aerofly FS 2 coffee party

Only 2 week left!

It’s no longer a secret: OrbX cooperates with IPACS.
So OrbX is the first company announcing the support of aerofly FS 2.

It was an impressive moment for me to meet Jarrad Marshall, who came from down under Australia to Tubingen in southwestern Germany. Unfortunately we had dirty late winter weather with rain all day. Not ideal for some nice sightseeing. So there’s nothing else for it but to work hard in the office at IPACS together with the other team members.

I took some shots and want to show you the guys behind the scenes.
See Jarrad Marshall with Marc Borchers (left) and Torsten Hans (right), the heads of IPACS and both doctors in physics.

Innsbruck, Austria (LOWI) and Meigs Field Chicago will be the start, to be published on June 15, as a birthday present for John Venema, head of OrbX.
Find all the stunning snapshots in the preview thread:
http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/13…ight-simulator/

The LOWI area along the Inn valley nearly connects to the Switzerland DLC of IPACS, only a small strip is left with default texture and may be closed in the future. This image has been published in the OrbX forum thread mentioned above.

The cooperation led already to advanced or even new features,
now implemented in the aerofly FS 2 core product.
I want to mention the new photo-realistic trees. Watching the trunk, the leaves and the shape you may even distinguish the different botanical species of trees.

With the new Utah DLC the first people animation has been introduced into aerofly FS 2.
You may discover it, if you find the place…

Moving objects will be seen first with OrbX sceneries. This will massively change the immersion of aerofly FS2, and we will hopefully leave the lifeless ‘twilight zone’ behind us.

Likewise new is the ability to add generic buildings. IPACS stated, it’s different from established autogen due to a dissimilar kind of workflow.

We’re all excited to see this new level of aerofly FS 2 in conjunction with OrbX sceneries.
My last question was: What’s next OrbX???

But in the meantime John Venema stated this in the OrbX forum:
“Some of the large area regional projects we are working on for AeroflyFS2 are going to blow your minds and elevate the sim to a new level.
We have new tech incoming which will massively streamline production of vast photoreal areas so there's going to be a whole new 200fps world to discover. 2017 is going to be epic! “

This is nothing else than awesome!
Rodeo

Hmm,

I've never been in Utah :cool:

Hi all,

today I took the chance for another coffee party in the IPACS office.

First of all, the team is excited by the overwhelming response to the published geoconvert tool.

They expected few people to try this scenery tool, but were really impressed by the screenshots of so many successful conversions.

They will further support this tool and continue development taking the users feedback into account.
Improvements of memory management and workflow are already under investigation.

Another step is airport creation with AC3D, which suits to the geoconvert sceneries.

And they assured me, to publish the generic feature for the community.

This will allow users, to define ‘autogen’ generic objects like buildings, lights and trees. I had a sneak preview to the coding of this feature.

Today I want to introduce another team member, Michael Hochgraef.

He joined IPACS already in the year 2008, when the aerofly rc 5 simulator has been finalized.

Michael holds an university degree as a software engineer and is specialized in computer graphics.

His sphere of activities reaches from aircraft and scenery design to texturing and configuration settings.

In the moment he prepares the catalogue for the IPACS object library, which we can use shortly for our scenery design.
See some shots of this catalogue. It’s very detailed comprising the object name, the extent in all 3 directions and the pivot point of the object.

This makes it very easy for us to add it into our scenery.

There is a good deal more coming, it’s just a matter of time, even for these professionals.

Stay tuned to aerofly FS 2, thanks!

Rodeo

Some more examples ...

There are lots of airport buildings, but houses, offices and factories as well in the catalogue.

Rodeo

Good note!

Please see the point 0 is not at the lower corner of the buildings, so it slightly sinks into the ground.

This might not be enough for all situations though...

Rodeo

Dear aerofly FS2 pilots,

last week I had another aerofly coffee party in the office of IPACS.

Torsten gave me even more insight into geoconvert.

The information about the aerofly tile system will be shortly added to the wiki. This will allows us to create better alignments with the aerofly tiles. The possibility to create png files, which can be viewed or even edited, is already mentioned in the advanced wiki tutorial.
See attached the tile system of the entire world for aerofly level 4.

Additionally geoconvert supports polygons as well. For islands this may be a better solution to avoid processing of large water areas around the islands.

The code will be added to the wiki as well.
Torsten's current task is to check the memory management, I provided a large FSET download for him to test this.
The blurry section at the borders is under investigation as well.

The cultivation test is in a final state. Besides buildings and trees the lighting is very interesting. We can define the height above ground for the light source, the color of the light, the intensity, blinking and flashing and some other parameters. Since OSM is strongly discussed here in the forum I try to combine OSM data with the aerofly cultivation feature. See attached an example of different colors, intensities and blinking cycles.

Today I want to introduce another member of the IPACS team, his name is Dietmar Schaible.

Dietmar made an operational training as a media designer in a German game developing company. He was involved in the design of ego shooters and real time strategy games.

In 2007 he joined IPACS when aerofly RC5 has been under development. He constructed sceneries and many aircrafts for the rc simulator. Also in the current aerofly FS 2 he designed several aircrafts like the Cessna 172. With his previous knowledge of game development he contributes now as well to the feature list of aerofly.

Talk to you soon again, enjoy aerofly FS 2!

[Blocked Image: http://www.smilies.4-user.de/include/Fahrzeuge/smilie_car_035.gif]

Rodeo

Dear pilots,

let me report about another meeting in the IPACS office. Working with the team ended up in several exiting features.

GeoConvert now allows to define a specific input directory. We don’t have to move our input files in and out of the current input order, just note down a specific input folder in the TMC file. So you can keep your input images separately.

GeoConvert supports also polygons besides the current rectangles. This allows us to cut rather precise along a border . The polygon consists just of a line of point coordinates specified in the TMC file.

Another great feature is a new flag: Create only full image tiles without mask, skip images where a masking is required. This flag can be set globally or per each separate level. This gives the user an enormous flexibility and avoids problems with masking tiles. I love it!

Additionally admoore63 is involved in this process and will adapt his great GeoConverter Helper to the new features.
All of these features mark a tremendous step for the tool aerofly FS 2 GeoConvert.

The blurry sections around custom areas have been identified and will dissappear with the next aerofly update.

Finally I got the first version of the airport construction tool in my hands. It is based on AC3D. We can create ground and runways which will be merged into the aerofly mesh. This will allow curved runways, but also avoid spikes and bumps by a sophisticated operation. We can now set a placeholder for an aerofly object like a static plane, a tower , a hangar and so on. Exporting them to aerofly, the objects are magically showing up in the scenery.

I hardly talk about the cultivation tool today. In the last weeks I made many tests in combination with Open Street Map data, which are a good base for ‚cultivating‘ aerofly sceneries with buildings, lights and trees.

This all together is a giant playground for people who want to ‚mod‘ aerofly for their own conception.

Stay tuned!

Rodeo

Latest news: The new SDK package has been released already. Find it in the Download section!