MSelig,
I was at my LHS the other day and they were demoing the FSOne sim. One of the local flyers wanted to change the prop on one of the sim planes and was confronted with gibberish to effect the change. The advice you just gave:

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Here's an idea. Make a copy of the Edge 540 33%, and then in the aero editor increase the prop normal force scale factor. It's in this section:


[PropData]
mNormalForce_UserFac
mPFactor_UserFac
mPropNormalforceMethod12Weight
mPropNormalforceMethod12Bias


Set mNormalForce_UserFac to a value of 1.2
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reminded me of that. What does the above recommended change mean? mNormalForce_UserFac? What the hell is that? I fully realize that is the field name in the database that changes a specific aspect of the prop based on a numerical value.... but that's about the dumbest thing I've ever seen included in a sim. That really needs to be changed.

As an example, when you want to change a prop in G3 you put in the diameter, pitch, type (like Mejzlik narrow carbon fiber) and the prop is changed accordingly. That makes sense to an RC flyer. Obscure database field references with non-intuitive numerical values make zero sense without a conversion table to relate numeric values to real-world measurements. Why didn't the authors allow real world values to be used? Or at least provide the conversion table so if we really wanted to spend the time doing manual coversions we could?

I bought this sim and although I may have missed it, I have not found a table that would allow me to interpret what your advice of "Set mNormalForce_UserFac to a value of 1.2" even means. What exactly does it mean by the way?

Please don't take this wrong, but this really needs to change for this sim to be useful to many flyers I know. Once they saw the mess that constitutes the editing features of this sim they were totally turned off to the idea of purchasing it. They were like "all I wanted to do was change the prop...what does all that mean?".

Oh...and did I really see that the prop diameter field is entered in feet? Like I have to calculate how many feet equals a 10" prop?

The sim would be a lot more useful if average flyer could easily edit planes. Just a thought.

John