Photo Story - adding scenery & cultivation to an airport in 7 layers

  • I am still engaged in the forest industry. :thumbup:

    I have made a forest around the airport - as described in the Layer6 (Trees) How-To.pdf. Everything works excellent.

    But .......

    I have now created an additional area of forest further from the same airport (2 forest toc files relating to the same airport).

    Is there a standard Dummy.tsc file that can be used instead of the airport.tsc file?

    Or is it possible to put several forest.toc files into the same airport.tsc file?

    Or is there another easy solution?

  • You can put several toc files in the same airport.tsc file (see example below). Copy/paste the block below then update the element number from 2 to 3 in the new block and update the filename to match your new toc file. Repeat if you need more toc files near the same airport.

  • Is there any advantage to separate out houses, trees and tall buildings? I find one extract can give me everything from 1 and 2 story houses to 100 story skyscrapers, and trees and lights as well. Do more TOCs give more stutters?

    I found the method to use an FSET images to generate trees gave great coverage, but often resulted in trees in cultivated fields. Mucking with the selections could remove trees from the cultivated fields but also removed them elsewhere where they are wanted. Using the land class category seemed to give me a good coverage of trees but left cultivated fields alone. The disadvantage is undocumented green areas are not cultivated as they are in the FSET method. However, a lot of green areas and forests seem to be documented in OpenStreetMap and flow through to scenProc .

    Thanks to kenventions for the tutorials or I wouldn't even be able to ask these questions.

    Thanks, Chris

    Win 10 64-bit, 24GB RAM, i5-9400F @ 3.9, 6GB Nvidia RTX-2060

  • Is there any advantage to separate out houses, trees and tall buildings? I find one extract can give me everything from 1 and 2 story houses to 100 story skyscrapers, and trees and lights as well. Do more TOCs give more stutters?

    I think the main advantage is that you can change each one independently. For instance your buildings and plants might be right, but something needs tweaking with the lights, so it's a case of regenerating that, not the whole thing.

    There's a sweet spot between number of TOCs and size of each TOC so it's hard to say, and would be based on how much cultivation data is in the TOC.

    AeroScenery - Easily create photoreal scenery for Aerofly

  • You can put several toc files in the same airport.tsc file (see example below). Copy/paste the block below then update the element number from 2 to 3 in the new block and update the filename to match your new toc file. Repeat if you need more toc files near the same airport.

    Thanks again, Ken. It works excellent. :thumbup:

    Adding forest means a lot to my experience of the terrain - especially VFR flights.

    How far from an airport.tsc can you place forest areas (forest.toc)? I guess there is a limit.

  • I don't know if there's a max distance from the airport that is using your toc file. Trees seem to be only displayed within a 5-6km radius of your aircraft. My suggestion is experiment and report back with anything odd that happens.

  • Size=xxxx in your airport TSC defines the read distance in meters that cultivation is read. So, if you want to see the cultivation tied to that airport from 20 miles radius around that airport then you set the parameter size=32187

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • Size=xxxx in your airport TSC defines the read distance in meters that cultivation is read. So, if you want to see the cultivation tied to that airport from 20 miles radius around that airport then you set the parameter size=32187

    Unfortunately this is not working, as I have found the size value in the airport TSC has no impact on visibility for objects referenced by that TSC.

    I have cultivation city high rise 6nm from my airport and they are not visible from the airport as they are in the real world. They gradually become visible as transparent objects at about 4 nm from them (2nm from airport) and are fully visible about 2nm from them (4nm from airport). As you fly past them they disappear at the same intervals of distance as they appeared. Fscloudport objects in the same TSC are still visible at 40nm and beyond, if they are big enough.

    I tried 5000, 32187 and 100000 values and there was no change in the visibility of cultivated or Fscloudport objects.

    This problem is really only a issue for larger cultivated objects, like very tall buildings, which are usually visible from large distances. Other smaller objects disappear into the ground clutter in the real world and are not noticeable until you get closer to them. In FS2 only need to become visible at much shorter distances anyway and the current issue is not a problem for them.

    Thanks, Chris

    Win 10 64-bit, 24GB RAM, i5-9400F @ 3.9, 6GB Nvidia RTX-2060

  • Interesting that your tall buildings start to fade beyond 2nm versus the 5-6nm I experienced - that may be the result of your GTX970 memory of 4GB versus my GTX1080 with 8GB.

    Perhaps it could be something to do with the objects location in reference to the TSC location. Were your buildings linked to an airport TSC or in one of their own?

    Thanks, Chris

    Win 10 64-bit, 24GB RAM, i5-9400F @ 3.9, 6GB Nvidia RTX-2060

  • Unfortunately this is not working, as I have found the size value in the airport TSC has no impact on visibility for objects referenced by that TSC.

    I have cultivation city high rise 6nm from my airport and they are not visible from the airport as they are in the real world. They gradually become visible as transparent objects at about 4 nm from them (2nm from airport) and are fully visible about 2nm from them (4nm from airport). As you fly past them they disappear at the same intervals of distance as they appeared. Fscloudport objects in the same TSC are still visible at 40nm and beyond, if they are big enough.

    I tried 5000, 32187 and 100000 values and there was no change in the visibility of cultivated or Fscloudport objects.

    This problem is really only a issue for larger cultivated objects, like very tall buildings, which are usually visible from large distances. Other smaller objects disappear into the ground clutter in the real world and are not noticeable until you get closer to them. In FS2 only need to become visible at much shorter distances anyway and the current issue is not a problem for them.

    Perhaps it's how you are doing your scenery. The way that we make scenery is how I explained it.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • Perhaps it's how you are doing your scenery. The way that we make scenery is how I explained it.

    You could be right as I am just a novice. But others are reporting the same problem so it is not an isolated issue. Do you know of any area in the IPACS generated FS2 environment that has large objects generated by cultivation rather than scenery design using CAD? I could then see if the same problem persists and if not it might help myself and others isolate the issue in our files.

    Thanks, Chris

    Win 10 64-bit, 24GB RAM, i5-9400F @ 3.9, 6GB Nvidia RTX-2060

  • The TOC files always get loaded by distance triggers presented by the Size parameter from within the TSC file that has the TOC defined. The only variance is objects that are not cultivation files but rather objects defined by either airport or 'scenery' TMB files.

    If you have more than one TOC defined in a particular area it may be causing conflict with one another.

    kenventions

    I will have to check with Torsten to see if he changed anything causing cultivation files to 'fade' In or out that i'm not aware of but it has always been that cultivation is triggered by distance defined in the TSC, as I mentioned above (size=xxxx). I don't think anything changed here because I haven't tested anything new but he was looking into that pop-in issue where groups of point lights just turned on In the distance.

    A coupe of months ago, during the work on South Florida, I tested how cultivation was loaded and what affect it has on performance once its loaded, by changing the size parameter to different values (meters) I was able to precisely detect that that parameter does in fact work properly.

    Please provide some more detail to where you are seeing that this isn't working the way that it should be in your project so that we can look into it more carefully. I'm not saying that you are wrong here, I could be wrong myself.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • Jeff, here's an example:

    - KADS airport tsc file has [SIZE] [48000] and only 1 toc being used / referenced and no nearby toc files that could overlap

    - only 100-floor buildings are in the toc

    - I used osm data for a ~14km tall x ~11km wide area centered around the KADS airport (here's the osm screenshot)

    the following 4 FS2 screenshots were taken north of the airport at distances of 20km, 14km, 6km, and at the airport ...

    20km to airport - no buildings visible (~12km from edge of osm area)


    14km to airport - some buildings visible but transparent (~6km from edge of osm area)


    6km to airport - nearby buildings solid, further buildings transparent (inside osm area)


    At the airport, distant buildings transparent (~6km to the edge of the osm area)

    With [SIZE] at 48km, these buildings should have been visible & solid in all 4 screenshots. I'm guessing the new graphics engine added a 6km radius cultivation bubble around the aircraft that ignores/doesn't display any cultivation outside that bubble. It makes sense for trees & houses because you don't notice they're missing at that 6km distance, but ScenProc-generated buildings need a solution like ScenProc lights where they're visible at any distance.

  • Please provide some more detail to where you are seeing that this isn't working the way that it should be in your project so that we can look into it more carefully.

    I wanted to check if any addons I have created and installed impacted this problem. So I did some testing and brought my FS2 back to zero addons by removing all user installed airports and all user created and installed photo scenery. I then added back in just one cultivation. First with an airport and then as just a cultivation file by itself with no airport. So the only customisation was the one cultivation area. Unfortunately the buildings behaved in the same manner as before, only fading in as you approach. Removing all the photo textures made the cultivation behaviour easy to spot and I noted a couple of things:-

    1. The trees appear at a difference distance to the buildings. Trees were visible in the distance behind the area where buildings were yet to appear.

    2. The fading in of the buildings occurred in the same manner when using an airport TSC with the centre point at the airport, as they did when the cultivation was in the cultivation TSC with the centre point in the middle of the high rise buildings and no airport TSC used. These 2 centre points are approx. 6km apart. So neither the centre point of the TSC nor the airport environment itself were influencing factors.

    3. I tried a TSC size setting of 1,000, 5,000 and 50,000 separately in both the airport TSC and the cultivation TSC and this made no difference to either the trees or buildings.

    Unfortunately the map.osm was too large to attach to allow you to replicate the cultivation but have attached the airport TSC and cultivation TSC which both contain the same cultivation reference, in case this is of some help.

  • I'm guessing the new graphics engine added a 6km radius cultivation bubble

    In December 2017 I was trying to wrap my head around the 'size' parameter in the tsc file. I made a simple test object, a single cultivation code block with a single 'sky scraper' 400' x 400' x 32 floors. Placed it in the middle of long island NY and ran my tests. I can tell you that I experienced everything you've noted in you subsequent posts and can verify that the transparency 'fade' in aspect was happening with the December 2017 engine.
    My tsc location was the center of the skyscraper. I don't associate cultivaion with an airport location, rather use the' dummy airport tmb' method.

    -- Rich