Hi.
A slightly unusual question: how far off the ground can an aircraft be but still have GSX see it as 'on the ground'?
The reason for asking is that I have a multi-channel system based on Wideview. Wideview has a function to raise the aircraft height by x inches on the client machines. The point of this feature is to avoid problems with ground interaction on the client if the model being used has behaviour based on that. For example, the FeelThere E-Jet v3 that I'm using will set its nose wheel at a 75-degree angle to the right when it senses it 'dragging' on the ground, which is what happens on the client aircraft model as it's not actually under power and is being moved by the Wideview server. This would be fine as I'm not visually displaying the exterior of the aircraft on my client system, but the nose taxi light on the EMB170 is on the lower part of the strut and it rotates with the nose gear. So my taxi light does weird things (pointing off to the right) if I don't lift the wheels on the client at least 6 inches off the ground, which covers the extension of the gear and puts it 'in the air' from the model's POV. Taxi light problem solved (not completely: ideally I'd want the light to rotate as it does on the real aircraft, but I haven't figured out how to do this - or even if I can).
Now, I use GSX on both my host system and the client machine. By a relatively complex mechanism of exporting keystrokes from the host to the client, I'm able to have the two copies of GSX do the same thing at the same time and thus provide a sort-of networked capability. This means that on my client machine, I need to satisfy the conditions GSX expects for an aircraft to be on the ground and parked in order to get the right menu options. So I synchronise the parking brake, for example. By experimenting, I've discovered that GSX will still see my client model as being on the ground even if it is raised 6 inches off the ground.
However, I'm having problems with the client model when hard brakes are applied and the aircraft nose dips far enough that the gear comes back into contact with the ground on the client. This creates a very annoying visual stutter as Wideview corrects the client model's attitude too quickly, causing a visual glitch. So I really want to raise it some more (though not to the point where it becomes visually distracting.
So, my long-winded question is: provided the aircraft is positioned at the gate, and the parking brake is on, how far off the ground poly can the model be before GSX sees it as not 'on the ground'? What's the tolerance?
Sorry about the essay post, but I wanted to be super-clear what I was asking. Hopefully I was :-)
NH
