Stress test of tow rope simulation
2 Likes
Today I flew a nice little soaring mission.
@thealx I have no clue why but the thermals are just not working. I tried the file you sent me, flew above both thermal locations at a decent altitude and there was not the smallest reaction by the plane.
I had LittleNavmap open and it didn’t show any change of vertical velocity either. 
Nevertheless this was a FUN flight!
I set the ground wind layer to 15kn from 270°, let myself be towed to 2000ft by the winch at Brigham City Airport (KBMC) and made the whole flight to Nephi Municipal, which is 111 miles away.
Definitely my longest flight in a glider in any sim. Spent one hour and 41 minutes in the cockpit.
Here are some screenshots:
7 Likes
Love the first two shots.
1 Like
Is ridge lift working?
Yes, working perfectly as far as I can tell.
I am NOT a real glider pilot though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
1 Like
Dammit. I need to sleep but I can’t because I am too hyped up for MSFS2020 soaring.
So I am thinking about where to soar next.
Right now thermals are not working for me, but ridge lift can be fun, too.
So far I have tried flying around the Odenwald and Schwarzwald areas in Germany, and the Rocky Mountains in the USA.
I am thinking about where to soar next.
Maybe something exotic. An interesting landscape to look at.
My next ideas so far are the Alps (not exotic though), getting some flying done in the Peruvian Andes, and I wonder if there are any good soaring spots in Japan.
Do you have any good suggestions? Maybe some exotic areas with nicely sloped mountains you know of? Long mountain ridges usually do well. Bonus points if they have complex shapes allowing for interesting routes.
Are you in MS Flight Simulator Gliders FB group? members sharing flight plans periodically.
that is weird actually. some people report that thermals “barely works” which is possible because of the way how they implemented - it’s not a wind but a magnet at the top of the cylinder, but no one said it does not work at all.
when you launch the program and load thermals CSV, have you pressed Enable thermals button?
when you inside of the thermal, can you see numbers (distance to the center, forces) under same button?
if not, for some reason file was not processed properly.
No, I don’t use Facebook.
Yep. The sim also says “thermals enabled”.
Nope, never seen anything like that. I’ll probably reinstall the program and create a new thermals file from scratch.
I am 200m to the center, and -2m to the top (forget to set elevation), 10kn force. in the game glider started to jump on the ground
1 Like
Yeah definitely haven’t seen anything like that.
I created a new file and will try in a few minutes.
Is kinetic assistant 0.6 released yet?
Ok tried again. Newly copied the files from the original zip I got from simMarket, ran as admin just in case, created two new thermals files (one with the simple thermal format, one with the thermal force), also checked the .net version (4.8.0).
Tried with both files, still no joy.
Does it matter whether I start the sim or KA first?
I usually connect KA after I start the flight, or shortly thereafter.
You can start app anytime, even in the middle of the flight.
still haven’t finished 0.6, AI is not smart enough to take role of tow plane. so I should control it’s pitch/position by program. no thermals changes there, so no point for you to test it.
have you checked decimal delimiter (it should be point, not comma) Changing Regional Setting in Windows (CSV imports)
1 Like
Correct me if I am wrong, but should that not be a non-issue when I am not using Excel?
I am creating the thermal files using LittleNavmap (and of course used the one you mentioned above).
So unless the setting you posted affects the import of the file in Kinetic Assistant we should be fine.
This is a line from my newest CSV file, raw from notepad++, it shows decimal points correctly it seems, and using comma as the separator.
Location,thermal,48.79250,8.16061,2000,1.11015,1,250,2021-01-24T15:49:24.979,
The only thing I noticed is a trailing comma after the last line. That’s not great style but most programs don’t care about an empty line.
I attached the full file (just renamed the extension to TXT because the forums don’t like CSV).
THERMALS2.txt (328 Bytes)
Decimal separator is important when you are dealing with CSV tables, even if it could be possible to avoid such issue.
Trailing coma is not a problem. Your data looks okay, but not being loaded properly by program for some reason. I will revise the code and ask you to test it, if some issue will be found.
1 Like
try this test build, made some changes in numbers parsing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IYGW8Fxk7VbspGkOmeTzoVVOKJakoY8K/view?usp=sharing
1 Like
Great!
I’ll download it once I an home. 
Tried it.
It behaves the same way as the other version.
But although I still cannot believe that it could possibly be the problem I tried the decimal delimiter thing, and… yeah, it works as soon as I swap around comma and point.
Sorry for sending you on a bug hunt.
I kinda hate to set it though, mainly since I guess it will ruin other things as it affects the windows standard settings (in my experience it is usually best not to touch them). I will have to go through some programs to see what is affected.
The weird thing is that every program I checked displays the CSV in the right way, but it seems that KA (or the .net library it probably uses for parsing the CSV) doesn’t.
Just flew around a bit in my area, the (northern part of the) Schwarzwald (Black Forest).
Those standard thermals are way too strong for me, I changed them to strength 10, and half a mile of radius to make circling them a little challenge.
Feels pretty good already!
Here are some screenshots:
2 Likes
Concerning the decimal thing I just remembered this from my old visual basic .net days and I think it works similarly in C#.net (not sure which language you are using).
There was a class named “TextFieldParser” that did that automatically, and one could also set the culture in the thread I think.
// “en-US”:
string text = “1.25”;
decimal value = decimal.Parse( text, CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo( “en-US” ) );
// “es-ES”:
string text = “1,25”;
decimal value = decimal.Parse( text, CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo( “es-ES” ) );
(Copied the example from some guy. But maybe it helps)
A checkbox in the settings to choose the decimal would be fine as well I guess, in case you cannot read it from the content or the registry.
1 Like
Actually my last change was adding CultureInfo.CurrentCulture like
double.TryParse(data[4], NumberStyles.Any, CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, out double lng)
but that was wrong one, instead InvariantCulture make script ignore current systems settings. will be fixed next time.
1 Like