Reply To: CLS2Sim turbulence

[Diego Bürgin]

Hi Richard

Some input on turbulence:

How it works in P3D/MSFX
Turbulence is implemented essentially by reading the Data from “AIRCRAFT WIND X/Y/Z”. As the data has a big amount of jitters even when there is no wind and the rate of reading data is limited by other factors (other higher priority communication like position updates), the output is somewhat random.
Now we add some strong filtering to get a curve from this. We set a threshold using the sensitivity setting and act only on inputs surpassing it.
The ramp setting decides how twitchy or smooth the movements should be.

Now the banking of the yoke is the result of input data over the threshold.
The reason that you feel aileron instead of elevator movement is that the vibrations are currently on aileron only.
Putting the turbulence on the elevator axis caused problems with gear and motor vibrations due to hard- and firmware limitations.

Getting the right feel
To get a relatively good result, you have to play around with the settings. Results will also vary with different air speeds, so you might get a good result at low speed, or slight winds, but exaggerated results at stormy weather. It will be difficult finding a sweet spot.
If you are using a plane model with custom turbulence implementation, it may well be that turbulence will feel outright wrong.
In that case you can really only deactivate the turbulence feature, except for the remote interface option.

For people with programming experience, we’ve added support for vibration control to the remote interface a while back.
So it would be technically be possible to implement better support for turbulence when using third-party aircraft.
Well if anyone manages to create a better working turbulence system using the API, my hat off to you!

Yes profile cloud is not far off 🙂