chris k
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Posts posted by chris k
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=)
- CK.
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Didn't you know? the Moon rises in the East near Marthas Vineyard, and sets in the west near Flagstaff, Arizona; every night =)
- CK
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Correct - That X-Plane 9.70 is indeed a "complete" product.
XP10 is a "work in progress" for now. As many users have suggested, they will wait till about release 10.3 or so as all the kinks are worked out, and the number (and quality) of XP10 specific scenery/aircraft/etc.. which can take advantage of the new features are developed.
Note that most things you have for XP9 work perfectly well in XP10. (You do not necessarily need an "X-Plane 10" version of manythings, as much of what was produced for XP9 is forward-compatible with XP10).
Again, "watch this space" is probably the correct mantra to have - if you're looking for a Rock-solid product with lots of current material and support, stick with X-Plane 9. However, this will change (over time) as XP10 gets out of it's teething pains and matures into a more finished product.
- CK.
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Hey all,
I'm looking for a few stand-alone objects to assist with some scenery development; (for YSSY) of which I believe these are very common objects and might be useful to the community at large.
These are to 'dot around' the scene, to give an impression of immersion or "ground clutter" as others have described them. Objects such as:
- small huts/sheds (ive used alot from the opensceneryx lib) but could use more
- electrical junction boxes coming ouf of the ground (white, silver, metal)
- small red/white checkered buildings (note how everything is painted this way at most major airfirleds).
Note that for the small red/white checkered huts, I cannot find any opensceneryX or default X-Plane library obejct anywhere which resembes this (except the built-in"Glideslope Object" which has such a hut, but also has a tower and fence....(tkyler, i'm looking at you =)..) Even just a dis-assembly of the current glideslope object into it's consituent parts (tower, hut, and fence) would be all that is needed.
Thanks to any who can assist. Even a simple 4-sided hut with red/white checkers would do for now. =)
- CK.
EDIT: i.e. this object, minus the tower and the fence:
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ATI 6970 or an ATI 7970 (once they fix the ATI bugs)
GeForce GTX 580, 680, 570, 480
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
- CK.
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If you can afford it (and you want to stay on OSX), a MacPro offers upgradable graphics capability. However, it sounds like you may not necessarily be in a position to pickup one of these (from what Im reading into here..)
- CK.
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Hi Guys,
I did a little flying around the scenery the other day. It's coming along. =)
- CK.
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iMac 11,2 = 21.5 Inch (Mid 2010)
Processor i3 @ 3.06 GHz
Graphics Card ATI Radeon HD 4670
Graphics Memory 256 MB
Resolution 1920 by 1080 pixels
1. The Core i3 is significantly slower than it's bigger cousings (i5/i7) - I wouldnt expect alot of CPU grunt here...
2. The 4670 isn't a great video processor. - Check http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html and have a look for yourself.
3. Turn down the texture resolution - with 256 Mb of VRAM, you'll easily run out of VRAM and that will cause *nasty* texture swapping
4. Disable HDR, Disable AA, Disable Per-Pixel-Lighting, Disable Grtty Textures. As Simon sayd, These eat FPS for breakfast.
5. Do not attempt to run this full screen at 1920x1080. You are suffering from "fill rate" issues - the GPU simply cannot 'paint the pixels' fast enough.
Try this to see if you're fill-rate limited: http://developer.x-plane.com/2012/01/mobile-gpus-and-fill-rate/
- CK.
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Agreed. Lower your texture settings a notch.
I frequently run out of task RAM (3.5G or so) when using some very detailed/hi-res ortho sceneries.
Also, enable texture compression if it's not already enabled. Most sceneeries these days are .DDS compressed anyhow, so you wont be losing much detail. A good article can be found here regarding enabling compression vs. Uncompressed: http://developer.x-plane.com/2012/01/dds-revisited-in-x-plane-10/
- CK.
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Mmmmmm Cool Ranch Doritos. The one thing the Aussies dont have.
ptru, hmmmm once i convince them I *also* need the accompanying 30" monitor in order to "improve my productivity" ill see about a second system. =)
- CK.
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Convinced my company that I really needed one of these for "working at home" =)
http://www.macsasnew.com.au/en/mac-desktop-computers/78-mac-pro-early-2009.html
The RAID-5 card and those nicely striped 1TB drives will shorten my reload times considerably =) ( can you say concurrent reads?)
The 2.9ghz Xeon also help. I have a 5770 ready to swap into the case too. Should make a nice XP10 dev box.
Now all we need is a 64but version of WED. Keep running that thing out if RAM with those hires orthos.....
-CK.
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I think the Shift-6 view is the closest to the old 'a'=chase view.
I actually have remapped this to the [A] key, just like before.
- CK.
Which begs the question, why the heck did they change that?.. sure give us all the nice shift1-to-9/0 views, but keep the old 'a'=chaseview. =)
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Yeah - Looks like these airports have never been defined in the master X-Plane database.
If you're interested in making these Airports, you can use the World Editor tool (WED1.1) which can be found here:
http://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/
Might be a good entry for you to start on the wild world of scenery development =)
Else, If you can find me some charts for it, or information (perhaps from the CAP-b or other NavCanada publication) I could throw a quickie airport together for you. Woudn't necessarily be that accurate, but would be 'something'.
- CK.
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One question chris, I see that you have used the photo textures for taxiways and ramps but not for the runway. Why is that ?
Heh, Actually, that's more of a development bug for now - I've made the taxiways transparent currently so I can line the edges up with the orthophoto. (else I cant see through the pavement so to speak). I don't know if I want to do the same trick as I did with NZCH in terms of taxiways under the ortho, or taxiways+runways under the ortho yet.
The kicker is that the runways really need to be at the top-most resolution to look good. (i.e. extreme res / either with or without compression); else they end up looking pretty poor/blocky. The taxiways I can 'get away with' at a lower res, since the edge and centrelines are re-drawn on top of the texture, so they still remain crisp and sharp at lower res.
I'll experiment with both methods as I get closer to a release candidate and get some time to clean up the rest of the taxiway markings. The original images I have used here are native 15cm resolution; which look really good.
I may even make it 'user selectable' via different .pol files like in the NCH scenery (i.e want default runways? use these .pols .. want photo runways? use these .pol's, etc);
- CK.
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At it again Chris? Trying to pass off a photo as your scenery work? Shame on you!
Yah... I know...
You caught me - I'm just taking stock photos from elsewhere and adding that XP10 "fps//f-sim/f-act" Banner to make it look like it's an XP10 screenshot.. like this:
However, you must admit, it really makes things go sooo much faster when posting updates...!
p.s. Pls Ignore the lighting. I have it set low w/overcast clouds so I can see/test the HDR lighting during the day. However, it's perfectly fine for Simon, if you want to give it to Chip for posting to the xplane10blog (as it's already at the required brightness level..! =) -grin-)
^^ Tom, you might recognize this object. However, this isn't exported into the standard lib/g10/ library tree. Any way to get it into the next library EXPORT? I'd love to use it.
^^ ooo! I finally figured out how to use the "Pick Walls" function for facades as part of WED1.2
^^ Dang! No place to park today.
^^ Adding .agp objects now
Still got a lot more lighting work to do, as well as vegetation. Sydney's airport is quite 'Tree Filled' on all the boulevards (being a warm climate and all..). The In-Laws are coming over for the Ester Long Weekend, so not much time to work on this for the next few days. =)
- CK.
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Hi Baber,
Progressing. Will be doing some more work on it this week. (I seem to have less spare time these days). =)
- CK.
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I'm waiting for this card to come out:
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More work this weekend. Hope to have a beta out in a few days.
Ignore the Bridge. It's in the wrong place... =)
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Yeah. Happens.. Here's my replacements (for example):
Apparently there's another YSSY in the works from the original author....
- CK.
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Alrighty.... time for an update!
1. I was denied permission to use MIKX's original Sydney Airport Scenery objects.
Meaning: the two terminals and the tower I cannot use.
I have therefore used replacement objects for these; as well as used some XP10 objects and XP10 Facades. I have also heavily used XP10 boarding bridges and the like... So this one will definitely be an XP10 only release.
If anyone feels like doing up the Sydney Airport Terminals... I'm all ears! =)
2. I have found a better source of imagery that I originally anticipated. The ones I had were missing the hi-res in certain areas. I have now found (albeit an older imagery) which is all high-res. It does not take into account the new Domestic Terminal expansion area; so I'll be removing that for now. It also does not have the IKEA in it, but I have used the IKEA object anyways =)
3. Lighting will be all XP10 naturally.
4. I am now looking at different XP10 commercial building facades in order to fill out the area... It looks pretty good so far!
- CK.
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I love it when you get that X-Plane 10 moment every now and then.. when the new lighting system and the textures align in a really beautiful way...
- CK.
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Hrm... a Core 2 processor and a 9800GT should work reasonably well... but don't expect miracles though with that configuration.
As Zoltron correctly mentioned, you will probably need to dial down a few of the settings in order to get a reasonable experience. However, the 1Gb VRAM Video card will come in handy; as well the 9800GT was a pretty top-of-the-line card for that series. The quad processor will also help out, as XP10 does do some limited parallel processing.
The Demo would be your best bet. As it stands right now, pls check the [X] Enable Beta Downloads in the demo - So it will pull down X-Plane 10.04rc1; which is not only the latest release but a rather stable one which has made some great optimizations for nVidia cards.
- CK.
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Roads - Check. Signage - Check. Water - Check.
Kieran - this should give you a reasonable idea as to how much the ortho I am using.... Is easy to get more; but all this is the hi-res stuff (2kx2k tiles) I want to use. ANything else would be of much lower density (1/8th res or so).
- CK.
An Appeal for Common Airport Objects
in Scenery Development
Posted · Edited by chris k
You, sir, are awesome =)
I was also going to also try to start making Facades out of checkerboard textures as well (hence I can scale the object as I see fit).
Here's the junction boxes (from another FSX based scenery - Although these may be a bit "big" - might make em shorter IMHO):
http://simflight.com...ction-boxes.jpg
A more reasonable size and another shot of what i'm after:
http://206.80.253.132/~chrisk/calvin/dirt-shop-12.jpg
As you can see, it just a short, small metal rectangle with 2 cylinders sticking into the ground. Nothing big.... useful for dotting around the place. Metal box, or white, or grey - possibly with a panel on one side of it. (a panel 'texture' that is).
- CK.
P.S. This is making me want to whip out Sketchup now and start learning =)