towerProcTL

    After manually creating the South Florida TL add-on, I decided to automate the tsc file & toc file generation to make it easier for others to add lighted radio towers and lighted water towers to their own scenery projects.

    The zip file is posted on flight-sim.org here.

    The basic process requires you to use Google Maps to copy the lat/lon coordinates for each tower location and paste them into an Excel file. You then run the FS2towerProc.exe program to auto-generate the tsc & toc files - that’s it!

    The Towers Library includes the following 15 towers - thanks Jake (ZoSoChile)!


    Adding Lighted Towers How-To.pdf

    Just like an early Christmas present. Thanks a million guys.

    As good as this is, I immediately wish for a more varied choices of water towers. If Santa is making a list of wishes, I would like to add some big box stores complete with signage, maybe a McDonald's corner store with the tall interstate sign. These things make a world of difference in the vfr world.

    Thomas made us a power plant cooling tower that could be added to the choices. If interested, I will pm for permission to use the files. Maybe even add the windmills?

    11414-hc-2397-jpg

    Quote from Jetjockey10

    As good as this is, I immediately wish for a more varied choices of water towers. If Santa is making a list of wishes, I would like to add some big box stores complete with signage, maybe a McDonald's corner store with the tall interstate sign. These things make a world of difference in the vfr world.


    Thomas made us a power plant cooling tower that could be added to the choices. If interested, I will pm for permission to use the files. Maybe even add the windmills?

    As much as I applaud kenventions et al for moving forward on automating tower placement (three cheers :thumbup::thumbup::thumbup:)

    If the vision is a generic CreateAF2Object would it not make more sense to look at OSM and scenProc extensions (sorry Arno) where there is already infrastructure for definition and placement of objects within the scenery context.

    /Stu

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    Stu, here's my 2 cents ...

    scenProc is great for generic stuff like trees, houses, buildings, and lights where you want thousands of each created. They all end up in a cultivation TOC file and are generally only visible from about 6 miles away (except lights).

    FSCloudPort is great for 3D objects (tmb files, etc) because the GUI makes it easy to hand-place each object. Airports were a natural starting point and often have 10-30 hand-placed objects. They all end up in a TSC file and are visible from great distances (+20 miles).

    Now that the community is getting good at using both, they're craving more realism / polish on their scenery projects by wanting to add iconic structures which means additional libraries of 3D objects that get referenced in TSC files. So I don't think scenProc is the solution but I do think a duplicate of FSCloudPort but called FSCloudCities could be. Instead of libraries of planes and hangars, FSCloudCities would have libraries of fast food restaurants, churches, sports stadiums, etc. The hard part though is populating those 3D object libraries - we need a quick & automated way to convert SketchUp models otherwise adding iconic structures will be a very slow and time-consuming process.

    Towers were a unique problem because you need a TSC file for the 3D tower objects and you also need a matching TOC file for the flashing tower lights.

    Hi Ken

    I agree that there is the generic class and the iconic class of objects

    I was sort of thinking ahead to power pylons.

    They certainly add to the realism of ORBX Netherlands TrueEarth.

    They fall into the generic class and would be tedious to position and orient by hand. There is already a lot of power transmission info in OSM that could be leveraged with the appropriate scenProc extensions and object library. There is voltage and strand info that could be used to determine correct tower type.

    I don't know if there are other generic object types that are worthwhile cultivating rather than placing.

    cheers

    Stu

    PS have not had a chance to try TowerProc yet, but it looks interesting.

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    I agree, electrical transmission wires and towers would be a cool addition. The 3D object / TSC file route is probably the easier solution - Jake's tall radio towers already have guy wires. He'd have to create a transmission tower with power wires stretched out to one side, then we could place copies of it to create a chain of them.

    As you suggested, we need a way to use the OSM data to give us the locations where each of those transmission towers should be placed. Need to do some thinking about that one - might be able to break it into straight line segments where you input the start point and end point and the program figures out the rest.

    Yep, those large cross-country power distribution lines are certainly easy to see and to follow through wooded areas. The wide right-of-way is kept clean from growing brush and looks like a highway without concrete or asphalt.

    On another tangent, I think generic power plants could be placed in accurate locations if we could come up with some sort of realistic looking structure. Power plants either have tall or short cooling towers and usually have a fixed number of multistory buildings in a complex. Not easy to miss when you are out flying around the countryside. There must be more than a thousand in the USA.

    Regards,

    Ray