Posts by Sasa

    This looks too good to be true, how do you get those high resolution dirt /grass strips? Is it a high resolution orthophoto or a custom ground poly with a texture? I wanted to create a small scenery area which contains several dirt strips but they don't look nearly as good with the 1 m/Pixel orthophotos I'm limited to.

    The detailed airports here are down to 2.5 cm/pix + bumpmaps, which is of course a whole different level than 1m/pix. Most of it is simply tedious manual artwork.

    With that being said, would our beloved R22 be able to fly reasonably in the Lukla scenery? If not, any chance for a boost mod??

    We will certainly need something stronger than the R22. It can takeoff to/from Lukla and all the airports lower than Syangboche to some extend, but helipads higher up like Everest basecamp are even impossible with the ground effect.

    The helipads are there but are more in expectation of something stronger coming in the future. Aerofly FS2 supports choppers just for a few months now, I'm confident we will see the first additional choppers soon.

    Doesn't look like Lukla but we will throw in this simple airport rendition as a free bonus!

    The Chinese will start building Tingri Airport north of Mount Everest later this year. Some fascinating info about this airport:

    • Construction is planned to commence this year, end of construction planned for 2020.
    • It's just about 65 kilometers north of Mount Everest (Chinese/Tibetan Mount Everest base camp is accessible by road from there).
    • At a whopping altitude of 4320 meters, which will probably put it at the top 3 of world's highest airports. Great for bringing larger jets to their limits - you will need quite a bit of that long runway for takeoff.
    • It will be the first and only airport in the area supporting larger jets - great for heavy iron sightseeing flights to Mt Everest! Most aircraft capable to land in Lukla will not be able to get up to that altitude!
    • Runway of 4500 x 45 meters with parallel taxiway.
    • Note that the exact location, layout and technical details of the airport are approximate until construction is finished.

    Airport at bottom with Mount Everest to the upper left

    Airport to bottom right in a moon landscape like valley

    Apron area

    Hi Sasa, thank you very much for the very attractive work! I wonder if you could offer higher resolution imagery than 10m? Or maybe 2 versions? I'd be willing to pay more for higher resolution, and I don't mind the size of download.

    I wish. There's simply nothing adequate for the region. Imagery providers that provide Google Earth with imagery have price tags for licensed usage of their imagery... You'd have to choose if you prefer to buy a shiny new car or the Lukla scenery if we'd be willing to license it for that. No one would buy Lukla, it would simply be incredibly expensive.

    Not to mention that even the imagery used in Google Earth isn't of very good quality. There are lots of seams, cloud layers, fog, misaligned ridges... We removed most of that in our imagery manually.

    Anyways: You should see the 10m/pix area shown on the map is a bonus area beyond the already very big core area. I could state in the feature list that forest areas have been upsampled to 2.5m/pix area everywhere but I feel that would be misleading.

    As I understand it, they might do this for the P3D version, but the AFS2 version is still probably released first. Coverage should be the same, but of course you can't disable anything.

    Correct. Sorry I didn't make this more clear. Some people prefer a vector based scenery over a rather low resolution 10m/pix satellite imagery.

    That is for FSX/P3D.

    There's no point to deactivate anything in Aerofly FS2 because the satellite imagery is so much better than the default scenery. And there are no vector based sceneries for Aerofly FS2 possible. In fact I like flying the low resolution areas pretty much because most of them have such dense forests (60+ million trees... :)) that you barely notice the low resolution.

    And yes, we are still planning to bring out the Aerofly FS2 version first!

    Two random shows I just took in preparation for the first beta:

    Looks great!

    Was going to download images from Bing and a better mesh for this area, but may hold off. Is it likely to be released this year?

    Yes. And as mentioned by frui:

    The public imagery available for this area is horrible (adding to the fact of not being able to use Bing and Google imagery without licensing it). The imagery for this scenery is a custom merger of various public domain and licensed sources to get the best of all of them.

    The scenery will not only cover the airport of Lukla but also some other airports in the area.

    Presenting: The first work in progress screenshots of Syangboche airstrip near Namche Bazar. This airport is located even higher and closer to Mount Everest than Lukla but mostly used by helicopters these days (people further down the valley protested against the full opening of this airport because they would loose their income from the tourists walking up here from Lukla on the way to Mount Everest).

    Screenshots taken in Aerofly FS2.

    To clarify: The view positions do not have any functionality yet? I assigned a few of them using the entries in one of the default airports as an example but I'm not able to circle through those views in Aerofly (or I'm simply too stupid to find the right keyboard assignments?).

    Hi!

    Forgive me if that has been discussed elsewhere already, but the search function didn't help me finding this.

    Has is been discussed already if there are is an easy way to convert any of the innumerable AFCAD/AFD files containing vector data for FSX/P3D to Aerofly FS2?

    Right now creating a simple creating a simple visible ground layout for a purposely simple Aerofly FS2 airport is a very tedious work if that is something you'd like to do for a large scale VFR area for many larger and smaller airports without wanting to add too much detail there.

    In the end that's something that should be possible by a script that converts the existing vector data information into something readable for 3DS and any other 3D tool that is supported.

    Bests,

    Sascha

    Good too see I'm not alone there. :)

    I had to split the area into 25 tiles (5x5) without any LZW compression applied to have Geoconvert handle it without a crash after a few minutes. Question is how to split it into smaller conversion chunks without having overlapping masks along the borders?

    It may work if we'd know (or would have the code to calculate) the Lat/Lon border lines for each particular level so we can split it right there?

    Bests,

    Sascha

    Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere already but I made an interesting observation last night when compiling a 200x200km are at levels 9,11,12 and 13.

    At some point in the middle of the night geoconvert finished the job after finishing the last level 13 tile, went into a loop and started all over again with level 9. Hours later it's now overwriting all previous level 13 tile files again step by step. Impossible for me to say what exactly happened right then but maybe someone else observes a similar issue at some point.