More like a floating simulator… 
1 Like
This video shows missing “gear down” on most AI aircraft when landing.
Will it ever be fixed by MS/Asobo?
ISSUE DESCRIPTION
Description of the issue: AI inhected aircraft lands with gear up.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
This happens from almost all the time to very often.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
-
Follow an AI aircraft on approach to any airport
-
Easy to follow all AI aircraft if using Spotty from rksoftware
YOUR SETTINGS
If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the User Support Hub.
What peripherals are you using:
[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?
[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use?
[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share?
MEDIA
It so simple to reproduce…
For one case (“ALL Landing planes on Vatsim”):
- install some AI Models
- Jump into a e.g. Vatsim, IVAO Session
- Watch the incomming planes.
The other case with the LOD issue (which i never observed) might be other steps needed to reproduce,
Hi Chewwy94, why did you moved my “ FSLTL inceted AI aircraft land mostly with gear up” to this topic about LOD issues. This is another issue. This just proof to me that you either don’t read the topic I raised or that you just don’t understand.
I wonder how many more signatures might be needed to acknowledge and fix this persistent issue.
3 Likes
This video is great, because it shows clearly that we are not talking about a bug but a decisions taken that many don’t like.
The gears are there, but at a certain distance they dissappear.
And now it comes down to personal preferences whether that distance is acceptable or needs to be adjusted.
For me that video looks perfectly fine while for others it serve as proof of how terrible things are.
Looks like the only real solution would be one more slider to adjust details of injected objects.
1 Like
I stopped at some point in the discussion what the issues are … as always when i responded here im in Team - Arrivals miss their gear always, no matter from what distance (while departing, freshly spwaned have them) .
Is there still another ?
This is not about personal preference. This is wrong plain and simple.
Asobo, it’s already time to fix this.
6 Likes
I now read through this thread, since it was linked in the vPilot support forum. And I think there are two separate issues here that one must be careful not to intermix.
On the one side there is the LOD for the gear, where one can endlessly discuss if it is too much or just fine. While I fall on the side it is fine, I can understand that some people prefer LODs further out. Maybe that is also something the devs of the AI models could fix by reworking their LODs to show something approaching a gear further out.
The real issue at play though is that for many traffic injectors like vPilot we see planes landing without gear, even at a close distance. But from my observations that is not a bug in the sim that can be fixed by Asobo, but rather a shortcoming of the tools. Case in point, BeyondATC does not have that problem with the exact same AI models used by vPIlot.
Also, vPilot works fine when one deletes an AI model and it is recreated up close. And one even can trigger an extension of the gear without doing that by using some dev tools. So the real issue at play here is that these tools don’t properly force the gear out because it was plainly was unnecessary in the old sim. From what I can see from the vPilot logs (and it is probably the same for FSLTL, but I don’t use that) they only ever toggle the gear state and it’s related animation, but don’t have a state for that. So what happens is that the VATSIM pilot extends their gear 5-10 NM from the threshold, at which point the model is very likely still in a LOD without gear. Since it does not have a gear, it also doesn’t play the animation and the model stays gear up. This state is then kept until the gear toggle is commanded. Somebody mentioned the vPilot gear actually coming out on a go-around, which would support my theory.
Seeing that BeyondATC works fine I think the fix on the tool side is not too hard. Might even be worth asking them how they did it, in my experience they are quite open and helpful. Maybe it is possible to set a gear state instead of just toggling?
4 Likes
Good point. I have the same theory here.
This is precisely what I suggested is happening in my long post earlier in this thread.
I also discussed how vPilot sets the state of the gear when new aircraft are first injected, and how it uses the gear up/down events to trigger the gear up/down animation if the pilot raises or lowers the gear after the object already exists.
If I were to change vPilot so that it directly sets the gear up/down state instead of sending the events, then the gear would “snap” down or snap up instantly, with no animation, and this would look terrible.
A workaround that I considered implementing back when this issue first arose is to have vPilot continuously send the gear up or down event to the object so that it would trigger the animation once the aircraft gets close enough that the LOD contains the gear mesh and animation. I didn’t implement this workaround because it’s an ugly hack and obviously it would be better to keep the pressure on Asobo to fix the issue. Perhaps something like this is what BeyondATC is doing. Could also be that they are explicitly setting the gear extension percentage state value and animating it using their own animation speed, with some database of speeds per aircraft type. Or maybe they just use the same speed for all aircraft.
Long story short, there are several possible workarounds, but they are all workarounds … not actual solutions to the problem.
1 Like
Thanks for your explanation. I understand the objections, but I would rather take an imperfect solution. Because while I almost never see the actual gear animation happening, I see floating aircraft on every single VATSIM flight. And I don’t think there will be a change happening in the sim soon. I would also wager, that at least for gear down it wouldn’t really matter at all if it is a proper animation, since that usually happens so far away that you don’t see it anyway.
Maybe a compromise would be possible where the expected value of the gear is matched against the actual value every 10 seconds or so for aircraft within 5 - 10 NM? And the animation triggered again if it does not match.
Because I think there needs to be a solution implemented in the client, since I wouldn’t count on Asobo ever fixing this, since it is only affecting legacy models like AIG and FSLTL. It does to seem to work just fine with the sim models even with the current implementation, which are sometimes injected when there is no matching model in the VMR.
1 Like
You could first send the animation event and after a few seconds (15s or so? The A380 gear takes around 13s to deploy) send the desired state additionally.
If the animation worked, there would be no visual difference by additionally setting the state afterwards, if it didn’t then at least sending the state would sync the desired result independent of the animation itself.
Best of both worlds - keeping animations if visible, but also ensuring the final state.
Of course also a workaround, but might be the one with the least visual impact.
2 Likes
I would agree. The immersion is much more broken by floating aircraft taxiing on the ground than a “snapping” of the landing gear in the air, which I’m unlikely to witness anyway. It’s a shame that Asobo is taking so long to address this (if they ever will), but a workaround would at least make things better than they are now.
2 Likes
Do we have any reason to think that setting the state would work when the event doesn’t?
Well I thought you have since you pointed that out as an option but just discarded it because of the “snapping”.
I guess it’d be easy to test with a beta build of vPilot implementing this, no idea how else we could know.
The state upon spawning is correct, the animation doesn’t seem to trigger, so I guess there is a reason to believe it might solve the issue, so is worth a try.
2 Likes
It’s definitely annoying that this problem isn’t fixed in SU4 either. Where are we going with this, Asobo?
2 Likes
I also think it would be a pretty good idea, I know it shouldnt have to be on the vpilot guys to find workarounds but their doesnt really seem to be any other solution sadly, it could also be beneficial testing what works and what doesnt to report it back to Asobo maybe?
What I mean is that it likely wouldn’t make any difference because if the animation event doesn’t cause the gear to appear (due to the LoD not having the gear) then snapping the gear into place wouldn’t work either. If the gear isn’t there, the gear isn’t there.
That’s why I mentioned earlier in this thread that the workaround that I think would work best would be to continually send the “gear down” event to the aircraft, perhaps every 10 seconds, so that the gear would lower as soon as the aircraft got within range where the LoD contains the gear.