XP12: Altimeter roller counters not animating correctly
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Very excited to have this wonderful aircraft in XP12!!
There's a bit of a prominent issue with the animation of the altimeters as of XP12 v1.0... but I think it existed in the previous versions also. The digits of the roller counter displays don't animate correctly, on the altimeters but also in a couple of other places I've noticed. What should happen is, when a digit is rolling up to 0 or down from 0, it grabs the digit to its left and they both move in sync. Currently each digit moves separately, like each is being driven by a separate solenoid or something.
Also, the tens drum on the main altimeters have values in increments of 10ft - I've found a video showing they should be in increments of 20ft (matching the increments on the outer scale).
To demonstrate this on the ground, adjust the main altimeter pressure setting so it reads 0. Then reduce the setting slightly so it moves to -10ft:
Hard to capture in a single image but the tens, hundreds, and thousands drums are moving at different speeds and times.
The correct behaviour is for it to show ▨0000, and as the needle moves below 0 all the drums should rotate together to show (red▨)9980.
If you do the same thing with the standby altimeter it shows a bigger problem - as the altitude reduces from 0, the 1000s digit changes very fast and so the altitude appears to be (red▨)9000 when it should be moving gradually from ▨0000 to (red▨)9900.
Because of this, if you're cruising slightly below a flight level, the standby altimeter incorrectly shows you're 1000ft off.
The OBS displays also go a little sideways when set to 099, 199 or 299 - the 100s digit jumps too early:
There's more that aren't quite right, but not as obvious!
This video of a BAe-146 landing at London City shows how the altimeter drums should behave, if you look closely. At around 1:18 the aircraft descends through 2,000ft and you see the altimeter drums moving together, with 2000 changing to 1980 (and the leftmost digit, showing ▨, not moving). This blurry screenshot shows the altimeter reading ~1990ft - I've added a faint red line to show the digits are more-or-less lined up as they rotate together:
I hope this can be fixed in the product - I think it'd make a big improvement!
edit: here's another example, a bit clearer. Aircraft is climbing to FL250. The altimeter reads 24980:
...the 4 9 80 rotate together:
...and 5 0 00 comes into view together:
That's 34:18 in "Capital 676"
I've had a go at designing and 3D-printing my own roller-counter displays... it's a lot of fun. There can be a bit of slack in between the digits, which you can see here as the 00 is leading the 0 which is slightly leading the 5. But you'd need careful plugin/scripting work to simulate that slack.
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Cheers! I found a tangential issue with the rollercounters on the autopilot popup window - there's an off-by-one error, the NAV1 and NAV2 COURSE windows display 001 when the value is 000, 090 instead of 100... also I feel they animate too slowly. They're moved directly by the knob between your fingertips so they should move almost immediately with just a couple of frames to show they're moving rather than teleporting between positions. As it is they have a weird floaty feeling to them!
