jettojig

That's what I thought, and why I suggested lower populations.... If you aren't rendering a city then I imagine it gets a lot easier to render terrain! Thinking of where else could be nice... I can imagine the Alps is very much a "see it to believe it" kind of experience... The peaks of mountains look vastly improved, but in the screenshots the lower slopes don't seem to show nearly as large an improvement (not to say that's a bad thing, there's just far less extreme terrain there which requires UHD to be seen properly). I know next to nothing about mesh editing, but would there be a way to make it so the lower slopes were more like HD V3, whereas the higher altitudes in the Alps were UHD? That could be a nice way to optimise but something tells me it isn't possible. A shame really, Rio has some of the most spectacular terrain in the world from what I've seen! Its a wonder why nobody's managed to get some good data on it... Personally, I'd be happy enough if we just got fixes for the area around Sugarloaf Mountain and Christ the Redeemer, both of which are noticeably wonky at the moment, especially when using a (converted) scenery like this one, where you find the famous statue embedded in a hillside and a mystical floating cable car station... Obviously it isn't your fault we can't have these things though! I have been looking at that Sketchup mesh editor on the .org but I have no idea how to begin, or to get it accurate...

That's incredible! I can see this working as smaller area packages for locations of high natural beauty (and intricate detail) and low population (to reduce the objects needed to be drawn), as I think they'd benefit the most. Places like the Grand Canyon above, and perhaps Ayers Rock - though I think the Alps don't seem to have quite as drastic an improvement in quality apart from at the peaks of mountains. Only place I can think of that is densely populated that would be nice with UHD mesh is Rio, which I've just started flying around, or São Paulo' simply because of the unique way Congonhas airport sits on its own little plateau - if UHD mesh had that, I'd be desperate for it! sadly that's just a pipe dream since I know it's been asked for before but you can't find good enough data...

Had me for a moment there, damn you!

Heh, it's funny. I've managed to get reasonably good at landing the A320 around 200fpm most of the time, I've managed to get below 100fpm a couple of times, but I still can't land a Cessna 152 like the one I fly in reality at the tiny grass field I call my home base (at least not in X-Plane!). It's all a case of what X-Plane can and can't do, and how it makes things different from having real world experience.

You could also import part of the basic X-Plane apt.dat into the scenery (only keeping KDEN obviously) instead of re-drawing all the taxiways yourself.

Fair enough, I understand some users would hate having to make another account! And you'd probably need more hardware to manage a login system - I see the disadvantages!

That's a neat idea! Now we'll all know how awful we really are Jokes aside, looking forward to seeing this, especially since I feel I'll be flying the Saab a lot more once it gets the GNS530 in the next update... By the way, would you consider getting in contact with Navigraph/Aerosoft to see if you can make this app be able to use the latest nav data from then on release? Airtrack by Haversine has this ability too and its very helpful when you have a subscription.

Hm, I definitely have 2.1 installed, not sure what's going on there. Hopefully it'll be fixed later!

Oooh, yeah!

Hi John, I wouldn't mind being able to alter/turn down/remove lightning too! I've seen a few occurences where I've had otherwise clear days with a single lightning cloud just floating around... looks weird and makes little sense. It would also be nice to turn it off in areas where it is rare, like the UK of Scandinavia.

No problem at all! I haven't any local knowledge as I'm from the UK but from eyeballing it then yes, the scenery looks very, VERY good and should be easy to fix once you get the hang of things! I may have a crack at it myself if I ever decide to make an adventure of flying in the US... I didn't suffer any issues at all... what OS are you using? No idea if that affects anything but I wouldn't be surprised if things went weird on non-windows machines. Hope you get to enjoy Vancouver eventually!

Not sure what you mean about killing ground textures. Do you mean vanishing ones? I find that most ground textures for airport sceneries like CYVR don't just vanish - a lot of the time they get tiny LOD distances and/or weird DDS alpha channels that means they like to disappear after a short distance, but they're still there, and are quite fixable. Though youhave plenty of experience it seems, for those that don't know (I've been meaning to write a guide on this for ages, I've seen plenty of people throw away good textures! Might as well do it here)... If the texture only seems to appear when really close to it, best thing to do is find a pattern in how they are named and open them in a text editor. Find a line mentioning LOD (Usually something like ATTR_LOD_DRAPED), and change the number following to a larger value (I usually go for 20000 for orthophoto/runway markings and 5000 for anything else - though you want smaller numbers on weaker systems!). If textures are turning black at medium distances, it's probably a weird Alpha channel in the DDS texture. Open the relevant texture in something that supports DDS editing and save it in a format that does not have alpha channels (no transparency). MAKE SURE TO KEEP THE ORIGINAL. DDS files lose quality every time you edit and re-save. In some conversions - particularly paywares like FlyTampa and Aerosoft - the ground textures just get misplaced by FS2XP and are in impossible shapes. You need to use OE or WED to reposition these as square tiles. This is the most time consuming process as it can't be automated like text editing, but it is easy and Finally, sometimes the layer groupings are set wrong - as is the case for your CYVR scenery. This means things like taxi lines are drawn UNDER photo textures or vice-versa. This link explains it better than I could. It is worth noting that sometimes ground textures really don't convert at all, though from what I've seen this is by far a minority in terms of sceneries available. Colin, I hope that your first question is answered somewhere within there - if in more detail than you may need. I actually was curious and installed CYVR myself to see how it converted and found that deleting a large grass texture in Overlay Editor uncovered all the orthophotos for the airport - though it seems you'll need to play with layer groups to get the taxi lines to appear - they are there, but below the other textures. See below to see what I mean: lines & Photoscenery visible Lines hidden below photoscenery. As for your second question, I believe that if you are providing your own orthophotos/textures, (or ones you have license to distribute) and all ground layouts are yours, then it should be OK. Distributing fixed orthophotos from an original FSX scenery without permission is a big no-no, but if you can get the author to allow it then it probably is OK - though at that point you might as well get permission to share the whole airport. Hope I've over-answered your questions enough! I've converted WAY too many FSX sceneries for my own good... I'm a bit of a hoarder!

Not usually. x-plane requires a single texture only being used, and won't accept sketch up' colouring tools. If multiple textures or colours are used (and they usually are), then you can't export it. If you fancied re-texturing everything it may be possible but I doubt it would be worth it usually.

Might be worth checking out JetSim or JARDesigns' A330s first nObLe, both have (or will have) very detailed 3D models and functionality.

From the video, the GNS530 has been added, the radio logic rebuilt, and scroll wheel support added.

There's a tiny button labelled "Mach" near the speed display, which you should press some time during your ascent. That way, the aircraft holds a speed relative to the speed of sound, which changes at altitude. Usually the auto flight system does this for you if set to managed mode, why aren't you at cruise like this?

Awesome stuff - Thanks!

Just purchased - looking good!

Wow, thought we'd never hear from you again... looking great, super excited!

There's always UFMC, which comes with a pre-made config file you can use, though it is payware.

It's a bit like a reverse SID, and is entered (and found) very similarly. In EFASS, it is the drop-down menu below your arrival airport (like the SID is below the departure airport), and once you've planned it, the STAR should show up next to your airport (or perhaps runway) in the sidebar. Entering one into the 757's FMC is also similar to how you enter a SID, except you select 'approach' next to the airport you want to land at, instead of choosing departure at the the airport you left. Hope this helps!

Ah, Hamburg is a nice airport to fly to, should be good for learning at - and it should have SID/STAR charts to help too! You're welcome!

Excellent! Perhaps only 2 can be engaged at once on an approach, haven't flown the 757 for a while so I'm not 100% sure. Best way is to a follow a STAR for the runway you want, which you can get from EFASS; these are entered like a SID but you select the arrival option for your destination airport. Once that is entered, you can follow the magenta line and in most cases it will line you up with the ILS. Which airport(s) are you practicing at, by the way?

Good to hear you're starting to get the hang of it! The course is the direction of the runway. You can find this in the local map screen (by clicking the ILS Glideslope of choice), or by finding a relevant approach chart (the course will be labelled clearly at one end of the glideslope). I think you can only engage all three once APPR mode is activated and you've captured the glideslope. Not 100% sure on that one. Usually, the intercept error comes from a route discontinuity. Scroll through the LEGS page of the FMC until you find it, most of the time you can fic it by selecting the waypoint below it and then pressing the Left key next to the discontinuity. Hope this helps!

I'm pretty sure those were there the last time we got a preview of the store, but fingers crossed the rest follows soon!