Steeler 2 years ago official
Announcements
This is the official announcement channel as every add-on site has it. The add-on author can use this thread to post updates, announcements or similar content. Every follower of the file will be notified of these posts.
Sky Dolly "Ethereal Embraer" (v0.14) has just been released. This release focuses on improved 3rd-party aircraft support and tries to improve replay of control surfaces and other controls such as:
Sky Dolly also improves the corresponding animation of AI aircraft (aircraft that are part of a formation flight): flaps, elevators, rudders and ailerons are now also animated (including arrestor hooks, canopies and wing folding).
Import and export of Little Navmap userpoints has also improved, by supporting the latest Little Navmap userpoint types.
And finally an annyoing issue with "counteracting ailerons, elevators and rudders" has finally been fixed: the root cause seemed to be that the unit "radians per seconds" for "rotation velocity" wasn't liked by MSFS, especially by those aircraft having a PID controller.
A what?
A "Proportional–Integral–Derivative" controller is a control loop mechanism employing feedback for systems requiring continuously modulated control.
[https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/Samples_And_Tutorials/Primers/PID_Primer.htm?rhhlterm=pid%20controller]
Turned out that sending the - somewhat unexpected and IMHO physically wrong - feet per seconds unit for rotation velocity seemed to solve the issue. The final solution is to simply not record rotation velocity anymore, since MSFS is able to re-calculate this value during replay just fine by itself 😊
For more usability improvement details and bug fixes also refer to the complete CHANGELOG on github.com:
https://github.com/till213/SkyDolly/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
10 months ago
Steeler
Sky Dolly "Flamboyant Fokker" (v0.15) has just been released. This is a no-new-features release. Instead several 3rd-party libraries are upgraded, most importantly the Qt 6 framework.
Among better support for Windows 11 Qt 6.4 introduces initial dark mode support. This is still work in progress in the Qt framework (an initial version is expected in the upcoming Qt 6.5), but it is possible to have a sneak peak on the existing dark mode support, by providing the following command line arguments:
With the default "Windows" style:
SkyDolly.exe -platform windows:darkmode=2
The current "Fusion" style looks arguably better in dark mode:
SkyDolly.exe -platform windows:darkmode=2 -style=fusion
The application is then dark mode aware, that is the actual dark mode has to be enabled in the Windows (operating system) user settings.
Unfortunately the default "Windows Vista" style that is used by default (when not providing any command line arguments) is not going to support dark mode. This is apparently due to Win32 API limitations that do not provide "dark assets" when queried for the current colour scheme.
Apart from that a few bug fixes and improvements have been implemented as well, as usual refer to the complete changelog here:
https://github.com/till213/SkyDolly/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
Happy flying!
10 months ago
Steeler
⚠️⚠️⚠️ IMPORTANT PATCH RELEASE: 0.15.1 ⚠️⚠️⚠️
Previous patch releases (< 0.15.1) like the 0.13.1 and the previous 0.15.0 would generate a logbook backup each time the application was started (and if the logbook option "Before migration of an older logbook" is enabled, which is the case by default).
This has been fixed with the 0.15.1 patch relase.
How to reclaim storage space:
I am terribly sorry for this inconvenience 😞
10 months ago
Steeler
Sky Dolly "Gregarious Gee Bee" (v0.16) has just been released. It introduces new Sky Dolly logbook import & export plugins. When importing aircraft and adding them to an existing flight it is now also possible to automatically synchronise the aircraft time offsets, based on the real-world timestamps. This is true for all formats that support such real-world timestamps (Sky Dolly logbooks, but also e.g. flightradar24.com and flightaware.com CSV/KML formats).
Note that the new Sky Dolly logbook import & export plugins do render the Sky Dolly CSV import & export format obsolete. This format is still supported in this v0.16 release, but will be removed in the next release.
Note: the FlightRecorder, Position & Attitude and most importantly the flightradar24 CSV import & export formats will remain.
While I do understand that one use case is to manually enhance the CSV data - e.g. for "flight analysis videos" - and then re-importing the flight into Sky Dolly the CSV format really has some fundamental flaws, such as it's flat "row-by-row" data structure which does not make this format suitable for more complex, hierarchical data structures.
The Sky Dolly logbook format has many advantages over this:
- Even older logbooks can now be imported, as they are automatically migrated (just like when opening an older logbook)
- They contain all flight data, because... well, they are logbooks 😉 For instance the real-world time when the first aircraft was recorded, making automatic time offset synchronisation possible
Furthermore with tools like https://sqlitebrowser.org/ it is also possible to modify existing flights. In fact, much more efficiently than manually editing CSV data in some table editor (DB Browser for SQLite also allows to "interactively" modify and add table data - don't worry if you're not yet familiar with SQL 😉).
A basic tutorial about how to insert new flight data - using the Structured Query Language, SQL - is here:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/sky-dolly-v0-15-free-flight-recorder-replay-location-management/405367/66
Sky Dolly now also supports drag and drop to quickly open a logbook, and the new "recent logbooks" menu makes it easy to quickly re-open older logbooks.
The complete changelog for v0.16 is here:
https://github.com/till213/SkyDolly/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
Enjoy!
9 months ago
Steeler
I am sorry for the rapid succession of bug fix releases, but I literally just discovered this regression (introduced with Sky Dolly v0.14 that introduced a new CSV parser ("comma-separated values") with a stricter validation) after I had just published the previous bug fix release 0.16.1. And I want to make bug fixes available as quickly as possible to you.
While I wanted to let you know about the latest release 1.8 of Little Navmap - MSFS POI database created by Rysatko which provides the New Zealand (World Update 12) POIs I noticed that those CSV files (in Little Navmap userpoint CSV format) could not be imported anymore, as they do not have any header (which is correct: Little Navmap allows to export userpoint CSV data without such a header).
This has now been fixed with Sky Dolly 0.16.2: the CSV parser is now able (again) to parse CSV files without header.
Also have a look at:
https://flightsim.to/file/17193/little-navmap-msfs-poi-database
Happy flying!
9 months ago
Steeler
- The exception message
- The stack trace ("where was the exception generated?")
- Some basic application information, including:
* Application version
* Logbook path
* Installed Sky Dolly plugins
It also fixes a regresssion introduced with the previous v0.16.2 related to the CSV import: Flight Recorder and Sky Dolly CSV files (the later being "obsolete") can be imported again.
3 months ago
Steeler