Colin S

It's official - I am capable of meshing around. Here is Kalaupapa Airport, perfectly flat - without needing the "runways follow terrain contours" disabled. I am sick of looking at GIS programs and command lines. I am giving myself a minimum 24 hour break from this. Going to go fix my bike now and enjoy sun. Two days in front of a computer screen is too many days.

Working on Hawaii Photoreal I've run into a bunch of walls: first it was how to georeference orthophotos (I did Lanai entirely by hand, dragging the nodes in WED until they lined up. I will never do that again). Then came making HD Mesh for Niihau. Niihau had no airports, and now I'm working on Molokai, which has several airports (four, to be exact), all of which are on tilted terrain, even in the 10m DEM. That sucks for keeping a plane on the centreline, and I thought, what if I could actually edit the mesh to make things at the airport be absolutely perfect. Turns out I can. The first idea I had was to try Mesh Remexe (or whatever it's called) which is glitchier than a Comet 1. After searching for month, I have found the perfect candidate for the ultimate set of tools for editing mesh in a user friendly environment (no command lines other than MeshTool, all GUI). Here's what you'll need: QGIS - get the latest. Possibly the best free GIS program in the world. Familiarize yourself with how to create, edit, and delete shapefiles. SAGA GIS - Not as broad as QGIS but it has some pretty snazzy features that QGIS lacks, notably a visual attribute editor. You'll understand what that means in a few minutes. Before we begin, I want to make something clear: I am sick of people telling me I'm an idiot for not knowing how to use command line tools. I'm not a programmer. I'm a scenery developer. I have no interest in living in the 1980s. We live in the age of GUI. So if you are just going to post a reply about how some command line tool can do this so much faster, get out. Simple as that. I'm not interested. This is for those who want a simple and pretty solution ot a very complex problem. Here are the next things you'll need: DEM - The elevation data for the area you're working on in DEM format. The USGS provides 10m shuttle acquired DEM. Welcome to the future. Water Shapefiles - Unfortunately, MeshTool is a little old and has no ability to figure out where water belongs so you'll have to do some reading yourself on how to layout a script file. The first step in this is that the Shuttle DEM isn't perfect. The elevation data (nearly) is, but the limits of its range aren't. MeshTool, again showing its age and incompatibility, refuses to acknowledge anything that doesn't conform to X-Plane's perfect 1x1 degree tile grid. If it's even 0.0000001 degree over, MeshTool will crash. You will need to use QGIS to crop the DEM down to nothing more than 1x1 degree. YouTube and Google have lots about cutting up DEM in QGIS or other programs. This I will leave up to you and assume we can now work with our awesome, perfect DEM. The next step is getting coastlines aligned. This will take ten minutes max (unless you're me and are aligning orthophotos to coastlines to the pixel, in which case it will take upwards of ten hours). I'll assume you're 'Murican, so head over to the USA Census TIGER data sources. There are sources like this for Canada as well. No idea about anywhere else (yet). Find the water area for the state/county you are working in, and make sure that if it has ocean that you add in the rest of the ocean beyond territorial waters. This is all preliminary though, so that MeshTool spits out a DSF that doesn't have a dried up ocean. This is where the new stuff comes into play: EDITING DEM ELEVATION DATA This is where SAGA GIS arrives on our doorstep. Download it (safe, no viruses, even though it's from SourceForge). Open it up and look over it. Acquaint yourself with the layout, it's quite different from QGIS. In the bottom of the far left pane you'll see a filetree. This will allow you to find your DEM file that you've cut up. Double click it. It will load and show up in your project tree, but not on the big empty map. Now you right click it and say "add to map." Presto, you have a wonderful rainbow coloured map of Hawaii (or wherever you're working). Head on back to QGIS. We need one last shapefile. Create a new shapefile called whatever you want, and outline the area at your airport that you want to adjust the elevation of. We have to do this because in SAGA GIS you won't be able to see where the airport is so you won't know what pixels you'll need to edit. In SAGA, open and load into your project this new *.shp file the same way you got your DEM in. Now you can see the area of your airport or shoreline or whatever you're editing. Now comes the black magic, what almost no other GIS software does easily without command line sorcery. Switch to the pointer-selection tool, and zoom in on down to your airport. Click on a pixel. Nothing will happen other than that it will be highlighted. In the pane to the right of your project tree, you should see different tabs selectable. One of them is Attributes. Open it and you will see one measly little number. You can edit this number or you can highlight a wackload of numbers to achieve much more in much less time. The downside is that you cannot batch-edit these pixels, and the selection must be quadrangular. This is very important: Make sure the your airport outline shapefile is WITHIN the flattened area. This is how MeshTool creates the polygons based on elevation change amounts. Click on a different item in your project tree, and it will ask something to the tune of "Do you want to save?" Don't worry, it's not going to close, it's just saving changes... within the project. Yes, obviously, save. Now you need to Export. Under the menu go to GeoProcessing > File > Grid > Export > Export GeoTIFF. You will probably want to export it as something named differently from your original file. This has just created a new DEM as modified by you. Congratulations. You are now a Mesh Editor without knowing a bit of command line language. I'll leave MeshTool up to you. If you need help with that, the manual is actually surprisingly confusingly usefulish. The real thing you need to know for MeshTool is that the Script file is just the "what to do, in the order that you want it to happen." Like any script. Cheers and happy Meshing! Don't mesh about too mucsh.

Do you guys want half of Molokai and a tiny bit of Maui as a teaser to what's coming? (just the mesh, no imagery) I can add it to the Hawaii UHD if you want. Heck, I'll do it if you don't want me to. Yeah I'm doing that.

Hate to reactivate this Cameron, but how does one use HTML in the new post creator? There is no option to disable formatting, so HTML just appears as its code.

Quick update: I got the HD Mesh for Molokai to work, just need to do the final tweaking of the coastline and then it's on to Molokai Airport... then Kalaupapa...

Excuses, excuses... but slightly valid excuses. I've been quite busy lately. I am in two volunteer positions (a tour guide at the British Columbia Aviation Museum and an invertebrates collections organizer at the Royal BC Museum). However, I have time now. Before I run off to Spain and potentially return to a full time four-month job position. Oh glory. But for now, let's get done what we can. Which is what? Not much. The image at the bottom should explain why, despite being the approximate colour of a peanut butter sandwich after a "Will It Blend" episode. Here's what is going on in this picture: There are three important layers showing: DEM, coastline, and orthophoto mask (as transferred from FSX). As you can see, absolutely none of them line up. The DEM not lining up is the biggest unsolvable problem, but the most frustrating one is the coastlines not lining up. I have tried three sources - TIGER, OSM, and something I can't even remember the source of - and none of them line up to ANY satellite imagery. How hard could that be? Anyways, I drew all of Niihau by hand, and I will never do that again. I'm experimenting with converting the FSX water mask to a vectorized shapefile so that coastlines are quite truly perfect for the imagery. But that is not easy, and I don't even know if it's possible. Right now my plan looks like this: make an image that only has two colours: white for water, black for land. Load into QGIS, speak firmly but politely to it, and hope for the best. What I hope for anyone wasting their time reading to get out of it is that this is a HUGE task to make one measly little island. Yes, I tried that new utility that automatically takes mesh and imagery and marries them together in holy matrimony. It doesn't agree with my computer. I can't even find all the other ten-ish programs you have to download on top of the initial download. Some simply don't exist. Anyways, I'm not using that. If you know how to, feel free to make a for dummies instruction manual because I am a serious dummy. I'm going to be processing the current shapefiles in a few hours to see how I'm doing, and if it turns out all these things aren't working, I'm hooped.

Why is it then that I cannot make see any traffic happen when I load up in LOWI? Even with max settings. Lots of planes on the ramp, zip in the way of traffic.

I finally figured out what this is, and it's hugely misleading. It's not freeware. Most of the airports (the few it caters to in Europe only) require a payware license. This isn't freeware. That should be removed from the site. A demo being free doesn't make something free. Otherwise it looks super cool, I love being able to mess with frequency of arrival and departure and whatnot. Going to keep an eye on this.

Okay, I thought that (1) X-Plane had traffic built in already, and that (2) X-Plane already had an ATC system. What exactly does this do?

I have no idea what this is and the website doesn't seem to fully work... Looks awesome if it does what I think it does. Cheers!

Flying out over Lanai enroute to the eventually-to-be-released Molokai.

I'm happy with the new plane. The cockpit is a total win for me, I like the move away from physical instruments to electronic. We live in the 21st century, and while backup is important, you shouldn't fill the cockpit with mostly backup-worthy material. I love how Boeing found an effective hull design with the 727 and stuck with it. On the other hand, there are flying sausages (Airbus) that seem to all look completely different from one another, and none are particularly aesthetic.

Flew Pedro's awesome Twin out of Molokai on a short hop to Lanai. Not too short when you're on such a slow plane in bumpy weather.

Well, there goes my GPU.

Windows 10 is pretty dull but I no longer get blue screens every two hours (literally). I highly recommend it. It takes time to get used to but frankly it runs smoother than Windows 7. I still am not happy with the cluttered left-hand "quick access" junk they threw in that makes "quick access" a pain the access (if you know what I mean). Other than that, get it. It's a great OS for those who aren't heavy "modders;" that is, people who see the need to hack into their computer and install stuff randomly that is only compatible with their current OS. If you're just a simple user like myself, update now while it's free. Startup speed is a big bonus.

I've had this problem a few times before. I can provide some preliminary troubleshooting help but more info will be needed (I'll explain) to fully solve, probably. 1. Deactivate all your custom scenery. This should fix it but it doesn't really provide a true solution as you are now down all your custom scenery, which sucks. This error is usually involved in custom scenery from my experience. 2. Activate it one by one. Wait 'til you find the culprit. When you have, you can either remove the bad scenery pack or you can attempt to fix it. To fix it try opening it up in WED (http://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/ of which a new version was just released) and check for errors. Beyond doing an automatic validation... it gets complicated and it can sometimes be due to things crossing DSF boundaries or due to bad terrain reference or etc. Anyways, what scenery do you have running in the area? Is it from X-Plane 9+? Finally, update your installation. Considering that you haven't updated your X-Plane installation in over a year, this might, just maybe (with some sarcasm in there), have something to do with it. Don't expect an out of date application for which updates are available to run properly, especially when scenery developers work with the latest versions.

It hasn't changed since last time I checked. 4.0b1. Everything is the latest version.

Let me know what you need, Ben. I have included every relevant piece of information of which I am aware.

Sorry about that, I realize I mind-referenced it in the sentence regarding if art controls might have changed in the last update. My apologies, that was dumb on my part. Sorry about that

And that would be why I clearly stated that I had read Ben's thing about it. To quote him, "Art controls are an active volcano." I just wanted to see if others had either 1. experienced this so I know it's not something I've screwed up, or 2. found a workaround. Also, Ben Russell if you're going to down-vote a post at least be a grumpy person out in the open and take the time to explain why. It is useless to just dislike it. Dislike it for a reason.

Sadly, I can't provide any information beyond observational stuff (no log files since nothing is really going wrong). Here's what is happening: RTH is only changing lighting levels, not colours. Essentially, I can crank the red through the roof (like 50.0) and nothing will change about the horizon (yes, it's set to RTH Atmosphere). It's the first time I've ever noticed this, it may have been happening further back but I never noticed. I was trying to make an artsy screenshot and realized that the mountains in the distance weren't blue. And I couldn't make them blue. I have uninstalled and reinstalled RTH and FlyWithLUA without even including custom preference files or any other scripts. All controls do not work except the water and light controls. That is all that works. This isn't a "whine until someone solves it for you" post (okay, I guess it kind of is) I'm more looking for other people who have had the same issue, and I'm wondering if art controls have changed with the last update. Here are three shots of FlyWithLUA RTH. The first is default X-Plane atmosphere. The second is the default setting one in RTH. The last is with the reds cranked to a ridiculous level (theoretically) but as you can see nothing has happened. Anyways, as I said before, I've done a clean (totally) install of RTH and FlyWithLUA from the bottom up with the latest updates. Ideas for where to go next? Colin

One more question, unfortunately (yeah, I pretty much never shut up). How do we rate files now (considering there is still a high rated category)? Thanks

I understood the comment, I misunderstood what he was criticizing. However, saying that the skill is "wasted" on working with the compressed texture is a bit ridiculous, it's the X737, pretty much the only high-quality freeware out there for this sim, but like I said, I totally understand the criticism of the texture itself now. About Hawaii... I really hope Alaska does a Hawaii livery like their old one with the Eskimo wearing a lay. Although with this colour scheme I have no idea how they would achieve that without making it look dreadful. The colours are already pretty Hawaiian. I just jumped on this particular livery because I was so excited to see an airline stuck in the nineties modernizing their look!

Dude, I didn't make the paintkit. I have no control of this. If you don't like it, don't download it. It's what is available. Don't lecture me about texture resolution when I have no control over this. Peace out.