15 replies to this topic

[shagster22]

Hello all,
As head of SDI-BSMP scenery developement, i am proud to announce Project EGLC V2 (London City Airport). Further discussion and details can be found at the official preview HERE.
Come visit our forum and see what is coming sometime 2006!

ciao!  

[TaterSalad]

shagster22, on Jan 1 2006, 02:03 AM, said:

Hello all,
As head of SDI-BSMP scenery developement, i am proud to announce Project EGLC V2 (London City Airport). Further discussion and details can be found at the official preview HERE.
Come visit our forum and see what is coming sometime 2006!

ciao!  

Wow, very good looking package you have there Frederik. God speed!

[TechnicolorYawn]

Wow... that's amazing...


It looks I can cross EGLC off the list of sceneries I was going to do....

[flyhalf]

Good lorrd that topdown view on Canary Wharf is superb!

[RoniisH]

wow that looks outstanding!

[shagster22]

hey TechnicolorYawn,
i just saw your website (nice madeira BTW   ), and you mentioned you were planning to elevate the ground a few meters above water level with a platform. I've tried to do that and the result is is that the user aircraft is on the platform, but the AI aircrafts do not, and seem to be on the original height (1-2 meters under the ground textures). Ive tried to work with mesh, but that increases in fairly large LOD steps, not sharp enough for the LCY edge. Any suggestions? how did you do madeira for the AI? help is appreciated, i mean, a platform would certainly give an edge (no pun intended   )!

ciao!  

[TechnicolorYawn]

This was easily my biggest headache for me making that scenery. You need to raise the height of both the airfield and the runway in AFCAD as well as physically making it look higher with 3D objects.

This will keep the players aircraft and the AI at the right level, but you may find that the AI shadows are still at the original ground level which looks odd. To get round this you will need to raise the ground level. Rather than messing about with meshes, because all you need are raised rectangle shapes, the best way is with flatten areas as these can be made in nice geometric shapes and you are able to specify a very accurate height for them. If you find the raised areas are 'leaking' out into the water, you can use more flattens at sea level to tidy the edges up a little. For this technique EGLC will also be a lot easier than Madeira as the runway run pretty much exactly east-west (LPMA's is diagonal, so you get jagged edges when you raise the ground under the runway with flattens)

I use FSSC for my flattens - http://www.fssc.avsim.net/

One other thing to note is that unless there is a flatten area there, and nodes places in AFCAD will raise the ground up to their height, so you may find that raising the ground level and runway level with AFCAD alone solves the problem.

Then all that remains is to tidy up the sloped edges into vertical ones with GMax objects. I see you have used a custom ground texture on yours which will be tricky lining up with any texture the Gmax stuff uses. You can create a nice 'blend' effect of the Gmax object's texture into the ground texture by using a gradient in the alpha channel to tidy up any joins.

Hope this helps

[shagster22]

hey thanx mate,
yeah ill look into that. I tried to raise the airport height in afcad before, but i got interesting results, even when i raised it to a rediculous height, AI still does something interesting: when you load FS and are at LCY, AI which is parked at the gate is not on the platform (ie. sunken), but AI which has come in (landed) is on the platform! Even with the AFCAD height at hundreds of meters in the air! So this is a dillemma for me. There is a way to use AFCAD for your flattens, as well as Sbuilder, but neither have given good results, ill take a look into FSSC, hopefully that should work, and i only need a flatten at the apron and the rwy, so i can make 3D edges. I placed the ground textures in gmax, so i can line up pretty easily. Will try and see what i can fish out, would be super with some edges! Thanx!

Ciao!  

[TechnicolorYawn]

As an example, heres a couple of shots of LPMA, with the Gmax objects to tidy it up, and a shot of it 'naked' showing how I altered the ground underneath.

[shagster22]

ah nice pic!
I can see how you did that, i hope it works for EGLC, gonna be tight at the apron-water edge, but i should manage. I downloaded FSSC and took a look at it, does it accept FSUIPC? cause i need to place the flatten pretty precisely. Is it only square/rectangular, or can flattens be irregular polygons? Will take a better look this afternoon, when i have a little time. But again, i hope i can raise EGLC without affecting the water...
BTW: how did you place your effect? in gmax and then use the gmax coordinates to place with SCASM? or did you use the attachtool in gmax? how does this work for approach and taxiway lights? specially the long distance viewable ones....

Thanx in any case!

ciao!  

Edited by shagster22, 11 January 2006 - 10:04 AM.

[TechnicolorYawn]

A little app I've found brilliant to work in conjunction with FSSC is something called ExcBuilder (which does use FSUIPC). Its actually meant for making excludes, but I use it for grabbing very accurate coords from the sim. Once you have them in there you can copy and paste into FSSC. FSSC can also handle the XXX.XXXXXX format of FS coords as well as lat and long.

http://library.avsim...util&DLID=41356

As for the lights, I use the Gmax attach tool, but they need a bit more work (they're not very long distance) - I'm not very experienced with effects yet. I've found the forums at http://www.scenerydesign.org invaluable.

[shagster22]

well i got the flatten (though i need to add another cause water is affected), but the gmax plane i have is on that, probably because its an FS2002SDK texture. Now thats not so much the problem, i can make FS2004 ground texture and make that work, but the loaded AI aircraft still doesnt go "on" the flatten   ! I made an AFCAD from scatch and i dunno what im doing wrong. How did you make AI go onto your "new height" madeira step-by-step. Perhaps if i follow your method exactly will i get the same result! Your help is much appreciated!

thanx! ciao!  

[shagster22]

ok i did some testing, and i removed all FS2002SDK scenery, so i can now see any flatten changes easily. I have a scrach made AFCAD importing only the rwy and airport coordinates to get that placed, and made a simple taxiway and gate from the rwy. i changed both the airport and rwy altitude to the "higher" altitude before i made taxiways and stuff. Here's a screenshot of AI at the gate:



Interestingly, when my plane is either over the gate/taxiway/rwy, the plane will "sink" into the ground, like the AI, ignoring the flatten. I think the flatten only affects the placement of gmax objects. I have slewed around and ive seen that there is indeed an increas in height. Here's another screenshot of my setup in FSSC:


I tried to put another "flat area" around the higher one, so that the height would change faster, to no avail. Also, now in FS im not 1.82 meters higher, but around 2.3 meters...

Im lost about this, why won't AFCAD be normal...   

any help is appreciated!

ciao!  

Edited by shagster22, 12 January 2006 - 12:29 AM.

[TechnicolorYawn]

I'll have a look myself when I get back from work.

If the worst comes to the worst, you could always lower the water by a few metres instead of raising the land.

Edited by TechnicolorYawn, 12 January 2006 - 02:51 AM.

[shagster22]

Yeah, i mess around with it when i get back from school (have free time then). Thing is, ive remodeled a lot of the thames and water and stuff, so its not straightforward in lowering the water, specially considering that ive got separate ground textures for the larger areas (lower quality for FR). I think that somehow the AFCAD still insists on being on the original ground height, perhaps i need to make the flatten in the scenery.cfg instead of a BGL, thats also what the AFCAD help file said to do if i wanted to make a flatten. Maybe the separate BGL works "next" to the AFCAD bgl, instead of getting a higher priority (not neccesarily in drawing, but in setting altitude for AI). My plane (as you can see) can still be on top of the mesh, but will "drop" down when over the AFCAD taxiways/rwy/gates. And because AI will always follow AFCAD, it would, in this current setup, never go "up" on top of the flatten. I think there's a problem with the AFCAD height. Also, i made an irregular test AFCAD and AI followed that AFCAD, so i doubt that an other stock AFCAD would have any effect. There has to be a way to either make AI follow a (scenery.cfg) flatten, or raise AFCAD   ...

anyways, ill work more on it later today, if you have any ideas, ill try it all   !

Ciao!

[TechnicolorYawn]

I've been advised that these links could be helpful - I haven't got time to check them out myself yet though...

http://www.simforums...?TID=14884&PN=1

http://www.simforums...?TID=14838&PN=1