Purchased today, 12/29/2018, to understand it for the possibility to turn it into a hardware simulator for an A-4.

It is commercially licenseable for $750 which can make it FAA certifiable, but that is not our current intent.

Since I recently paid for one month of a Navigraph subscription, I downloaded the Nav Data for X-Plane 11 as well and placed it in Xplane→Custom Data as earth-awy.dat, eath_fix.dat, earth_nav.dat, and CIFP directory of SID/STAR info per airport. Also downloaded a file from the FAA - *FAACIFP18* and placed it in the same directory.

• https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/flight_info/aeronav/digital_products/cifp/download/

Right now, thinking of doing hardware work with a A-4 simulator, turning it into a very fancy Joystick, using Raspberry Pi with a possible servo controller board. X-Plane can communicate via UDP with it.

- 12/29/2018

Tried this procedure to fix a frame rate which is about 17 - 19.

https://www.x-plane.com/kb/frame-rate-issues-windows-10/

Purchased new GTX1060, now rates are closer to 30 even with features turned on, second monitor.

1/1/2019

Downloaded improved B737 from here: https://forum.thresholdx.net/topic/201-download-links-license/

Sim reported CORRUPTED NAVDATA. Found solution here: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/167034-latest-navigraph-airac-causes-error-in-zibo-mod/ (modified file at X-Plane 11/Aircraft/Extra Aircraft/B737-800X/plugins/xlua/scripts/B738.fms/B738.fms.lua, adding additional rows to the NavData date ranges, and changing to cycle_n = 31

To make a 3D Cockpit, you use blender to make a cube, with normals pointing in. Transparent places become windows. Then the cube needs to be exported using the Xplane2Blender plugin to make an OBJ file which X-Plane 11 can read.

It is possible that the layers in Blender cause different detail:

 The purpose of layers 1-3 is LOD (Level of Detail). If you tap into LOD functionality,
  layer 1 will have full detail, layer two will contain medium detail (for medium 
  distances from object), and layer 3 will have low detail. [Per YouTube video comment]

• PlaneMaker-19-Blender-05 - Creating a simple 3D cockpit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEOLdTewxUg&t=328s

• Better written tutorial, mostly working: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/137897-tutorials-for-blender-279-for-x-plane-scenery-and-aircraft/

Finally got 3D “hello world” working by doing these steps (slightly different to these instructions:

• Create cube with normals pointing in.
• Exported as OBJ file with XPlane2Blender to the folder like this: <airplane>/cockpit_3d/-PANELS-/Cockpit.obj
• Also included in the same folder a file Panel_Military.png which is the same size as the texture png.
• Texture png (only one allowed) is in the same directory. It is referenced to inside of the Cockpit.obj file.

Xplane2Blender Notes