Local Legend III: Dornier Do J Wal

Interesting. have you submitted those changes as a bug report? Chances ae no-one from Asobo reads this thread.

Out of curiosity is it just a virtual cockpit cold and dark start that has issues or does switch gear also play up?

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I’ll look into submitting the bug report.
It’s difficult to be sure where the bug is when I can’t see the code in the xml. It seems to be a rather simple oversight.

Ok, now I’ve made a post in the bug forum. Feel free to vote and chime in to let the issue gather some attention.

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Voted!
Kuddos for you finding out.

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I landed on dam placed on top of the hill :smile:

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I have posted a 1925 Wal trip in the Caribbean here:

Weltfliegers: Aviation Pioneers of the 1920/30s - Community / World Discovery - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums

Got only three sources about the trip, all german:

http://www.scadta.de/Scadta-Fluggesellschaft/Scadta-Fluggesellschaft/1924-1928.html

Dornier Wal : Griehl, Manfred: Amazon.de: Bücher

Do Dornier specialists or Colombian simmers know more !?

yes - these ridges or elevation issues exist in many of the lakes and other large bodies of water in MSFS.
I had hoped that they would have been addressed before Asobo introduced their official float plane addons (aside the Icon A5) but either it’s happening slowly or not at all.

Is it really difficult to define a custom seaplane base? I mean, I don’t need parking slots or even scenery, just to define a “virtual runway” in a given place just to allow the sim to plan a flight between two points starting and finishing on the water.

If it wouldn’t be very difficult to define and then add to the Community folder this particular plane would become much flyable.

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I think a very basic water runway like that would be pretty simple to whip up. I did mess about a little bit with the SDK a while back to make a basic grass runway and it wasn’t that difficult. I’d imagine water ones would be a lot simpler because you don’t have to worry about terraforming wonky land unless you come across one of those weird steps you sometimes see in water. There’s a bunch of guides on youtube and elsewhere that cover the basics.

I think its scandalous that we even have to think about that matter, given how many seaplanes were recently released by Microsoft (and their affiliated developers). Let’s hope the H-4 in the 40th Anniversary Edition finally gives them an incentive to create an environment where those aircraft actually work!

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They actually did add a few hundred very basic water runways several updates ago. Almost all of them are in the US and Canada though. Originally there were a few more outside of the US as well as I remember finding a couple in Sri Lanka and flying around there but for some reason they were removed in a later update, probably a bad code merge or something. It’s odd.

Here’s some screenshots I took from Little Navmap using the search filters to find every single airport with a water runway. 604 in total: (a small number of these might be from airports I bought from the marketplace. I did empty my community folder and regenerated the scenery index in LNM though so most of these are default and some are probably from World Updates)

image

And out of all of these only 3 of them seem to have any parking and they are mixed sea/land airports with only ground parking spots so useless for cold starts in pure flying boats.

Something I’ve been calling for a while now is the ability to just select any spot on the map to take off from with the option for cold and dark start. It would be awesome to just be able to take off from a random lake anywhere in the world without having to mess about with slewing or whatever.

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If you are on pc there is a lot of seaplane runways on flightsim.to, returntomistymorings and others. A lot of links upthread and more has probably been added since.
If you are on Xbox start on a parking spot close to the sea and use slew mode functions as a workaround.

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I’d prefer flying around Europe, so I fear I would have to go to flightsim.to. Although maybe I will try to add some water runways too, if not too difficult (I will watch two or three tutorials and then decide).

Anyway, thank you for your useful contribution!!

I’m now doing a flight between the Canary Islands (using the base they introduced for the Plus Ultra challenge at Gran Canaria) and what I feel is that the engine sound is way too low for having it literally over our heads, isn’t it?

Headphone simulation on?

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Yes!! I didn’t read the definition and understood that it was a kind of special sound processing when I, as a PLAYER, was using headphones :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile: :sweat_smile:

Much better now :rofl:

Thank you!

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Well, sitting right under two big engines for hours I believe many Wal pilots would have been happy to wear noise cancelling headphones :slight_smile:

Another question, how can I finish a flight? I’ve landed several times and followed the checklist to stop the engines, etc. but in other planes the sim considers the flight as finished when you turn off the batteries… something not possible here.

My recommendation is to not worry too much about what the logbook considers a finished flight, or anything else to do with the logbook. It’s notoriously glitchy.

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Flight end is properly detected on parking places I think.