Cultivation tools status

1st Official Post

    Dear IPACS team,

    What is the status with the new cultivation format allowing wide scenery coverage ?

    I compiled last year a complete cultivation for Switzerland and were asked on this forum by IPACS to step down and wait, because they were preparing a new cultivation format better suited to large sceneries, the current text format being only suited to small patches around airports.

    Which is a fact, the current format is not suited for country coverage.

    We've been patiently waiting for some 8 months.

    When asking recently, I was told the new cultivation tools were still not available, still under development, despite Orbx had released a cultivation for their Chicago scenery in the new binary format

    Now, I see Orbx is planning to release a Swiss cultivation addon in direct competition against mine, that has been waiting for 8 months.

    I was planning to release for free. If Orbx's cultivation is good enough and free, I'm fine, despite it's totally unfair.

    My sole aim is there's a good cultivation available, whoever is the editor.

    But how come some third party developers have access to tools that others cannot have?

    Why do we free editors systematically have to struggle to get tools and infos you give spontaneously to Orbx? (cultivation, animation, collisions, shadows, grass,.... the list is pretty long)

    Why don't you take us seriously, while we're fighting to open the path to your simulator ?

    When can I please have the tools and documentation to compile cultivation in the same format as Orbx?

    Thanks

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

    What made the msfs line so sucessful?

    The huge population of 3rd party developers.

    I understand that the ipacs approach is to have control over everything also to keep the excellent performance. This makes sense but is it maybe time to rethink this

    approach?

    Regards,

    Thomas

    i7-14700KF @ 5.6 GHz, Geforce RTX 4090, 32MB RAM, 1TB SSD M.2, 1TB SSD M.2, 2TB SSD M.2, 32" Monitor 4K, Pimax Crystal

    I agree with you Trespassers, I look forward to having more tools and info to accellerate and increase the quality of our work ...

    But on the other hand I can understand IPACS...

    Subtle balance between "Openness" and "Exclusivity"...

    the opening, allows the creation of a passionate community, to increase at a lower cost the popularity of a product and thus to ensure its development. On the other hand exclusivities with commercial partners assure the financing of the development and the perenniality of the product in the time ... if the product is not yet sufficiently popular and therefore widespread, to remain in the project the partners ask to being able to stay one step ahead of the freeware to be sure to have a return on investment on the sale of their DLC.

    I think that IPACS considers that their product is not yet sufficiently mature and widespread and does not yet have sufficient support in the simulation market to let the freeware become a serious competitor for their partners. The risk is that partners like Orbx are going away if they have to increase development costs to stay over freeware offer and in the end they only sell a few copies of their DLC ...

    I think that the concurrency Freeware vs Payware is healthy and allows to pull ever higher the quality of the DLC, but I can understand that IPACS make choices not always popular because they want to secure the future and the financing of fevelopments of their simulator at longer term. Indeed put in by the sale of the starting product, the sources of income can only be on the DLC, otherwise it would be necessary another mode of financing by means of monthly subscription or annual seasons like other games. But I am not not sure that this would be very popular either ;)

    Too much openness is also dangerous, as your reaction, like those of other first-hour users who become very impatient over time, proves it.

    The risk is to demotivate the community, to scare away enthusiasts and consequently to lead to a decline in the popularity of their product...

    For futur development, Aerofly needs both: strong community and strong partners. In short, good luck at IPACS to find the right balance. I prefer to be in my place than theirs :)

    Quote from vogel69

    On the other hand exclusivities with commercial partners assure the financing of the development and the perenniality of the product in the time ... if the product is not yet sufficiently popular and therefore widespread, to remain in the project the partners ask to being able to stay one step ahead of the freeware to be sure to have a return on investment on the sale of their DLC.

    I'd assume it isn't the case. Commercial editors that expected to also propose their products for AFS2 would be artificially kept behind competition by such process.

    This is called a cartel, is both against the law and against the market.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

    Edited 2 times, last by Trespassers (May 26, 2018 at 1:54 PM).

    you are definitely right ;) After I think IPACS was not legally obliged to give access to a free SDK... wrong ? for now, we have access to a basic SDK for "free" and maybe there is a kind of "Premium" SDK for money (specific tools, compiler, etc.) so for those who can afford.

    After, I did not inquire further with IPACS if a service like this is available.... Anyway I can not afford ;)

    • Official Post

    Like we mentioned before, the SDK we offer for free is exactly whats being used by Orbx as well. We do not offer any professional SDK as of yet. Every users has the tools to create fully blown sceneries like LOWI or create new airplanes. Keep in mind however that Orbx has written custom tools that simplify the process of creating sceneries and they also use professional tools like 3D Studio Max, which is something normal users don't have.

    Also, we still haven't solved the issue of large scale cultivation coverage. We want to take this step very carefully. Releasing something too early will cause us trouble in the future. We will make appropriate announcements, once we are happy with a solution.

    Hi

    I have looked into aircraft development, I refuse to do any more scenery, and the tools or more to the point tool available is somewhat lacking. Sure its relatively easy to export the model but after that we hit a very very big and steep mountain.

    The TMD file is just way to complicated for 99.99% of keen developers. There is no documentation to even help us to start to understand it. If I wanted to be a programmer I would have but I like to 3D model

    This process has to be simplified for the sake of FS2 and it can only be done by IPACs else you will be the only ones bringing out aircraft, perhaps that's the plan, to keep control of quality.

    Steve

    "Also, we still haven't solved the issue of large scale cultivation coverage."

    well, I solved this issue in a way. IF you have much RAM you can do similar cultivation areas like photo scenery level 10. I add them to dummy airports located in the middle of the tile and set the range to 50 km. One cultivation file can be around 80 to 200 MByte. It looks like it works for my system. I generated a quiet big area now and it is still growing. Frames are good and the loading of new parts during flight are working well. Of cause, the file size would be much smaller if we can "compile" the text file.

    Wish for Aerofly FS 2/4:

    - Flightpath recording on hard drive and replay in sim from different view points

    - Smoke for aerobatic planes

    - Multiplayer or at least watching other people flying sitting on ground or inside tower

    Quote from flightxtreme

    well, I solved this issue in a way. IF you have much RAM you can do similar cultivation areas like photo scenery level 10. I add them to dummy airports located in the middle of the tile and set the range to 50 km. One cultivation file can be around 80 to 200 MByte. It looks like it works for my system. I generated a quiet big area now and it is still growing. Frames are good and the loading of new parts during flight are working well. Of cause, the file size would be much smaller if we can "compile" the text file.

    That's what I did for Switzerland, in 1° x 1° tiles. It's not a solution, it's merely a workaround.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

    What needs to be in a dummy airport TSC file? I already have a toc file for OSM cultivation tied to actual airports and now I want to create a dummy airport for my photoscenery-based cultivation toc file.

    I created a dummy airport using FSCloudPort using a dummy ICAO name "trees" but it shows up on the map and on the ground - need to get that one deleted.

    I think I've answered my own question - I took an existing airport tsc file, copied it and added -trees to the ICAO name references, deleted all the object references but left the cultivation section and changed the toc file name from the OSM version "map" to "trees" and the extra trees are showing up!

    Hi Ken,

    Since latest update there's no more need for a dummy object.

    Attached you will find a TSC file sample for cultivation.

    I split cultivation in tiles and call each tile with a dedicated TSC file.

    France_N4118_E00905_N4124_E00912.zip

    This sample is for a 0.1° x 0.1° tile somewhere in France.

    Cheers

    Antoine

    Config : i7 6900K - 20MB currently set at 3.20GHz, Cooling Noctua NH-U14S, Motherboard ASUS Rampage V Extreme U3.1, RAM HyperX Savage Black Edition 16GB DDR4 3000 MHz, Graphic Card Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 8GB, Power supply Corsair RM Series 850W, Windows 10 64 bit.

    http://www.flight-sim.org/

    Download my Bavaria package south-east. I have cultivation tocs included by dummy tsc files inside.

    edit: Ah, nice, Antoine. I have to wait for the DVD Update.

    Wish for Aerofly FS 2/4:

    - Flightpath recording on hard drive and replay in sim from different view points

    - Smoke for aerobatic planes

    - Multiplayer or at least watching other people flying sitting on ground or inside tower

    Antoine, great tip! It works and looks like this - this is from an airport tsc file, the first cultivation element is the traditional osm+scenproc cultivation output (buildings, houses, some trees, etc) with the second cultivation element just for lots of additional trees using the photoscenery technique Ian published under Cultivation from PhotoScenery topic ...