What Makes Condor so Good?

Discussion related to the Condor...

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Slartibartfast
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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Slartibartfast » Wed Apr 12, 2017 5:41 am

OXO wrote:I'm itching to respond to all your wrong thinking.. but I must resist. :cry:
Please don't resist...
Believe me, if you're willing to lend your expertise to the discussion they would be most welcomed!

The entire purpose of this thread is to understand and correct any misconceptions. You know, if I am mistaken about things I would much rather know about it than have you respect my right to be wrong ;)
Last edited by Slartibartfast on Wed Apr 12, 2017 11:05 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Tom » Wed Apr 12, 2017 9:07 am

LoL now I have seen it all, someone that has never even used the Sim baiting one of the Condor Developers.
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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Slartibartfast » Wed Apr 12, 2017 11:05 am

Sorry? How am I baiting OXO. I am trying to invite him to join the discussion.

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Tom » Wed Apr 12, 2017 11:08 am

He's already here and said whats needed to be said, this is a discussion about what is good not features that currently dont exist.

Please feel free to open any topic you want related to features that you would like to see in V2 and beyond but lets keep this one on topic please.
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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by EDB » Wed Apr 12, 2017 2:39 pm

Slartibartfast,

Go fly in Condor for 100+ hours (preferably in http://www.virtualsoaring.eu/ competitions) and then report back. Your posts are getting more and more ridiculous because you haven't flown in Condor yet.

And more important : Leave OXO alone. He has better things to do. (working on Condor V2)

PS
OXO is not here to make tea and clean the toilets.

- EDIT -
virtualsoaring.com > http://www.virtualsoaring.eu/
Last edited by EDB on Wed Apr 12, 2017 3:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by OXO » Wed Apr 12, 2017 3:16 pm

That's not what my contract says

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by EDB » Wed Apr 12, 2017 3:17 pm

:lol:

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Tom » Wed Apr 12, 2017 3:36 pm

Dont tell him not to make the damn tea, that means Uros will have to do it, they told me my tea was so bad that they wouldnt even look at it let alone drink it.

Plus do you know how much it cost for OXO's Uniform and how long it took us to find the right shade of Black, he's very fussy you know!
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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Olympia » Wed Apr 12, 2017 5:27 pm

@Tom,

Very funny Tom. It took me a little time to realise that Slartybartfast doesn''t even own a copy of Condor by the sound of it. Or if he has a copy, why has he waited all this time to ask this question?

There used to be a Troll-Finder-General on here- where is he when we need him? I was once accused of trolling for far less than this person!!

This thread, while feeding the troll, has fortunately been taken over by more sensible folk and some good things have been posted, so it isn't all waste.

I concur heartily with your suggestion that OXO be allowed to get on with more serious matters. I would advise all on here to ignore Slarty from here on, but to continue saying why we like Condor, which was where I came in. I hope that 'good enough' V.1 will shortly be overtaken by 'better still' V.2.

On the topic of 'nice to have' features, how about being able to demonstrate on Condor this bit of flying ineptitude carried by by me in my younger days:

It was a rather misty and cold November morning, I was on duty as the assistant instructor (I had only held my ticket for six months). News came that the full CAT duty instructor was ill, and I would need to take over and run the show. The weather looked thick, but possibly flyable. There was a posse of ab-initios waiting and keen to fly. Never one to disappoint, I got a two seater D.I.'d, the winch deployed, and decided a 'weather check' was in order to find how high the cloud base was, and called for a volunteer to join me. Off we went on the end of the wire and had climbed to about 500 ft when we shot into the cloud. Far too high to open the brakes and hope to land ahead inside our rather small field and too low for a circuit, so I decided to go to the top of the launch and hopefully come out above this mist patch, which is what I thought it was. Wrong! It got thicker. The winch was a powerful one which I had designed and was club built (we had a great engineering team). It had a ex-Jaguar XK120 engine in it, and at 1200 ft we reached the top of our climb and released. The extra time on the way up I used to come up with a plan that might just save us. The pupil fortunately had a watch with a second hand, so by using the Turn and Slip it seemed possible to fly a race track with 180deg rate one turns and short straight and level sections to check the compass heading. After about four minutes of this we broke out of cloud over the back of the airfield at 600 ft at which point I handed control to the pupil and let him do the landing, which was one of his better ones, maybe because his mind was fully concentrated by this time. We put the glider away and all hands retired to the pub. No one ever breathed a word about. It would be fun and instructive to able to repeat this debacle on Condor I think, if only to curb the optimism of young instructors. And of course it would be a whole lot safer. :oops: ILAFFT.
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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Tom » Wed Apr 12, 2017 6:08 pm

Now that's how to handle unexpected issues also a great lesson to any student as well, in how to improvise quickly when things go wrong and to work the problem!

My Dad was an instructor at the RAFGSA club i learned to fly at so had loads of P2 time before I was legally able to fly solo, which on occaision led to the instructor "dozing" off when soaring as I was flying esp soaring etc as I wasnt making any serious issues, one particular day we were a ways out from the airfield still in visual range of it when I saw some rain clouds coming in and made the decision to go back then rather than wait any longer. He "woke" up as we landed and asked why i came back when I did, at which point the heavens opened and we sat in the k13 until the downpour finished.

My answer was simply I came back when I did, because I was always taught to plan ahead rather than react to a bad situation by him and other instructors, his reply ok next time I will really sleep. The lesson I learned was that the really good instructors know a students limits and decision making process and let them go to that and if its safe extend those limits whilst being fully aware of whats going on at all times. I've had Instructors purposefully fly with one foot on a rudder pedal for example full right rudder after coming off the top of the winch to simulate jammed controls etc and see how i dealt with it.

With regards to what could be done for training wise, one thing i think could be done using some of the existing code possibly is spot landing checks using something like a penalty box type scenario the further you are away from the center (end of roll) the worse your points are. would be great training for landing in tight areas in an emergency esp when its somewhere with extremely limited choices for out landing.

With regards to your situation only uros and oxo would know if that could be done weather wise.
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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by losnively » Wed Apr 12, 2017 8:54 pm

[quote="Olympia"]It would be fun and instructive to able to repeat this debacle on Condor I think, if only to curb the optimism of young instructors. And of course it would be a whole lot safer. [/quote]

Thanks, Olympia for sharing your experience. As a former instructor, I could imagine myself doing something similar under the circumstances, and I agree, if it should work out that V.2 allows us to recreate similar situations for our own and others' learning, that would be a wonderful bonus. Better to see how dumb some choice could be in Condor, rather than in RL. I have been in and can imagine many scenarios in the hills and mountains where having a solid and extensive cloud base below the ridge top would lead to lots of good learning opportunities!

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Olympia » Wed Apr 12, 2017 10:11 pm

@losnively,

Yes, the cloud potentially stuffed with mountain is certainly to be avoided. Uniquely we in the UK have always been allowed to fly in cloud, with reservations in competitions of course. I learned quite a lot about cloud flying by having an artificial horizon fitted in my 463, so that eventually I could manage short spells on the ball-needle-asi method when inadvertently caught out in gliders not so equipped. Never a bold pilot (wishing to be an old one) I tended to chicken out if things got a bit rough in cloud - like the day at 8000ft when it began to rain upwards - I dropped a pencil to be sure I wasn't the one who was upside down, and then headed for the exit. The vario was on its stop. Pity that, as Gold height was definitely on, though DIamond was not on, as I didn't have a full oxygen bottle or my canula. That trip ended in a field behind a house where there was a 21st party in progress. They thought I was 'glidergram' and invited me to join them. My retrive crew said I was feeling no pain by the time they reached me, and I slept the whole way back to the club. You couldn't replicate that in Condor though. :D

All this merely points to the fact that with a bit of tweaking Condor could be a marvellous training aid. Allowing us to teach quite difficult manoeuvres in the safety of the club house. The pilots of big airliners all spend a lot of time in the simulator these days as it allows many repetitions of exercises without spending huge amounts of money on real flying. I am sure that a careful extension of Condor in this direction would bring a lot of custom from gliding clubs. Teaching cable break recovery was always a bit fraught I used to think as you had to be vey quick to correct an error.
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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by tberry » Thu Apr 13, 2017 4:18 pm

What I like about Condor:

1. Every day that goes by increases my admiration for the development talent of this gem. Condor runs on pretty much ANYTHING and it runs really well. That's a tribute to how well the original code was designed. Even after all this time, the scenery, whether rendered or photorealistic is beautiful and the program functions so well people are surprised at its age.

2. Competition/multiplayer. It's great fun to fly the same task at the same time with your friends or in competition with others. The ability to set a task and fly it with others regardless of location is what has made Condor survive for so long. At our club, the winter shuts down the regular soaring and we meet weekly to practice flying cross country using terrain for our own soaring area. We take seasoned XC pilots and also students and teach them the basics of XC decision making. We use Discord to talk to each other on a party line and have a great time prepping for the coming season. I can't emphasize enough how this aspect alone has kept Condor relevant for so long.

3. It flies like a real glider. Obvious care and attention has gone into the flight modeling and I can tell you that after flying the real Discus and the Condor Discus, it's pretty damn close to the real thing. Close enough for simulation, that is for sure. We use the K-13 to teach our student pilots the basics of flying in the simulator before they go out to the line. All of them tell us that the simulator experience transferred to the real glider, saving them both time and money.

4. Yes, the weather isn't 'quite right' but it is quite good. You have a lot of control over the type of soaring you'll do in the weather screen and can try out all kinds of different permutations with a relatively simple set of controls that are designed for soaring.

5. Winch launch, aerotow, airborne starts. The rope length on Condor is shorter than we use at my club. If you can learn how to aerotow in Condor, then a real life tow becomes a cinch.

6. Ghost flights. Fly the same task with the same weather and learn from someone who beat you or try to improve on your own performance.

7. Track IR. I thought this was a gimmick until I tried it. Being able to look around just like in real life really frees you up to more naturally fly the glider.

8. Smoke. We use the smoke option to teach our students to hold their airspeed when thermaling, and help them center thermals and understand the concept of moving the circle to improve rate of climb.

9. PDA. Learning how to use a PDA for a cross country flight in a simulator is way better than trying to learn how to use one in real flight. Condor also outputs data allowing you to use a real life PDA and learn its functions at home rather than in the glider.

Two areas that the community have contributed to are objects and scenery. If I had a wish for the next version of Condor, it would be to permit a more plug-in architecture to allow different versions of PDA's, for example, or ability to set up tasks or manage the multiplayer server or perhaps weather rendering and so on. But even as it is, the current version of Condor does quite a good job of those tasks.

There was a LOT of thought put into this simulator and that's obvious even a decade later. It is STILL the best, most viable, easiest to use simulation of soaring flight on the market and it costs about the price of a single real life glider flight - what are you waiting for? Go ahead and get version 1.5 and when 2.0 comes along, get that too.

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by Slartibartfast » Wed Apr 19, 2017 11:19 am

Thanks tberry, that's a good and clear list.

I'm not sure why people are so eager to brand me a troll, I truly mean nothing of the sort. In fact I believe I have only spoken admirably of the simulator and my purpose of starting this thread was not to troll but to understand, well, what it is about Condor that makes it so good. I mean you can consider that trolling if you wish but it seems a perfectly legitimate thing to ask and frankly I'm somewhat bewildered as to how I seem to have offended the community so by asking :?.

As it is, the reason I haven't bought the program yet is because I've only just build a computer to use it on and I don't want to spend the money on the current version only to have v2 released two weeks later. Discussion in the "Condor 2.0? honesty please" thread while never explicitly stating it seems to hint that a release is indeed imminent and it is this release that I am essentially waiting for. I know I could potentially be waiting for years but who knows, it could also be released tomorrow and well, I don't want to buy the old version if it immediately gets supplanted. If there where some upgrade option such as getting a discount of the price of the original version minus say €1 per week since you bought it then sure, it would be worth doing, but theirs no indication of such a discount and no one's seriously going to be playing Condor V1 once V2 comes out, and spending €40+ on software that may only be current for a few days is not an attractive proposition.

That being said though, it's not like I'm trying to say the current version isn't good enough, clearly people adore it but I'm merely trying to under stand what it is that is so special, and I have to say some of you have indeed given some relay good responses, I just wish it didn't have to come intermingled with such abuse ;)
Last edited by Slartibartfast on Wed Apr 19, 2017 2:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: What Makes Condor so Good?

Post by janjansen » Wed Apr 19, 2017 1:01 pm

Slartibartfast wrote: theirs no indication of such a discount and no one's seriously going to be playing Condor V1 once V2 comes out, and spending €40+ on software that may only be current for a few days is not an attractive proposition.
This has come up a few times, and the devs clearly dont want to offer a discount or talk of an upgrade path. I think thats a mistake, but its their call of course.

That said, I wouldnt expect V2 within weeks. Only weeks ago they proclaimed it had began alpha testing. For a release version, I think months is more realistic, and if I where to bet, Id say end of the year. But even if it is tomorrow, I dont think V1 will be obsoleted immediately, if for no other reason than that it will take a lot of time to port all the sceneries. And hey, €40 isnt exactly a fortune. a single aerotow will probably cost you more.

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