Posts by Trespassers

Quote from BG2518-Bob

The alignment of imagery within P3D/FSX wasn't ever correct and very noticable at airports.

The opposite is actually the case. It is the placement of default airports which is totally inaccurate in FSX/P3D. Photo ground carpet placement is very accurate.

For that reason, when you make a photo scenery for FSX/P3D you have to edit all default airports and any landclass-related object placement.

Fortunately enough it's a quite easy (still time consuming) task thanks to convenient tools like ADE.

The concept with AFS2 is totally different, there's no crappy landclass, and no default airport.

Thus, first thing you create a scenery with Geoconvert tool, then you place airstrips...

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Jetjockey10

The physics is exactly the same for landing and taking off but you need a splash of sorts and some different resistance when you hit the water.

water and floats, dirt and wheels.

Regards,

Ray

When airborne yes. You simply have more airdrag at the feet when cruising.

When on water definitely not.

Water drag is very strong and a lot of power is needed to get the aircraft on the step before to start gaining speed. Waves make also a big difference - totally flat water is extremely sticky. The behaviour differences between floating and on the step are sure no easy stuff to get reasonnably modellized.

Step taxiing is also something very special, here again the influences of wind and waves make a big difference.

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from nubin

is a sad. i want have patricia with pilot uniform

really not possible export the pilots ?

This was asked twice, but IPACS team never cared answering so far : SDK extension, Pilot

You can try placing Patricia in the Airbus, but unless IPACS provides an SDK extension for Pilot editing, there's no way she'll wear the outfit...

Or you have to start a new pilot from scratch.

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from admin

Sorry, our beta testers are a little picky, so we delayed it until next week.

Well, I ever read on this forum that you don't want to release anything before to reach a certain quality level.

I didn't expect bugs reporting makes one picky...

Antoine

Quote from Raspou

For France IGN makes their own satellite photos https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/carte?c=4.4165…)&permalink=yes

don't know if it's easy use and good quality.

IGN doesn't make satellite pictures. Like most topographical agencies they take aerial pictures.

During a campain they can only cover a relative small area (clear weather, early afternoon), therefore the tiling effect with colors and quality discrepencies from place to place.

These pictures are never free, they're very expensive to produce and are sold quite expensive too as a result.

Once you've purchased the rights, you've got a tough job ahead of you to balance the colors. Even worse if you plan to make large regional or country-wide areas.

It's the same for the Swiss DLC, although the aerial pictures are much older (1990's) and were already corrected when IPACS got them...

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from nubin

if i understand well in AEROFLY 1 there are tons of pilots for select including boys and girls??

And if i undertand well with simple line of code i can add pilot girl in the a320??

really amazing and immersive

There are 2 girls pilots in Aerofly FS 2.

Unfortunately, both are C172 pilots, with rather special forearms and hands placement to suit the yoke.

As a result, when you seat any of these ladies in another aircraft they get totally distorted hands. I didn't try editing yet the hands bones orientations in the TMD file, seems a tough trial and error job to do when you don't have the 3D models and the coordinates...

Beyond that issue, you can easily seat any pilot in any aircraft by just editing the pilot's name in the TMC file.

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from drhotwing1

For the water masks, you can easily edit the water using alpha layer in Gimp. Aerofly FS2 uses alpha blending. Here's a photo of my Key West scenery taking advantage of Gimp and alpha layering.

[wsm='42','null','none'][/wsm]

Well, in that example waters aren't blended, there's a sharp watermask limit. We need to design a soft, progressive blending for the water texture (when there's one) to come up to the shore, and the areial picture with undersea details to show and progressively fade into deeper waters, like in FSX/P3D.

Cheers

Antoine

what can easily be exchanged is the FSET setup and inf files for anyone to download the orthophotos and compile them into a scenery.

The hardest work however resides in manually tuning the base photos in order to get colors that match existing sceneries, and draw the masks for water (Bodensee is much damaged in the Swiss DLC, just as the lake Geneva)...

Cheers

Antoine

Not actually suited for the season, but was worth a quick (coarse resolution) try...

[Blocked Image: https://u93773613.dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/AeroflyFS/aerofly_fs_2%202017-07-01%2018-12-46-25.jpg]

[Blocked Image: https://u93773613.dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/AeroflyFS/aerofly_fs_2%202017-07-01%2018-12-15-11.jpg]

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Hartman

Thanks for the tutorial.

It is based on FS Earth Tiles (FSET).

As mentioned earlier, I have some high resolution aerial photographs that are not retrieved from the net using FSET.

That means I do not have the coordinates for the upper left corner and the lower right corner. On some of the aerial photos, it is difficult to find the coordinates, because they are far offshore (see illustration).

However, it's easy to pick out the exact coordinates of landmarks in Google Maps (see illustration).

If I pick out two such coordinates as shown in the illustration - will the entire aerial photo come with - or will the area above and below the coordinates be "cut" away (omitted)?

I hope you understand the question.

Display More

This is something you can compute if your photo is already an orthophoto.

I'd use an MS Excel sheet to compute X and Y resolutions and compute the coordinates of any point accordingly.

If the picture is not corrected as an orthophoto, it's more complicated...

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from J van E

I'll try those insane shadows but they do hurt performance. But come to think of it: I use the Rift which has a low res screen: houses in the distance are just a few pixels and obviously they change place all the time so maybe what I am seeing is something different than what others are seeing on a high res 2D screen.

Well, Insane shadows divide FPS by 2 on my PC, without bringing any noticeable added value - ground terrain is still not casting any shadow, making all time setting different from early afternoon look inconsistent.

IMO in the shadow quality slider, ground terrain shadow casting should come earlier than buildings/vegetation shadow casting, since working with both of them might cost a lot on performance.

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from drhotwing1

Both IPACS and ORBX are aware of this problem and will be working on a fix for it shortly.

Thank you for that info!

BTW are we really talking about autogen shimmering, or buildings?

As far as I understood, there's curently only vegetation autogen coverage in AFS2, LOWI inclusive, and this one is not shimmering on my config.

At least it's the only feature responding to the density cursor.

Buildings all seem to be hand-placed 3D textured models and they're definitely shimmering on my PC, I assume it could be related to the all-in-one structure where everything is loaded and displayed as a block with the same LOD, i.e. textures in the far distance might be too high resolution...

Cheers

Antoine

Keep it simple, just like in FSX/P3D.

When I need to work on sceneries I usually choose an aircraft without much panel like the stock AirCreation ULM.

I move foward/backward with the yoke elevator axis and change heading with the yoke aileron axis or rudder pedals.

Otherwise, the slew mode is very convenient to just move the aircraft to the desired spot.

My 2 cents

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Jet-Pack

Yes that is one downside of the current way of creating scenery. In FSX you can take the default airport and change it's taxiways and signs and runways and approaches and so forth, too.

The plus side is nobody can steal your Aerofly airport and publish it in another sim and the scenery is smaller in size and can be loaded faster. For example you don't have to generate the vertices and triangles first, you just push them up to the graphics card, done.-

Well, I cannot think right now of so many Aerofly airports to steal and publish in antother sim, but if this is the main driver for such an architecture then I'd say markings should be editable as textures without needing the source files, just like one repaints aircraft liveries.

Cheers

Antoine

For scenery development you don't need the aircraft, you need the slew feature, to move free in all DOFs around the place, without flying.

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Jet-Pack

A slew function for the entire aircraft isn't actually needed I think. I'd rather see more positions on the map to start from (e.g. downwind, base, long/short final, beginning of the approach, start at ramp/gate/parking position, start on hold short line, start after pushback and prior to taxi, prior top of descent, at 10k during descent, etc).

A slew function is definitely needed for consistent and convenient scenery making. Your camera idea is good to recall a saved location, but sceneries must be tested dynamically, moving freely fast and slow in all DOFs without bothering to fly there and without having to exit and load saved positions...

This is for instance something XPlane devs never understood, stating you can fly at Mach 2 if necessary, which doesn't make sense...

Not really a bug, this is regularily changing due to variation's yearly drift.

True rwy heading is 095/275, thus rwy QFU oscillates over years between 09/27 and 10/28.

There must be no L/R suffix since only 1 rwy.

This is another drawback of IPACS closed approach for scenery making, with RWY markings engraved together with the whole aerodrome scenery in an external and unaffordable CAD SW for compilation, making it totally impossible to edit unless you have the original creator's source files...

Maybe this time somebody from IPACS will correct the rwy marking, but many airport rwy headings around the place are due to change sortly due to variation's drift, and change back again in a couple of years...

There's thus little chances this will follow the reality in the sim, not even sure variation gets updated either, and users won't be able to do it themselves with the current concept...

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Jet-Pack

We didn't ignore it. We put it on our very long todo list and will come to it once the developers have time for it...

Good to read that.

Forgive me Jan, but that's actually the first hint (even unofficial statement) that IPACS acknowledged this request.

All your replies so far were to argue why we should not need it...

Dont't take it personally, I know you're doing your best trying to reply in your spare time, but communication with IPACS in general (or its lack of) is sometimes quite frustrating...

Cheers

Antoine

As already stated in another thread, a slew mode is especially needed for scenery development : one desperately need the freedom to instantly move 6DOF and inspect our work under all possible points of view, without having to fly there and, above all, without having to exit the simulation.

As for most dev requests, this simple one has been ignored so far with the motto "the devs have to adapt, not the opposite"...

Let's try again...

Cheers

Antoine

Quote from Rodeo

I tried to join to the Innsbruck area and Switzerland DLC.

Very promising I think.

Rodeo

Well, and how do you handle the sceneries junction? When you have overlapping ground photo between the Swiss DLC and your ground photo, which one displays on top?

Thanks in advance?

Cheers

Antoine