Jack Skieczius

yeah, all great, but what garret posted about graphics card is correct, a 256 just wont cut it today. i haven't had a 256 GFX card in over 5 years or so. and today even a 512 is falling behind, and i say this cause my Q400 is using up most of mine and more is always better. i am interested in getting myself one of those GFX cads that have like 1.7 gigs of ram, so i wont have to worry so much from then on out. lol

We now have a pic of the Week page on our website which will be updated weekly for anyone interested in seeing the development of our plane a little closer.

i would love to have 3 monitors for X-plane. that would rock. i would definitely have to buy a new desk tho.

My frustration with FSX is basically, yeah it looks good, but you take 5 minutes to load it up, another 5 minutes to get into the sim and onto vatsim and then it is still unstable as hell and about to crash on you any second. and if you switch to desktop it may as well stop running. oh and when you do have it running, its not at any frame rate above 20 FPS at all. all of this is not present in X-plane.

yeah, i was surely frustrated. and now i have two CD boxes that i don't know what to do with. tho i have some ideas.......

After a night of frustration I finally did it....

that was funny. thanks for posting it goran.

WOW, very nice! i am definitely getting one of these, specially after seeing one pull up next to my plane that i just parked at KGNV, while i was on a long XC flight last Sunday. i stayed to see the pilots get out and it was so cool to see up close. you must have some good reference for it if you have made it this detailed...

WOW, thats even faster then i thought. looking forward to seeing the gallery

WOW and lol the pens.

WOW, that image looks awesome. and i just found out i may be going to the island next year to visit my cousin who lives there full time. i wonder what plane rental costs are out there cause i would love to fly around the island. may i ask, is this project here gonna take a long time or did you pick this island to do cause it can be a jumping board to bigger and better things and probably wont take as long to finish? Not sure how long or how much work you put into this, but i can see this type of scenery becoming popular for sure.

My X-plane is at the default gamma of 2.5 I checked the Nvidia control panel and that is set to 1.0, but is also set on application settings control. my monitor only has three gamma settings and i have it set on the middle value whatever that may be since it doesn't say.

yes, we must have the hatch and the crash site. i really am interested to see how this looks in sim.

neat. i just wonder how i would feel sitting in one. i fly(rent) a c172 now for my flight training, i wonder if a 152 would be to small for me.i will take a look at it when i go down again this weekend. what i really want is a Remos GX. lol

there is a 152 down across from the hanger i fly out of at my local airport for sale. new paint job, not sure of the inside, but they only want 23.5k is that reasonable for a 152?

And so i did. http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=863.0 not perfect yet, but that's all the time i have for tonight. i will check back on it Sunday and fix it all up.

It has come to my attention a thread just as this is much needed for our community of developers. It is very important that we all know the tools at our disposal and how to use them properly to better our products. Normal maps and Specular maps have recently been added to our set of tools we can use as of X-plane version 9.41. For some these two things may seem very unfamiliar and I hope to help everyone reading this better understand what these are and how to use them. X-Plane uses combined normal and specular level maps in a single texture. This means, one image map, separate from the color maps we are all familiar with, uses the Red,green, and blue(RGB values from the image to make up the normal map and the alpha channel(transparency) for the specular maps. We have 3 types of maps now at our disposal, a color, normal and specular maps, all of which if combined right give a greater effect of realism to our airplanes. Now what is a normal maps? Simple put a normal map is similar to a bump map but goes beyond using only 8 bit color(black to white) to give depth, but instead it uses full RGB to give each pixel on the surface of a polygon a direction to point in without adding more geometry. Unlike bump maps, normal maps don't use brightness values to define depth but use a color system to define the angle at which the polygon reflects light. If this explanation did not help you understand a normal map then please visit http://www.bencloward.com/tutorials_normal_maps1.shtml where you can find a bit more in depth explanation. Here is a bit of extreme example of what a normal map might look like. Normal maps can be very useful in making rivets and aluminum deformations pop out as the light or shine casts over the mesh in sim. Any kind of dent that you don't want to add in as geometry you can do easily with a normal map. To give you another example, here is a link to the normal map I am using for the back half of my Q400. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3449179/_FuseBack_NML.jpg Notice, its not as extreme as the first example. Subtly is the key, we don't want the rivets popping out like they are gashing holes in the fuselage. More on this later. Specular maps, are the maps we use to control the specular highlight or shine spot on any given spot of the object. With them we can make scratches stand out with a larger shine and we can make dirty smudge marks look less specular. These maps use the alpha channel of the normal map, using 255 values to tell the in game rendering engine what pixels have to be given a harder shine and what not to have any shine at all. For the values 255, all white, means it will shine 100% were a value of 1 almost black, will gives it almost no shine at all. Though not completely true, a specular map could be thought to be similar to a reflection map. When making them, one would think what pixels should be shinier then others, etc. Now you may be thinking, geez, how do I even go about making normal maps. Do I bake them? Do I need a fancy normal map generator? Do I need to make a high rez mesh? Fact is, none of those seem to be the best for our situation. I have tried a ton of different ways in making normal maps already, and for the most part i have found only one way that is both simple, and very effective. Start by making a bump map. yes that's right, we use a bump map to make a normal map. We start by making a simple map that uses a neutral color, 128,128,128 is the most neutral color you can get. then we paint on in which ever way we want the highs and lows of our texture. If the panel you want to pop out pops out, then take a white color or any value greater then our neutral gray and paint it on as such. And if that panel is suppose to sink in then make it a dark color. When done a bump map may look similar to the one I used on the back half of my Q400 linked here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3449179/_FuseBack_Bump.png As you can see, its subtle. Not everything is all white nor all black. Now for the tricky part. We need to convert this bump map we have made into a normal map. I do this by using the Photoshop plugin made by Nvidia found here: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html Gimp also has a normal map plugin for those who don't have Photoshop. Gimp is pretty cool and can be found here: http://www.gimp.org/ Note: if you have the 64 bit version of Photoshop, the Nvidia plugin wont work for it, but thankfully it will work with the 32bit version which should also have been installed with Photoshop. These are the settings I used in my normal maps but you can test out several options and see what works best for you: This is the end result: Since Version 9.50 we have not had to flip any normal maps around at all so the end result here works fine right inside the sim. This has been a big time saver for me and surely everyone else using them. Now if you followed that ok you are probably now wondering how do I make specular maps and how do I fit them into the normal maps texture. First, we start similarly to how we made our normal maps. We need to think how specular the paint is on our planes. I used between 60%and 70% on mine. So we take out our calculator and find what value between 0 and 255 makes up 70%, or whatever value you wish. we take 256 and times it by .7 to get a result of 179ish. So this tells me I want the value of the specular map to site around 179,179,179 color value. I can set my canvas to a matte 179,179,179 and start paint now my scratches and smudge marks in. Make dirty, worn, smudges areas a darker gray and any scratch marks a brighter color. My specular map before i applied it to my normal map looked something like this: Now time to make both the normal and specular maps into one map. We start by opening both our images in photoshop, and dropping our specular map into our normal map as a second layer. So in our layer window we have the purplish normal map below our specular map. hide the normal map layer and select our specular map layer. Go up top to our menu bar and go to the "select" pull down and click "Color Range" Use the settings in this image then press ok. You will end up with a selection with the values of your spec map. Now we need to apply that to a layer mask. Hide the spec layer and make the normal map visible again and select it. Now click the Add layer mask button on the bottom of the layers area. Now we should have a layer mask out of our spec map that will make the normal map partly transparent. Now it would be nice to say we are done but we have one more step. We need to make sure there is no black values in our layer mask. To do with we simple select the mask(not the image, but the box that is the mask) and go to menu "Image" -> "Adjustments" -> "Levels..." and in that window under the "output levels" under the black side change the 0 to a 1 and press ok. If we did not do this last step some of our normal map values may be lost, this is just a thing Photoshop dose and may be different if you are using a different program. Now the very last thing we need to ensure is to go into out obj file in a text editor(notepad works fine) and edit the shine settings. go to the bottom of the text file and find the command, if you have one that reads ATTR_shiny_rat and makes the numbers after it be 1.0 This will set the scale of the shine to what we desired from out specular map. 1.0 being 100%. if we set it to .9 we should get 90% of the spec map, and so forth. further reading on normals maps can be found in the X-plane wiki here: http://wiki.x-plane.com/Normal_Maps Thanks for reading, and i hope this has helped anyone who reads it in understand these two maps a bit more.

This ain't a bad idea. I shall perhaps do just that. i would hate to see this happen again on more "payware" airplanes. normal maps had always been a fasination to me ever since i first learned about them so many years ago now.

I, well, i don't know. i am feeling very disappointed right now. i should never had a look at his textures. His Normal maps.....well they aren't normal maps. he did it all wrong, as if he never even bothered to look up what a normal map was. looks like he just amused they were similar to bump maps in such a way as he edited the normal map images just the same way. Normal maps are a whole other beast entirely, and a very effective instrument to make any polygon look a whole lot better. tho i may have made them sound like rocket science, they are far from it. with just a few simple basic understanding of normal maps Dan could have made better use of them. i am totally applaud, and i am not sure even my little rant here can explain the way i feel right now. yeah that shine on the wings looks nice eh? but he only got that because he used the normal maps the wrong way, and you are actually not seeing what you should be seeing. I sure thought Dan was a better man then this. I wonder if he would be willing to be taught how to do real normal maps......

what is new in this one?

what file format did Dan use for the textures? If he used PNG, one might try converting them to DDS and seeing how the performance difference as DDS generally load faster, and you shouldn't need to lower them to 1024. from what i have researched. when you load up the exterior view it has to load all the textures, ok fair enough, but if you have say 6 or 8 2048 images all formatted as PNG file types then X-plane has to load up that many 2048 textures and then size them down to the size that the renderer calls on for the current zoom level, like 1024 or 512. This can casue a long pause when switching to external view while the computer dose this extra work load. The more textures the plane has on its exterior the more noticeable the load time. If the file type for the textures was DDS it would work a bit different. DDS are compressed just how the graphics card would compress them and they are mip mapped(pre-sized to have multiple sizes). when you switch to exterior view X-plane calls up the texture files and only grabs the size it needs out of the texture file, which makes load times much faster. anyway, thought i would add that here so it can hopefully help people run Dan's plane better without sacrificing quality. I will be using DDS on my Q400.

now that's something to talk about. very simple, yet still 12 grand? wow, lol i can see getting one if it was under 1000 USD but geez, its not worth 12k to me. anyway, a novel idea tho, and could be prety fun on those sunny days. wish we had fields big enough around where i lived. would be perfect if one owned a few acres. i can see someone cracking a joke, "Lets go take out my plane, i got it in the my car right now ready to go." hehe thanks for the vid Jason

nice. will have to get this today! right after i come back from seeing Robin Hood! a video would be great, maybe Simon will grace us with one, eh Simon?! hehe

Not an update, but we have a new website now where you ca get the latest updates if you wish to visit there. Visit us at: www.flyjsim.com

sweet! i had REX for FSX, and i liked it for the most part. as everything in FSX, it just hurt frame rates, lol, but i am sure that wont happen in X-plane. I am sure this will really boost people coming over to X-plane. YAY