Fuel Hydrant Position & Its Future Implementation

[Virtual Captain]

Hi Umberto,

I changed the position of the fuel truck on the PMDG 747 to the left wing because it has an animated fuel door that opens up during the refueling process. The fuel truck position and wing hook-up look great. The only problem is that the ground fuel hydrant object stays in the default position (right side).

Before you yell at me about already answering this  (I found an existing thread about the hydrant position) - I only have a question regarding the future implementation of it, hence the reason for this new thread.

You mentioned that there will be an option (in a future patch) to set the hydrant position via the parking customization. If done this way then what happens if you have one aircraft with the hook-up on the left wing and then another with the hook-up on the right wing? Instead, would it be possible to have the hydrant object position be relative to the fuel truck? This way its only an aircraft edit rather than a airport edit? It seems like a such a logical solution but I'm sure there is a technical reason why it may not be able to be implemented this way.

Thanks for reading.

[virtuali]

You mentioned that there will be an option (in a future patch) to set the hydrant position via the parking customization

Not the position. I said there would be an option to decide to use the Fuel Hydrant or not, overriding the default GSX strategy of assigning a Fuel Hydrant if there's a jetway and a Tanker if there isn't. This option is already there in the current update, as promised.

It's not possible to set the Fuel Hydrant position freely, because it's tied to the refueling point of the airplane. And course, if the airplane refueling point is on the left side, they Fuel Manhole should be on the left side too and if it isn't...it's a bug, which we'll of course check soon as possible ( meaning, after KORD V2 will be out )

So, it's already exactly like you asking: the position of the Fuel Hydrant is related only to the airplane configuration, and it doesn't have anything to do with the parking. The only thing you customize with a parking, is the override of the usage of a Fuel Hydrant.

[Virtual Captain]

Thank you for the clarification.

The PMDG 747 uses the left wing fuel port when using their fuel truck which also has an animated door. When you refer to the aircraft "refueling point" I am not sure if you mean that there is some internal value on pmdg's end that references this or if you mean the fuel point that we set in GSX. I couldn't find any fuel point info in the aircraft.cfg so I am assuming you mean the latter.

If thats the case then yes its definately a bug since I placed it on the left side. I appreciate that you will look into this at a later date when there are less pressing matters. Thank you.

p.s. Looking forward to KORD v2.


EDIT: DISREGARD. There is no bug. After restarting P3D, the fuel hydrant appeared in the proper location. I feel stupid now. *runs off to hide in a dark hole....

[Aussie123]

You can run away and hide, but from experience, stupidity will find you again - sooner or later. 

[Farlis]

I would love for you to reconsider that approach. There are add-on sceneries where the ground polygon shows quite clearly where the fuel hydrant is in real life. It would be very nice to be able to edit the position of GSX's hydrant to match that position in these cases.

[virtuali]

I would love for you to reconsider that approach. There are add-on sceneries where the ground polygon shows quite clearly where the fuel hydrant is in real life. It would be very nice to be able to edit the position of GSX's hydrant to match that position in these cases.

Have you read my previous explanation why this can't be done ?

Of course it would be "nice" to edit the fuel hydrant position on ground, but that would require a whole new different kind of technology to add to our software which is just not there, which is a kind of Advanced Inverse Kinematics that is NOT supported by the sim, so we would have to write it from scratch.

It means simulating a vehicle in the middle of two cables that can stretch, and it would cause a whole new class of problems, because it's very likely to end up in positions which couldn't be mathematically solved, because the cable end points might end up in impossible positions, due to editing the ground hole to match the scenery AND having to match your parking positions to the rest of the system.

So no, it can't be done easily, not without an almost complete rewrite of GSX, because if we had this kind of advanced mechanics, it would be sensible to apply it everywhere so, in the future we might eventually get it, but not as a quick and simple update to the fuel truck.