I completely agree with your assessment. And it doesn’t surprise me that aerial firefighting is also missing a lot.
I do understand that this is a game. And as professionals we’re going to notice things that 99.9% of other players won’t. But the Air Tractor 802 doesn’t even have nozzles on the spray system. And not having a light bar is ridiculous. Might as well make me fly an ILS by just looking at my moving map and eye balling my altitude. Who needs a localizer or glideslope. Leaving a light bar off a modern ag airplane is just as ridiculous. The game is missing such key components of the job that I can’t help but criticize it. If they spent one day at an agricultural aviation operation they’d realize how much they missed the mark. The positive side though is that all my ag pilot buddies had a good laugh about spraying a field in an AT802 with no flow control or light bar while getting yelled at by an AI voice saying we’re doing it all wrong because we’re faster than 120 knots.
Wow, that looks great! I’m not by any means a programmer so I won’t pretend to know what goes into what you’re doing. But it looks like you’re making exactly what a light bar is supposed to do. Glad to see someone working on something like this!
In a top left corner of the screen, if you have the compass-map thing, it highlights the field and shows the lines you already sprayed. Not super useful, but at least something.
This is useful. I don’t really know that much about Ag operations, I am kind of following some user manuals and intuition to figure out the way to make this work. And it has to be somewhat simplified to make it easy to use for the most people.
I was thinking that I should be able to track if a line was sprayed and add a big line in another color to show that. I think we could be able to tell how much percentage of the field has been sprayed and so on. I’m working up to these things.
I mean, what we have now in Sim is not as good as it could be. That compass-map thing shows the lines, but it constantly changes zoom by itself and it’s located in the corner of the screen. Better to have this info somewhere closer to the middle of the screen, to control both lines and the flight itself.
I see. I gave up on career mode before I got to the crop spraying missions but I have seen videos of it. The current state of the plotting does not take into account the aircraft position but that seems to be fairly easy. I can read the latitude and longitude of the aircraft position so should be able to overlay that onto the display so you see where you have passed.
With my screen, you can pan and zoom on the display to see any part.
But, a big disclaimer here, this mod will probably not be useable in the missions. This would be for free flight if you want to spray any random field.
Looking great. I’d sketched out much the same but stopped before cutting code on it.
What would be really cool, and a simpler system perhaps but also good from a historical perspective, as we have Stearman’s in game, would be to have a couple of animated flagmen so you can do it old skool as in
Some progress on the sat nav system. I got it in the sim and so far I can mark arbitrary waypoints and set up a new area by marking A, B and C waypoints. This seems to work fairly well.
I need to add more logic around setting the next line to fly and then to send that information to the light bar. I haven’t hit any major roadblocks yet except for some tricky parts of plotting and rotating to match the plane heading. I’ll add some more features and adjust the placement of the screen in the cockpit. This has been a fun project.
Yeah, it would work on any aircraft. I only added it to the Air Tractor for now but I could mod all the agriculture planes. I might need some help to know where to place the light bar on helicopters. I could make a smaller light bar to use inside the cockpit.
I had time this weekend to work on the sat nav and have it starting to have enough features to actually be useful. This first screen is the new area settings where you pick what type of pattern you want to fly (the swath width is in meters).
This is when the area is in the armed state and it’s waiting for you to mark the A-B line. I start at the right edge of the field for left turn patterns.
This is what it looks like after some passes. Obviously, my passes were a bit sloppy to say the least but I would say that this gives you basically all the information you might need to successfully cover a field. You can use the back and next buttons to select any of the lines.
I still have some work to do to integrate the light bar fully. And a few more details to improve upon. But so far, this seems to be working for the most part. I should have a mod for people to test soon.
That looks awesome! I’m very impressed. Just another small bit of info if you didn’t already know. We usually have a button on the stick that’s set to move to the line.
So when I pull out of the field I click the button on my stick and it switches me over to the next line. We try not to mess with the iPad while spraying. If we do we have to get to a safe altitude and circle lol.
Will it be possible to use a button to switch to the next line in your addon? Just curious. However this turns out I’m going to be happy that it exists and won’t have any complaints lol.
Yes, I thought about this also. I can assign a controller key event to trigger the next line, I just need to find one that is not used for another purpose on most planes.
For now, I just have it auto-advance to the next line when you end the spray. This works for simple cases but it would be nice to switch that off if you want to manually select the next line.
Another part of the real system is to control the flow rates but I don’t think this can be dynamically adjusted in the sim. Each plane has it’s own spray system configuration where the flow rate is permanently set. I think I can mod these settings to be more realistic but non-adjustable.
Having it automatically switch over when you turn your spray off is a pretty good workaround. IRL it wouldn’t work very well since you often have to shut off for a few seconds mid pass for various reasons. A good example is if you have to jump a house or if you’re crossing a road or creek in the middle of the field. That definitely works for the purpose of the sim though.
Yeah, I don’t think the developers even thought about rates. They probably didn’t do any research or attempt to understand it. It’s way off in the sim. Even if you just adjusted it to where you’re always spraying at the same realistic rate (like 2GPA) that would be a whole lot better than how it is now. Right now it’s just nonsensical. Like I said in the original post. The idea that you would arbitrarily load up an airplane with a random amount of product, then fly to a field where you have no idea how big it is, spray at an unknown rate until the field is complete, then land with hundreds of gallons of product on board and just shut down is just absurd.
The only time we land with a load is if something unusual happened. And in some cases you’d dump the load before landing. If you have 300 gallons on board that’s like 3000 pounds. An AT802 can do it. But you really won’t want to be landing with all that extra weight. And it’s just inefficient. We take what we need and we go spray. If we have enough work, we take as much as we can each load and come back empty and repeat until we run out of daylight. I understand it’s game. But it calls itself a simulation.
Same with helicopters. Also there is no indication of how much product is left, and if you run out somewhere in the middle of a field, the brilliant game logic just sends you back home, while the refill truck is there, waiting (see Helicopter agricultural mission ends when out of spray instead of refilling). If you try to land on it, you’ll be penalized, or fail the mission.
That’s really dumb. LOL I guess the truck only brought enough for one load. And I guess the crew didn’t bother to do math to figure out how much product they needed. They just guessed.
It would be really too. Let’s say the field is 50 acres and you’re spraying at 2 gallons per acre. 2x50 =100 gallons.
My Ag Nav Mod is ready to test now. I improved on the plotting code and added overall details. It’s just for the Air Tractor for now but I’ll work on adding it to other aircraft.
This is just a small download because it adds a new variation to the Air Tractor 802 and the instruments. There are some instructions included in text files. There are still some errors here and there and not all the patterns work perfectly. But you can fly a racetrack pattern successfully and I think it has most of the key features.
But I can only figure out so much by myself. Anyone who can test this out and give feedback is a huge help.
I was looking at the liquid dropping configuration settings for the Air Tractor 802 and by my calculations, it is far from the correct flow rate.
It has 30 nozzles with a flow of 0.0043 gallons per second at 110 feet/sec. That should be 7.74 gal/minute. I used this formula for gallons per acre: GPM * 495 / MPH * SW (ft)
The result is 0.46 gallons per acre if I did this correctly. Seems very low. I guess we can work backwards and maybe get a better configuration.
