TorqueSim Publishes Details of Islander 1.1 Update

The developers at TorqueSim kept their heads down and working on an update for the recently released Islander. The upcoming v1.1 update brings significant improvements over the original version in every area.

The upcoming update heralds the achievement of fixing just about every big reported so far (or almost to say the least), and the biggest addition to the product so far: implementation of RXP’s GTN simulations. Bringing forth support for the GTN750 and the 650, either to be used seperately, or together, in both the standard and G5 variants of the aircraft.

BN-2 Islander Cockpit Night Lighting, shown with RealityXP GTN750, GTN650, and AFM G5 (sold separately)

Avitab also makes its way into the cockpit, with the freedom to move the tablet just about anywhere in the cockpit. Avitab will be hidden by default, but a quick click to the center of the glareshield edge would bring it right up whenever you need it.

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On the visual end, the team embarked on a comprehensive texture optimization reworking, making a seperate 2k texture set redundant. The new textures downscales resource intensive PBR maps while retaining the original 4K textures. The new set also brings more night textures (LIT), in place of traditional HDR lighting to bring little to no performance impact.

"A total of only 4 HDR lights have been retained in places where they make sense."

The cockpit, shown with RXP GTN750, GTN650, and the seperately sold AFM G5

The team incorperated functional utility lights with individual HDR lights attatched to the request of some users struggling to search for the OH switches in the dark, and two more HDR lights are located in the pilot’s row cabin lights.

On the modelling end, the 3d mesh has also been optimised to improve performance and reduce polycount:

"many parts contained unnecessarily high numbers of polygons contributing nothing to the overall appearance of the aircraft."

As a result, the newly refined model should bring increased framerates whilsts not sacrificing visual appearance. The visual efforts aforementioned above effectively halves the objects folder size of the original 1GB to jsut over 500MB. Here are some other features added:

  • Expanded UI with more options for both the aircraft and the passengers
  • Manuals now contain useful charts for operating the Islander, including gross weight limitations, take off and landing distances, and cruise data
  • Cockpit switches are much more mouse friendly now, and we’ve eliminated the ‘click-and-drag’ style clickspots entirely
  • Addition of a CSL package

To close the blog post, as a reminder the team's Islander Screenshot Competition is still going on until the end of the month (May 31st), there will be three winners, and participants have the chance to win their choice of either their Pocket Rocket, the AFM M20 Collection, or both of Attitude Simulations “Gate to the Great Lakes” sceneries. Check out their competition page for official rules and details.

Read the original blog post here.

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