White smoke when ab is engaged

[Carlo90]

Hi everyone. I'm new on this forum and first of all i'd like to say thank you to all fsdreamteam developers. Thanks for providing us such a great f-18!
Its stunning cock has literally shocked me!
Well, the problem is: when the FIRST (and only the first) stage of the afterburner is engaged, a white smoke or a sort of "contrail", appear from the engine (I don't know how to say "dagli scarichi dei motori"). It appear only to me? It's a bug? How to fix it? Thanks in advance.

[tigisfat]

I don't know, my only guess is that they are trying to illustrate the "smokiness" of a modern jet engine in full mil or min aug. I think it's kinda unrealistic personally, but have no room to pass judgement because I don't make aircraft for FS, and the hornet in accel is the single greatest fighter ever made for any flight sim, EVER.

[Carlo90]

It looks like this (I think all of you have this problem too, isn't it?):

Is it possible to remove this horrifing effect?
It appear ONLY when the First stage of the afterburner in on.

[fael097]

yes, that happens for everyone
no, i dont know how to remove the smoke
no, i dont know if its a bug or not

i think you can remove by editing the aircraft.cfg file maybe

[Carlo90]

thank you fael097!
I'm not able to remove it, if someone could do this it would be very nice.

[Razgriz]

Its built into the model, only the devolpers can acess it.  It might also be in the effects.  I'll look around in the aircraft.cfg for the effect if its there.  Its most likely inside a .XML file in the gauges.

[fael097]

they probably wanted to do something like this:

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Voodoo]

A quick but dirty fix is for you to simply rename the "fx_fueldump.fx" file in your main Effects folder to something else (like fx_fueldump.old).

This will get rid of the burner smoke but the slight drawback to it is that it will also cause any other fuel dumping visual effects to disappear from "any" aircraft that uses it.

In my experience, fuel dumping is not something I do often, and other than the novelty of seeing it once I don't tend to watch it from the outside view anyway, so I personally run FSX with this file renamed.

[Carlo90]

And so do I!
Thank you Voodoo.

[vortex_25]

While this tweak does remove the "smoke" effect that stage 1 AB creates, modifying the fx_fueldump.fx file also seems to remove the wingtip contrails that appear when you slow the hornet down. Personally, I love that effect, so I had to restore the file.. still, kudos for the quick and easy tip.

[Voodoo]

Hi Vortex. I too love the wingtip trails, and I've got a good feeling that you might be in luck here because I am am pretty sure that the wingtip effects don't rely on the fx_fueldump.fx file, since I am still getting them even with the file renamed.

But I think the news is even better than that because, as best I can see, the fx_fueldump.fx file only made its first appearance on the Acceleration Pack disc, which means that the only aircraft that are likely to use it are the Acceleration ones (the F18, the P51 and the chopper) and not any of the original FSX aircraft. Now, fuel dumping has been available from the outset of FSX by using CTRL+SHIFT+D so I tried to confirm my theory by restoring my .fx files back to normal then loading up the A321 and having a look at her while she was dumping fuel. Tada...no visible fuel trail, even though the fuel gauge was dropping like a stone. (I also tried it on the P51 - same result)

Now, admittedly that doesn't constitute exhaustive testing so I can't be 100% sure, but I have a very strong feeling that renaming the fx_fueldump.fx file will not affect anything other than just the fueldump effect on the F18 (and probably no other aircraft at this time). Do you fancy giving it another try, chief, and let us know how you get on?