For the Big Birds!
Sky Dolly v0.14 “Ethereal Embraer” (v0.14) has just been released. This release focuses on improved 3rd-party aircraft support and tries to improve replay of control surfaces and other controls such as:
- Elevators, rudder, ailerons
- Flaps and spoilers
- Gears
- Arrestor hooks, wing folding
- Lights (landing, taxi, …)
Sky Dolly also improves the corresponding animation of AI aircraft (aircraft that are part of a formation flight): flaps, elevators, rudders and ailerons are now also animated, including arrestor hooks, canopies and wing folding.
Question: “Do I have to reload the flight each time before starting replay?”
Answer: “No. Sky Dolly uses a sophisticated test-and-set pattern to set ailerons and flaps, specifically also in cases (e.g. PMDG Boeing 737) where the corresponding flaps handle position variable is only updated in real-time (meaning: not immediatelly, but rather with the time it takes to extend/retract the flaps). As usual you can seek back and forth on the timeline as you want, at any time, and start, stop and restart the replay as you wish.”
Import and export of Little Navmap userpoints has also improved, by supporting the latest Little Navmap 2.8.8 userpoint types.
Adjusting the replay speed now also speeds up (or slows down) the simulation rate accordingly (with simulation rate factors of 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16, matching closest with the selected replay speed in Sky Dolly).
And if you need to take a coffee during recording, no worries: pressing the pause button during recording now also pauses the actual simulation. “Here’s your coffee, Capt’n!” 
Finally an annyoing issue with “counteracting ailerons, elevators and rudders” has finally been fixed: the root cause seemed to be that the unit “radians per seconds” for “rotation velocity” wasn’t liked by MSFS, especially by those aircraft having a PID controller.
A what?
A “Proportional–Integral–Derivative” controller is a control loop mechanism employing feedback for systems requiring continuously modulated control.
The complete changelog is available on github.com .
The following “historically accurate & researched video recreating the final patrol of Baron Manfred von Richthofen (The Red Baron) with 8 aircraft” shows an amazing work of creativity done with Sky Dolly, shared with kind permission from the author simPaul flights:
Sky Dolly is open source.
The latest binaries are available at: