With such great projects taking off for so many of the editable aircraft in MFS, are there any devs out there with advice on how to get started tweaking .cfg files and such?
I’ve dabbled with Notepad++ changing a few numbers here and there, but there’s not really any guides I’ve heard of about how to go about improving an aircraft correctly, what sort of tools to use, how to manipulate equations and calculations, etc. It would be very enlightening if some devs could record videos while tweaking default aircraft, integrating lighting mods, etc. Even some written tutorials would help bring more people into the scene!
Would starting with a prayer be appropriate?
Your question is a bit too broad for me to get super specific as it would take ages to type out ALL of the things you can change and what effect they have. I dont want to spend 4 days typing out all the things.
As an example of how much effort is required to do something simple like make a plane faster. Go to the .cfg files for that plane and open “flight_model.cfg”.
There are a few ways of doing it but the simplest is to go down the bottom of the file and reduce the “parasitic drag” value from 1.0 to say 0.5, so your plane goes faster as it only have half the drag. Simple. If it is mach limited (Jets basically) then it gets more complex as you need to change how the drag increases with mach number. That can be found by adding extra values or changing the existing under the name of “drag_coef_zero_lift_mach_tab” under the aerodynamics. This will be followed by numbers like this 0:0, 0.5:0, 0.6:0, 0.65:0.2, 0.7:1.2. These values refer to the mach speed and the second value refer to the drag increase at that speed. So at Mach 0.65 the drag is increased by 20%, at mach 0.7 the drag increases to 120% extra making that a hard limit. If you want to go faster, to say mach 1 you need to reduce the drag value and add in a few extras. The values should then look like this: 0:0, 0.5:0, 0.7:0, 0.8:0, 0.9:0.05, 1.0:1.5. This way the plane will accelerate normally, begin to slow at mach 0.9 but then will not go any faster at mach 1 as drag has increased to 150% extra (this assumes sufficient power to get to that speed). But note that changing these values greater than around 20% higher, you will screw the P&ID controllers and the plane wont work properly in pitch, heading, AP, etc. You will need to tune the controller after you make the changes (which i wont explain as it will take WAY to long).
Just adding engine power will increase your speed, but can cause issues with the prop governing making taxi’ing a painful experience.
I made a post a while ago explaining how ground friction works that may help you work out how some other things work: Is and How Is, Plane Tire's lateral Friction Modeled in MSFS?
You need to do alot of your own research and see what happens when you change values (thats how i have learnt what does what). It just takes too long to explain simple things.
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