Posts by Spit40

    Thanks qwerty42 - this is great stuff and very much appreciated. I've read it a few times and am trying to follow it now. I'm not sure what you mean by innermost vertices though? So far I've made a large mesh that covers the background image, and cut out a section that just spans my two overlapping runways. By "innermost vertices" do you mean the outside vertices of the inner cut out mesh?

    Also am I limited to the resolution of the mesh when it comes to aligning it with the background image?

    Do you know where its going wrong? These are the things that affect alignment:

    1. Work out your central(ish) reference point - I actually find it better to do it from mygeoposition when you're getting runway start/end stuff, than from the central point shown during geoconversion. By this I mean decide on a precise visually identifiable point.
    2. Load in your background image and rotate 90 degrees right because North is left/right in AC3D (still don't know why they do that!)
    3. After mesh creation, rotate background only by X degrees (keep a note, and it can get fiddly) to make the runway vertical and lined up with the mesh
    4. Do all your mesh stuff
    5. Rotate *everything* by -ve X degrees when you're finished
    6. Now move *everything* so that the central cross is over that reference point you decided on in step 1

    Oculus has always used the Rift motion sensors. But I thought these were only used as a backup in case the sensor doesnt (clearly) see the HMD. I still assumed it works like that. Is there any evidence that the Rift now works differently? That would really be bad for people with motion rigs...

    Without the sensors Oculus can't position you, it only knows through the gyroscopes whether you're turning or moving your head.

    Seems like the problem is that Oculus started using the inertial sensor in the headset.

    Big problem for me. Guess I'll have to move on to another VR platform.

    I don't think Oculus is interested in our use case. They want 1 billion people in social hangouts. Pimax/SteamVR is the one to back... but I wasn't confident enough to back the kickstarter.

    While you're waiting I do recommend looking at building a G-Seat.

    I made a motion simulator a few years ago for racing. I could make a basic motion rig for Aerofly as well, though I'm not sure if there are plugins that can extract the telemetry.

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    Go for it. I'm using a 3DOF platform. Beware that they haven't cracked motion compensation yet (well there is actually a SteamVR plugin, but I find it flaky on my Rift), so if your head is moved a lot by the platform the VR sensor thinks you're sticking your head out of the window !

    https://www.xsimulator.net/simtools-motio…lator-software/ is the one to go for and yes, there's an FS2 plugin. Here's the FS2 thread:

    https://www.xsimulator.net/community/thre…-2-plugin.9096/

    Go for it ! With VR you just crave more immersion. I recommend adding some bass shakers under whatever seat you go for. You get a great engine rumble - it's fantastic in the Bucker. Two of these and a cheap 100W amp from China off eBay, then use Steam VR to mirror your audio from HMD to audio output and you're away. (This will help filter out the high frequencies if you need). Then you need to convert your seat to add G-Force ! On top of that cultivation looks great in VR, especially at dusk.

    Spit40 Yes It would be interesting to have a place to discuss specifically UK related matters. On Goodle Earth some of the most scenic parts of the country (eg the Lake District, Scotland, etc) have rather washed out images. I haven't checked Virtual Earth/Bing, but I imagine it's the same there. And yes - I did see your post on the use of OS data and cultivation. That's something I'll probably turn my attention to once I've fully mastered the basic geoconvert thing. (I thought I understood it, but I still find that areas of scenery sometimes don't show up - and I can't discover any rational explanation!)

    Everybody Cultivate !!

    Ian C , I urge you. Wait not a moment longer. Make do with your interim geoconversions and start cultivating. There is nothing like it. I just went for a night/dusk flight through the Lake District in the Peruvian plane. I was living the dream. I see military jets fly in the Lakes fairly often and the realism in FS2 with cultivation is amazing. The streetlights and twinkles from clusters of houses is so convincing especially at night. It totally changes the scenery to have these buildings responding to ambient light or generating their own in a realistic way. Use my scenproc file and you won't need to inspect the OS Data, just do the reference system conversion in QGIS.

    My geoconversion is still crude. I missed a few white patches at sea and I should really do it again at 0 or -1 (I processed at +1) but it makes much less difference once you cultivate.

    Ah, you just discovered the very first snag :)

    You will need to add the cultivation files to your other airports in your scenery package and add the lines to your TSC of the other airport(s).

    There is one bug here though, if you start off at one airport then restart the scenario but at the other airport again you will find that the lights are all doubled.

    You will need to close Aerofly and restart to take off again at the other airport. It appears that the old data stays in memory then tries to reload the same data over it. This is indeed a bug that will need to be fixed.

    That's a perfectly reasonable work around. Do I get a prize for finding this bug... err snag? ;)

    Rodeo - Just a teeny request for the bottom of your multi-page "to do" list. Can you do another video tutorial showing a more advanced form of runway mesh cutout? I couldn't find out any more about using the knife or vertex picking. There's a lot of youtube about AC3D but they generally seem to be about creating new objects and not overlaying things onto photo scenery and aligning object/vertices to it.

    As well as the criss-cross runway problem I just made a second runway on a different airfield but found that the 45m mesh I created to match the runway width was a poor fit lengthwise, so either I chop off a chunk beyond the runway or I have some background runway markings emerging beyond my created runway.

    As I say a request for the list. I'll have some fun now adding objects to my airports.

    I've been progressively adding to my local area: Geoconvert, Cultivation (easiest and most bang per buck/effort of the lot) and now runways. I got a huge amount of cultivation data from UK Ordnance Survey and linked it all to my first airport. Tonight I added a second airport within the area of my airport 1 cultivation. I just flew from airport 1 to airport 2 - it was great. Then I decided to fly from airport 2 to airport 1 and to my surprise there was no cultivation, so FS2 apparently didn't load it as it's linked to airport 1.

    What should I do here? Break down the cultivation into two parts? But is there a magical radius related to an airport or will I never see cultivation related to a destination airport only a departure airport?

    Rodeo I think there are few more tricks we can do here to fine tune things, like using Google Earth to select/create areas and KML files and use those to tag buildings in those areas to indicate that they are all caravans or all high rise or all country cottages v. suburban. It would add a little benefit now but much more if we could have more cultivation objects. Is cultivation hardwired to industrial/com and residential/res or can we introduce new codes and create objects to match them? If we could go as far as adding XREF objects this way that would be even better.

    Spit40 Reading the thread again I realise that what I'm suggesting isn't radically different from what you were suggesting, except that I was proposing using the FSET .bmp sea colour near the coast to paint in the white areas - rather than using the default FS2 sea colour. The default FS2 sea colour could also be determined (if desired) by taking a snapshot in Aerofly and maybe one could try to transition between the two sea colours several miles from the coast. Anyway I'm in the process of trying it now and will report back later.

    The idea of using the tidal data sounds great, especially if you're a bit of purist about the real images as I am.

    I wonder if IPACS would be interested in creating (dev) subforums for UK, US etc, so people interested in those countries could co-operate better and share knowledge of scenery/data sources? Have you seen my cultivation thread on OS data? Its about the easiest scenery development work I've done and really adds a lot. I have a few more ideas to improve it more, but it won't be worth it really until we have more cultivation objects.