Additional Flight forum focused on development

[KavindaJD 31]

My Quick attempt at Wisconsin...

 

Not everything was converted though..textures missing!

 

 

As you can see.. Wisconsin is a bit cluttered!

[basys 4]

I would actually root for Orbx  :ph34r:

 

Nooooooo...............

 

Not after -

- The deer parks of Barrow Island ?

- The wooded summits of Lakeland ?

- The 70 foot high bracken forests of Wasdale ?

- The night lit motorways of Ambleside ?

- The forests of Shetland ?

- The outdoor swimming pools of Norway ?

 

Please -

Flight's tree'd North Slope tundra was bad enough.  

Fantasy Terrain Excretions....never. *

 

 

ATB

Paul

 

*

Tongue in cheek.

 

Yes they do create some nice fictional vistas,

but think of the meawannna now, fanboi culture it'd probably attract.   :ph34r:    

 

 

 

 

My Quick attempt at Wisconsin...

 

Not everything was converted though..textures missing!

 

Nice work.

 

ATB

Paul

[188AHC 2,138]

I would be happy with stock FSX textures if we can have the world.

 

As far as Orbx, I don't really care one way or the other and we aren't going to open a debate on that issue.  

 

Let's all be happy with what may come and worry about "improvements" at a later date.

[KavindaJD 31]

Nice work.

 

Thanks Paul.

 

Let's not forget about Steve here. The one who made this all possible! Without his knowledge base at the FSDeveloper forum, no-one would be able to add scenery to Flight. He's putting all he's got into this...his work is keeping Flight alive!

 

 

I would be happy with stock FSX textures if we can have the world.

 

As far as Orbx, I don't really care one way or the other and we aren't going to open a debate on that issue.

 

Let's all be happy with what may come and worry about "improvements" at a later date.

Nicely said Rick.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi All.

 

Steve will probably have a mass converter for FSX in the next few weeks. He's already got a rough version. It will use FSX textures where Flight landclasses are missing textures. We can backfill those textures with some (hopefully) better textures as this goes on. Even more exciting is the ability to create new landclasses and vectors by creating new lclookup files. FSX never had this ability, although we sometimes cheated by using a local texture folder.

 

Elevation dems would be stock FSX, and some of those will need improvement. And don't forget improvements to waterpolys, roads, etc... Much of this can be made from tools like ADE, SBuilderX and FSX resample tool, and converted if needed to Flight BGLs.

Hopefully an FSX conversion package will be available in the next few weeks, rather than months. But this is pushing Steve pretty hard, as he is by far the main contributor of tools.

 

 

I don't know if we have a roadmap that includes aircraft conversions... this might be difficult due to gauges. The geometry and textures should be able to be converted at some point.

 

Eventually, new content will become available. Maybe this will push the Dovetail builders to make an even better sim.

 

Dick

[stonelance 136]

Well, it will probably be more than a couple weeks for the whole mass converter to be working, but I should have the first pass at the scenery conversion done in a couple weeks

 

There is already some aircraft conversion, although the resulting content generally is not usable out of the box, and it really requires someone to go in and tune the physics flight models.  Maybe I will revisit it again at some time, but I would like to focus on converting scenery for now, then making new scenery and new aircraft (with some investigation into the possibility of jets).

[BaronKen 144]

Absolutely awesome work! Thanks!

 

Question: If you were already using a payware scenery texture replacement package like GEX or ORBX's Global in FSX, would the scenery conversion package you're developing use those textures for the replacement textures you would need in Flight?

[stonelance 136]

Potentially, although I may make it detect that and block the conversion, just so that people who are using the conversion will end up all getting the same base layer.  Theoretically it should let you convert any FSX content, although lots of 3rd party developers used tricks or otherwise non-standard ways of making things and my tools make not handle those.

[OMGBBQ32 12]

Does FSX need to be installed to be able to convert? I wouldn't mind re-installing it for the conversion, but it would be nice if I didn't need to.

[Orion 2]

Um... Yes. I'm not sure what you would convert from if FSX weren't installed.

[stonelance 136]

Maybe someone will convert it and put it online for you to download...  It is probably 10GB of data though.

[KavindaJD 31]

Maybe someone will convert it and put it online for you to download...  It is probably 10GB of data though.

 

But if wan't all the fun... then you would re-install FSX. By developing, you can also help yourself out. You learn things along the way and it may be useful when scenery can be fully converted!

[BaronKen 144]

Though I'm using Orbx's Global textures package now for FSX, my original FSX textures are saved in a separate folder on my HDD. Will the tool allow the converter to be "pointed at" that folder to convert the textures for use in Flight?

[KavindaJD 31]

I think that will be so Ken.

 

With Steve's tools, most things are manual so you have to set the target of the textures you want to convert. I am not entirely sure on this but it is very likely. You'll have to wait and see for the batch converter in about two weeks. 

[Orion 2]

I don't think so. Steve mentioned at FSDeveloper that his tool will parse the scenery.cfg (essentially the FSX scenery library), which means it will only know of scenery currently installed to FSX.

 

Edit: That's in regards to the batch conversion. If you want to create new landclasses, I think you should still be able to do so manually, but seeing as there are a ton, it's probably not something you want to do by hand.