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Hawaii Photoreal Development


Colin S

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A few updates on university to give you an idea of what non-X-Plane stuff is on my plate and how it affects my X-Plane performance

 

Take it  from the old farts ... don't let your X-Plane "performance" affect your non- X-plane performance. I too dropped calculus back in the day. I ended up going to law school rather than making big bucks in a STEM career. Don't be me!

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Take it  from the old farts ... don't let your X-Plane "performance" affect your non- X-plane performance. I too dropped calculus back in the day. I ended up going to law school rather than making big bucks in a STEM career. Don't be me!

 

I'm not dropping calculus for X-Plane, I would never put anything (other than my family and health) ahead of university. Just as clarification to those who are going "Damn young people and their crazy priorities"

 

I am enrolled in sciences because both my parents are doctors and it's essentially what they wanted me to do and I only just recently built up the will to tell them that I didn't want to pursue sciences. I am heading for a degree in geography with a possible minor in biology (which is offered through arts at Thompson Rivers). My final goal in life is to become a high school or elementary school teacher by first being an overseas English Second Language teacher. I know, what kind of wack-job teenager aspires to be an elementary school teacher? Basically, at my university, Geography does not require calculus and staying in the course will make me do alright in all of my courses instead of exceptionally, as I would have to devote close to half my study time focused on calculus, which I don't really care about. While I love science, it's not something I want to have as a career - I want to spend my life teaching young people in as creative and fun a way as possible. And calculus is not in the realm of what you have to teach 10-year-old children.

 

Perhaps I'm just insane. Okay: I will remove "perhaps" from that sentence.

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Sorry guys. I've decided I need to model Molokini since it doesn't exist in X-Plane. Perhaps another week of delay before the update. But you will now definitely want to grab this piece of awesome. Anyways, here are the final updates to Kahoolawe: Reefs and a dulled down version of the imagery for those who want a less psychedelic flying experience!

EDIT: No Molokini until the final update, V1.3

 

10828036_1535628540050181_28699467531375

 

10842029_1535628536716848_83007798149981

Edited by Colin S
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For those of you who aren't aware, Molokini will be released as a standalone package either tomorrow or Monday (I'm in North America). This particular one is my first ever project where I built an object completely from scratch and textured it myself. That wasn't that hard, but lining up a geological formation with the finickyness of SketchUp was the headache. Here is a little preview of that...

 

tumblr_niq2e36u2t1s2oqxno2_1280.png

 

tumblr_niq2e36u2t1s2oqxno1_1280.png

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I'm not dropping calculus for X-Plane, I would never put anything (other than my family and health) ahead of university. Just as clarification to those who are going "Damn young people and their crazy priorities"

 

I am enrolled in sciences because both my parents are doctors and it's essentially what they wanted me to do and I only just recently built up the will to tell them that I didn't want to pursue sciences. I am heading for a degree in geography with a possible minor in biology (which is offered through arts at Thompson Rivers). My final goal in life is to become a high school or elementary school teacher by first being an overseas English Second Language teacher. I know, what kind of wack-job teenager aspires to be an elementary school teacher? Basically, at my university, Geography does not require calculus and staying in the course will make me do alright in all of my courses instead of exceptionally, as I would have to devote close to half my study time focused on calculus, which I don't really care about. While I love science, it's not something I want to have as a career - I want to spend my life teaching young people in as creative and fun a way as possible. And calculus is not in the realm of what you have to teach 10-year-old children.

 

Perhaps I'm just insane. Okay: I will remove "perhaps" from that sentence.

You're not insane. You're following your passions and that's what everyone should do.

I attended the 6th top / most difficult high school in the US. I then attended university for a month and dropped out to start my company and re-ignite my passion for aviation. I go to my office every morning with the biggest smile on my face because an 8hr work day for me is pure happiness and joy. I commend you for pursuing your passion in life because it's what makes the difference between people that are happy when they wake up and people that are unhappy.

Be the best damn teacher you can be and show those kids that creativity should be cherished instead of diminished like in most schools.

*Ps: Great work on the scenery. Looking forward to downloading it. :)  

Edited by Oliver
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Ok I lied... here is a shot of Lanai, but note that as usual, as this is in the image alignment/coastline correction phase of development, all orthophotos are in 1/6th resolution. Final resolution will be 1m/px for the entire island, 0.5m/px for areas of interest (helipads, airports, etc).

 

tumblr_niqsskoOiI1s2oqxno3_1280.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey everyone,

 

Excuse time: I'm in university. I have barely any time to screw around with something as time consuming as X-Plane beyond what I absolutely have to do for Hawaii Photoreal and another project behind the scenes. 

Thing that the excuse is for: I just found this. Visual mesh editor. No idea if I will be able to even make it work, but on Kahoolawe and Lanai there are a few places where the coastline is wonky or there is a perfectly vertical cliff (which as you guys know looks bloody awful in X-Plane 10). So, I'm going to mess with Kahoolawe soon (orthos on Lanai have now been split and aligned, I'd post screenshots but I have a chemistry lab write-up to do and a biology midterm this week). Anyways, this will be a project for next week... READING BREAK!!! I am travelling a bit over the break so it won't all be X-Plane (much to my family and girlfriend's relief), but I will try to put in some serious time and maybe even pump out Lanai before March. At least the next version of Kahoolawe and the next version of Molokini will be released at the end of reading break if said mesh editor works.

 

cheers :D 

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Thing that the excuse is for: I just found this. Visual mesh editor. No idea if I will be able to even make it work, but on Kahoolawe and Lanai there are a few places where the coastline is wonky or there is a perfectly vertical cliff (which as you guys know looks bloody awful in X-Plane 10).

 

A more or less (or halfway, or barely, or what ever) official thread about mesh Remexe is over at the org ... It might possibly help you in the process of learning to use it (but to my understanding it is still - at best - a beta):

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=81152&hl=

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A more or less (or halfway, or barely, or what ever) official thread about mesh Remexe is over at the org ... It might possibly help you in the process of learning to use it (but to my understanding it is still - at best - a beta):

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=81152&hl=

Completely with you it agrees. All my attempts to change a mesh to anything did not lead. It is a lot of bugs. I`ll corrected elevation manually. By the way, big thanks for your help, Andras. The program will be very useful. But it is necessary to wait when author will finish it.

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Ok... I gave the utility a shot, and I now have a migraine. Between poorly translated instructions and errors that shouldn't be happening according to what I am doing, as well as the program constantly outputting the "Memory Error" every single time and crashing, I have decided that it simply is not worth it at this point. I'm going to direct all my work time on Lanai and KBLI from now on. Kahoolawe has been shelved as I see no further room for improvement until this utility functional beyond opening and crashing.

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I got the job interview within two hours of submitting my application material, so I'm back to X-Plane development for now (also finished my work for the upcoming week of uni, reading break is over way too fast... that's what happens when you're enjoying basking in the sun of the Northern Cascade mountains for four days doing nothing). First of all, let me say that splitting up orthophotos manually from FSX to X-Plane 10 4096 size is a pain in the ass. FSX, to my knowledge, allows any size of image, as my source imagery sent by my partner is over 28000 pixels each side. If I wished to waste my time writing a unix script I could, but doing it by hand is much more fulfilling. So is listening to Jack Johnson while building Hawaii. 

 

EDIT: PHOTO MISSING

 

And then I get to type those coordinates into WED, because I'm obsessed with doing things the most inefficient and difficult way. At least there aren't bugs in doing things manually, you don't have to sift through your script finding problems.

tumblr_nk4y6yfVkz1s2oqxno1_1280.png

Edited by Colin S
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HAHAHAHHAHA I want to drive my scissors through my forehead. I have to put these all into WED. In this configuration. God help me. Trying to optimize for DDS compression to reduce the number of MB of unnecessary smooth alpha (since that doubles file size)

 

EDIT: PHOTO MISSING

Edited by Colin S
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In my drunken (I don't drink, I'm just exhausted, it's 12:20AM here) stupor I shall break protocol and publish an in-simulator shot comparing full resolution to default scenery without the typical overlay stating that it is official from HAwaii Photoreal... I just want to get the orthophotos done with so I can start dropping houses and trees...

 

10983260_10206260815069095_8776162378794

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Looks great, Colin

 

Much appreciated :) Super thrilled that we got permission to use this FSX scenery to supplement the existing stuff for X-Plane, but it's still almost all original work for ground textures around the airport (pavement, runway, etc). Anyone care to help me solve what this means at the end of the log.txt file? I'm at a loss.

 

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: PING-FILE ERROR!

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: setjmp(png_ptr->jmpbuf

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: Custom Scenery/HP_Lanai/ORTHO/14-8-4096-2048.png

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT:

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: ..\HLutils\TEX\TEX_png.cpp:86

 

EDIT: Solved. There was actually an issue with the PNG file itself, that scared me because I did NOT want to have to recut that one.

Edited by Colin S
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