The realistic gull finally glides like a gull
If you fly the realistic gull, you probably noticed something off when it glided. The wings were held out flat and straight, tip to tip, like a paper plane. It looked like a bird, but not like a gull. A gull is the bird you can name from a hundred metres away just by the shape of its wings, and that shape was missing.
What a gliding gull looks like
Watch a herring gull ride the wind over a harbour. The inner part of each wing, from the body to the wrist, tilts up a little. At the wrist the wing bends, and the outer part, the hand with the long primary feathers, angles down and sweeps back. Seen from the front or from behind you get a shallow "M". From below the leading edge pushes forward to the wrist and then runs back to the tip. Children draw it as a little tick in the sky, and they are right.
What changed
The model's own glide animation keeps the wings flat, so we now bend them on top of it while you fly:
- Shoulder: the whole wing lifts about 18° and the wrist moves slightly forward.
- Wrist: the outer half of the wing drops 36° relative to the inner half, so the tips end up a little below the body, and the primaries sweep back about 28°.
The bend sits about 40% of the way out along the wing, roughly where a real gull's wrist is. When you flap, half of the wrist bend stays and the shoulder lift goes away, so the wing beat from the original animation still reads clearly. On the ground, taking off and landing nothing changes.
This applies to every realistic gull in the sky, yours and other pilots', so a flock now looks like gulls from any angle. The box gull keeps its look.
Wings folded on the ground
While checking the glide we found a second problem. When the realistic gull walked or rested on the ground, its wings hung down at its sides like a person's arms, the tips nearly touching the ground. The animation itself has the wings folded tight against the body. Some wing bones only have a few keyframes across the whole animation file, and when the game cut the file into separate clips (walk, rest, glide) it dropped those bones from the clips that had no keyframe inside them. With no data for those bones the game fell back to the model's default pose, which holds the wings straight down.
The same gap broke the glide shape in the first version of this change: the wrist bend was applied again on every frame on top of the last one, so after a moment the outer wing hung almost straight down. Now every clip keeps every bone, holding the value the animation has at the start of that clip. A gull standing on a pier folds its wings along its back, the way a real one does, and the walking cycle looks like a gull rather than a penguin.
Try it
Pick the realistic gull in the vehicle settings, take off, let go of flap and look at your bird from behind or from below with the camera button. If anything looks wrong at a particular angle or while banking hard, tell us in Discord with a screenshot. We tuned the angles on still renders of the model, and real flight in the wind may suggest a different balance.