Posts by KenR297

    I think in a previous post it was explained that there's a setting on the configuration file on which you can set a height parameter to allow buildings to look taller. If that is correct could someone post something about that?. It should be a quite tedious work doing this by each individual building.

    Cheers, Ed

    Sure Ed you can do that, but do you want all of your buildings to be 20-30-40-x stories tall? I don't think there is a variable for the height setting to give you randomized building height. Since most cities are only going to have a manageable number of tall skyscrapers it isn't that much extra work to edit the toc file for them. Strictly your preference though. 😀

    Here is one thing you can do, it is a bit tedious but does work, and will give you what you are looking for.

    Using Google maps, locate a building you would like to increase the height of, and note it's coordinates. Open the cultivation file for your city, and do a search for the coordinates you noted. It is best to use no more than 4 decimal places. Search until you find the building that is closest to your listed coordinates; you usually don't get an exact match. Now change the the height to the actual number of floors for that building, save your file and test in AFS2.

    It sometimes takes some trial and error, and can be a bit tedious as I said earlier, but this method, while not perfect, will give you what you seek. Remember you will see a generic building, but it will match the height of the actual building you are trying to replicate. Hope this helps. 😀

    It isn't a substitute for a fully hand modelled airport done using Ac3D etc but it's turned out to be quite effective. Rapport came from rapid Airport creator. Taxiways are not yet modelled however I hope they can be in a v1.1. There are some technical challenges to achieving taxiways with the method used and I had to draw the line at a good first version for release.

    Thanks for the explanation Phil... will be looking forward to this!

    Don't worry about airports. I have a solution for that coming in a couple of weeks. Airports, runways, buildings, static aircraft. Just no orthoscenery so this Orbx announcement is great news. Its been in development for 3 months and a bunch of us are beta testing it right now (and making new airports daily), aiming for Easter release.

    P.S. Its a free community, crowd-sourcing wikipedia style project.

    Taxiways?

    Phil,

    I posed this question in another thread but will repeat it to you since you're working on some cultivation yourself. Are you seeing a reduction in draw distance of your cultivated buildings, or does it appear to still be the same?

    I could swear I'm seeing a reduction in the draw distance, but I'm probably wrong. It could just be a change in the brightness of the objects at a distance making it appear they are not being drawn as far out as they were.

    Thanks...

    Dave,

    My BGL files are from FSX scenery; in this case from scenery for my home area.

    I will look for the transform icon in MCX, but I thought I had gone through all of the available tools and do not remember seeing one that allowed scaling. I will look again.

    Thanks for the tip!

    Thanks for the replies. I spent the afternoon today converting bgl files (objects) for my local scenery using MCX. I ran into one other object that was oversized and simply removed it, as I did the first building I was referring to here. No matter what I attempted it always ended up in the right location, but was extremely oversized. The boundary box for the object, if I have the right info, shows this:

    min x -136 y -136 z 0 // max x 136 y 136 z 990

    I see no way or option to resize this object so I will just assume I cannot use it in my scenery; instead I will use a cultivated bldg. and set the number of floors to coincide with the actual bldg. height at that location. Not complaining, it's a treat to be able to create my own scenery for AFS2 and if a few objects won't work properly, well that's OK.

    Let me take this opportunity to thank you guys for all of this once again, and a special thanks to Arno for these programs that gives us the option of adding objects to AFS2.

    I now have my local area (and a large one at that) in 1m resolution, with cultivation of business bldgs., some trees ( have an issue with that because my OSM data has few forest areas so trees are sparse), lighted roadways (I use half of the available roads to keep performance way up), and now many local objects as well. I am very pleased with my results up to this point and will try to improve the tree situation some how, although there is no way I am going to place individual trees. That is just not feasible.

    Thanks again! :)

    Thanks for sharing. We are all learning and growing here.

    - Kenneth

    You're welcome, happy to contribute my own experimentation results. I'm pretty sure IPACS is still working on the cultivation process and as easy as it is to produce they may provide a new tool at some point that makes choices even simpler to implement for the home user, depending on personal choices and taking their system specs into consideration when creating scenery.

    I discussed the performance hit in another thread; you can reduce it a significant amount by cultivating only industrial buildings and trees, and cut your street light cultivation in half by dropping several of the street/hiway types.

    I actually prefer it because residential houses still look good when using FSET 1 m or better res tiles and there is plenty of night lighting. Having industrial 3d buildings gives you that occupied look vs. bare (for me anyway). Give a small area a try and see if it appeals to you visually and improves your performance, if not you can always revert back to full cultivation.

    Not trying to rain on the cultivation parade, but like you discovered there is a price to pay for full cultivation additions to the scenery. Fortunately I found a way around it that gives me a satisfactory outcome. :)