Posts by Tailwheel

I don't understand why you would want eliminate this effect in a... flight simulator. That's exactly the point, it's a simulated effect that occurs in real life aircraft and part of pilot training is to learn how to counteract this with correct use of the rudder. Very basic aircraft, the Cessna C152 for example, don't have rudder/aileron trims and therefore a pilot is taught to use the rudder during take off and climb to counteract the torque of an engine at full rpm and the effect is only lessened or eliminated when the aircraft is properly trimmed for level flight at the correct rpm.

If you remove the effect, you're not flying using a simulator... you're just playing a game.

Inspired by IZ0JUB's wonderful UK photo scenery, I am looking to create some landmarks and sightseeing locations for UK VFR flying.
If anyone is interested in adding these to their install, let me know and I'll upload them somewhere.

Here's the first one completed...

Glastonbury Tor - At Sunset

Quote from IZ0JUB

You have been so inundated with replies I apologize for my late reply.

Having used both fs 2 and fs 4 I have returned to my faithful fs 2 the main reason being I can make my own scenery with cultivation and special objects.

Not at all, just happy to hear from folks

Is AF4's new built-in cultivation a permanent feature then, i.e. it cannot be switched off or overwritten with user-created cultivation files then? This being the case, I definitely will NOT be upgrading as that is absolutely what I'm looking for in a sim. I'm working on some custom content right now and don't want to waste my money if AF4 isn't going to support custom cultivation and custom objects.

Quote from TomB

IPACS said in another thread: we do not have a road map. Hard to believe but I do based on what I saw in the last six years.

This is very interesting. It seems that their approach to development has not changed at all then. I've had AF2 since early access and there seemed little direction then with regard to development, although certain major features such as traffic, ATC and weather were hinted at coming. However, skip two versions and it would seem that without a road map, how are any of the most requested features likely to materialise? Or are features being added on an ad-hoc basis depending on what is felt is important at that moment in time then?

Hi Aeroflyers,

I don't want this post to become a ramble, or a rant, but rather an honest and open expression of my feelings towards whether to upgrade to FS4 and I'm sure many of you will have gone through a similar process. I have made a tentative return to Aerofly FS2 after being away for a while, mainly because I saw that FS4 was available on Steam and I wanted to remind myself of why I was so captivated by the sim the first time around. To be honest, like most of you I'm sure, it was the super fast load times, the photo scenery and the smaller, friendlier community surrounding the product - a community that has produced and shared a lot of user created content.

After having installed some portions of IZ0JUB's incredible scenery for the UK, I felt inspired to look at creating some custom objects and cultivation of my own again, however, I have quickly run into the same frustrating issue that I had forgotten I had experienced before and what ultimately contributed to putting me off making any content last time. It's simply the omission of what used to be an 'exclude polygon' in FSX scenery development. The ability to easily remove or exclude an area of pre-generated cultivation with a simple exclusion file seems sorely lacking. I realise that ScenProc supports the use of KML's to exclude areas for airport development, but I'm just referring to something simple that can be created to override pre-generated cultivation files and not involve completely re-generating them just to add a small feature or two.

So... what I'm getting around to saying is that I am feeling reticent to pay full price for an upgrade to FS4 when it seems that very little has changed. I very much understand that it is still a product in development, but let's be honest, so was FS2 and it would seem that many of the features hoped for and expected to be developed for that version of the sim never materialised and now have become something only available in a full price upgrade.

Don't misunderstand me, I'm more than happy to support IPACS in their development of a fantastic flight simulator with my money, and this post is not supposed to be a whinge by any means, but I guess what I'm looking for the second time around is some reassurance that IPACS are actively working with and listening to their user community to improve the creation of user generated content to be the best it can be and fill their sim world with quality enhancements.

What tools and/or improvements have been, or are in the process of being developed for FS4 that enable easier creation of user content, especially with regard to refining and adding to existing user created content rather than creators just having to re-make someone else's work?

Constructive responses definitely appreciated

Thank you TomSimMuc for the clarification on correct folder structure. I have now shifted everything over to a user defined [extra_user_folder] and all is working correctly.

However, the issue still persists with the 'trees' cultivation folder, with sim load time of around 2.5 minutes. If I remove the folder, everything loads within a few seconds. I will keep the trees cultivation removed for the time being and take a look into generating my own files to see if replacing them with new ones improves performance or not.

Many thanks both for the continued assistance.

Ok, so all I have installed in my Scenery folder now is IPACS included USA scenery, IPACS Switzerland scenery and your Isle of Wight scenery. The folder structure looks like this:

...\scenery\images\ch

--------------------------\gb\map_(xxx)
-------------------------------\map_(xxx)
-------------------------------\(etc)

---------------------------\usa

Pressing 'Start' on the main menu results in the sim starting pretty much instantly (1-1.5 secs).

If I now add just the 'trees' folder to 'places' like this:

...\scenery\places\cultivation\trees

and run the sim again, it takes 2m 47s to load until actually flying.
As a comparison, if I remove the 'trees' folder and add the 'buidings' (SIC) and 'night lights' folders only, the sim loads in 2.98s

So, it looks like something is amiss somewhere, but obviously I appreciate it's difficult to diagnose without having my actual hardware in front of you.

Not to worry, thanks for trying

I believe so.

I first downloaded all of the Southwest/Southeast files found here:
https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index…by-iz0jub-2019/

Then I installed the missing middle section of South England here:
https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index…-england-files/

Finally I installed the 'uk isle of wight_b_new.zip', 'uk isle of wight_arcgis_2m.zip'and 'uk isle of wight airfields_b.zip' files for the IoW found here:
https://flight-sim.org/filebase/index…-photo-scenery/

I then deleted the 'map_09_7f00_aa80' and 'map_09_7e80_aa80' from the South East Part 2 and South England folders respectively and couldn't disable the Isle of Wight because there wasn't anything there to start off with before I installed the HD scenery from the last link above.

After that, I just added the 'buidings' and 'trees' folders from the 'fs2 users cultivation, special objects and airfields.zip' into '...\places\cultivation\' folder as you suggested and that's when I get several minutes of sim load time. Removing the 'trees' folder seems to fix this.

Is there a particular folder/sub-folder structure that I need to follow with regard to how my photoscenery is installed in '...\scenery\images\gb\' ?

Cheers for the help!

Thanks for the reply IZ0JUB.

My current folder structure is '\places\gb\isle_of_white\buildings, trees etc.' and this was chosen because IPACS already have something similar using 'usa' and 'ch' for their scenery. However, as you suggest, I have moved the structure to '\places\cultivation\buildings, trees etc.' and the issue still persists. I get slightly longer load times if I put all of the folders in there (objects, poles etc.) and I understand that this might happen, but if I just put the 'buildings' folder in there alone, load time is almost instant, but as soon as I add the 'trees' then it takes several minutes. The issue doesn't happen if I spawn in the middle of the SW of England though with the tree cultivation in that area.

Does that make sense?

Hi all,

Is anyone here still using FS2 with IZ0JUB's Isle of Wight HD scenery?

I'm having a problem with the performance of the cultivation files, specifically the trees, compared to using other parts of his scenery for the UK. Adding the 'buildings' folder to '\places' works just fine and FS2 loads and runs perfectly, However, when I add the 'trees' folder, FS2 takes an age to load into the simulation (although it works normally when it finally does) and hangs on shutting the application down. I don't have any similar problems when using cultivation for the rest of the SW/SE of England. I have noticed that the trees used for the cultivation files for the IoW area appear to be different in style/size to the rest of IZ0JUB's cultivation files.

Is anyone else experiencing the same issue and knows of a way to fix the problem?

Many thanks!

I'm sure that this issue has no doubt been discussed at great length before and is a constant frustration to all FS2 cultivators, and I'm sorry if I've brought it to the fore once again. Surely IPACS must see how totally counter-productive to community oriented scenery and mod development their thinking is though? If someone with more time and ability is able to automatically generate cultivation and freely share this with the FS2 community, and then someone like myself says "I love what you've done, but there's a tree placed right over my house that I'd like to remove", then I have to learn how to re-generate all of that cultivation and re-do it all with a tiny exclusion polygon, just so that I don't have a tree planted in my roof. This is a complete duplication of effort!?

Surely it is preferable that someone with coding/scripting knowledge should focus on doing what they do best, whereas someone like myself who is better suited to 3D modelling/texturing should be able to do just that and not have to learn to code and script as well, and then spend time repeating a process that someone has already spent their time doing?

I'm preaching to the converted aren't I?

Quote from Trespassers

As I told you :

Worry not, I listened 🙂

However the method you suggest will only work if the cultivation .TOC is still readable as text format yes? If I was to use someone else’s cultivation files or generate areas of cultivation and then compile them, but afterwards find something out of place that I didn’t pick up on when I initially checked them before compiling, there is no method to quickly remove or blank out something undesirable after the event. If that is the case then so be it, I guess I’m just trying to understand what is or isn’t possible when developing scenery for FS2.

Scenproc... Ok, been looking at this tonight and I can basically see how it works. However, I'm not sure it can do what I still would like to achieve, which is to exclude the existing automatically generated cultivation radio masts (i.e. multi-floored buildings) and replace them with my own hand placed versions. In other words, not include a .KML file for exclusion during the scenproc script processing, but rather entries in a .TOC file that would exclude an area within an already cultivated area using lat/lon coordinates I specify.

Does that make sense? Am I asking for the impossible by any chance?

Thanks!

Quote from Trespassers

Definitely overwhelming and worth sitting down and getting your head around it. Arno has been developing both ScenProc and MCX for many years and added a lot of well-thought features over the time. Fortunately enough, he usually documents his stuff very professionally and manuals are real bibles.

I remember Arno's name from my FS9/FSX days... a real pillar of the flight sim scenery development community!

Well, so far I've managed to get started on editing my airfield .TOC by hand and adding objects from the XREF library, so progress is being made. It's a little unwieldy, but combining it with placing dummy objects using the AFS2 Scenery Editor, I'm getting results. I'll post some images once I have something worth showing.

Thanks all again for helping me get this far

Quote from Trespassers

You may use multiple sources in ScenProc actually, it's a very powerful tool.

This is fantastic stuff... and somewhat overwhelming I can see I'll need to sit down and really get my head around all this at some point.

Quote from Trespassers

Earlier in this thread Hartman advised you the AFS2 Cultivation/Scenery editor tool, did you try it ?

That's basically what I've started using, yes. I initially downloaded IZ0JUB's cultivation files for the whole UK and removed the ones I didn't want that are outside my area. The remaining ones are still sizeable and editing/adding to them was looking like an impossible task. So I considered starting afresh by adding my own cultivation using the AFS2 Cultivation/Scenery editor, working outwards from my local airfield. But I suppose I've hit two hurdles... 1) being the large number of generic trees/buildings I'll need to place by hand to cover the region and 2) placing specific buildings/objects to better represent their real world counterparts. If I could find a way to exclude IZ0JUB's auto-generated cultivation just from the airfield would be helpful because then I can better place my own manually.

So... I'm sticking with IZ0JUB's overall coverage of cultivation at the moment and have begun looking at placing custom objects on the airfield using AC3D. Then I will look into redoing the overall cultivation myself just for the areas I want by bulk converting OSM data (as I imagine IZ0JUB did), but creating smaller files rather than one big 1.2GB file.

I'd also like to find a way of referencing a different source of building objects as well when placing cultivation for some that better represent those found in the UK.

Thanks folks for the extra information regarding the antennas and that multiple .TOC files are possible. It would seem that the floating trees issue might well have been related to the Vulkan renderer then as they returned to proper placement after switching back to OpenGL. I'll look out for more anomalies, but at least after your help I can proceed with what I'm working on knowing that I'm not doing anything wrong.

Cheers!

Quote from ApfelFlieger

These house-towers instead of radio masts unfortunately occur again and again. I saw on a base map that there is written "tower" at the respective positions. I have observed this effect with radio masts and chimneys so far.

Because of other projects I have not dealt with it further so far.

Tschüss, Michael (III)

Thanks Michael for confirming this and that it is not just an error I'm seeing in the sim

Ok, well I think things may not be quite so straightforward...

After thinking this house of numerous floors was originally an anomaly, I think it may actually be what is being used to represent a radio antenna in the sim - was this intentional, or has the wrong object been pulled in?

[Blocked Image: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48631018346_f97f2620e4_h.jpg]

Then I saw this arrangement of floating trees. I thought it might be a Vulkan rendering issue, so switched back to OpenGL and it seemed to fix the issue. However, I am also trying to run my own .TOC to add small additional details to specific areas. Can someone confirm that it is possible (or not) to run more than one .TOC file in an area as long as it named differently, or could my own .TOC be causing possible conflicts?

[Blocked Image: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/48631164987_7fa067428e_h.jpg]

Any further thoughts/suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!

Actually I think this whole thread is likely irrelevant now anyway.

I went back into the sim to try and establish exactly where the anomaly was (I'd paused it at the location) and the towering oversized tree has gone! So, I'm going to assume it was some sort of visual or calculation error when rendering the cultivation