Converting FSX content to Flight

[winjimon 6]

Thanks for looking into this stonelance. As you said, Dick's New Zealand screenshots do show the same apparent snowy trees, or at least one of the two types I've noticed.  I have no personal knowledge of horticulture, though I could probably identify a cactus if I sat on one.

[majuh 14]

If both lists are complete, the following trees from FSX need to be remapped:

• Broadleaf_thin
• Conifer
• EucalyptusGum
• EucalyptusSav
• Norway Spruce
• PineScrub
• Sagebrush
• Savanna (two types)
• Tropical (4 trees)

And these bushes:

• Dry (two types)
• Rhody

 

EucalyptusGum and EucalyptusSav could be remapped to Flight's Eucalyptus tree, Conifer to CookPine and NorwaySpruce to Hemlock. I'm not sure about the other stuff...

[stonelance 136]

So I tried looking into this last night and the weird thing is that it seems like the regionalization ids from FSX are the exact same in Flight, so theoretically the correct groups should already be getting set.  I have to verify this, but it might point to the groupings just being wrong.

[AlbacoreTunaMan 16]

My FSX to Flight scenery conversion battles continue.  I currently have 1.1.6 installed which I had hoped would solve my "Conversion failed. Could not find part of path ...." problem.

I discovered that I had FSX installed on my F: drive which probably accounted for problems finding the scenery.  Here's where I made it worse:  I uninstalled FSX to do a clean install onto my C: drive.  However, my old FSX Deluxe Box Edition cd's are no longer readable!  I have a "Fry's run" in my future to buy a new one.   Arrrrgh!      

[stonelance 136]

The drive shouldn't matter as long as you are passing the path correctly. What error are you getting exactly?

[AlbacoreTunaMan 16]

You are right Steve, but I wanted to do a clean FSX reinstall anyway. 

Thanks.

[stonelance 136]

If you need to get another copy of FSX, I would recommend buying from Steam instead of getting a hardcopy.  It has bug fixes, plus I have heard some people have had issues with the activation servers with the box copy.

[AlbacoreTunaMan 16]

Yes!

Did a fresh FSX install from Steam, ($25 later) and voila!  It's a whole new game.  I landed at a couple of local airports and saw my "unique airport" stat go up to 732.  I was stuck at 730 for a long time, having landed at all the airports and seaplane bases in AK and HI.  This really opens things up for Flight.  New Aerocache locations, and hopefully new missions too.

Good job Stonelance!

[Air1 136]

Good job Tom. There is hope. I got FSX SE for 5 bucks when it first came out. I did deleat my box copy. Still have not done anything with it yet. Busy busy!

 

Steve A

[majuh 14]

I noticed that the Canadian airports and rivers etc. close to the Alaskan border are missing, f.e. Burwash Airport (CYDB). I guess this is due to the less detailed terrain in the border area that came with the Alaskan Wilderness Pack. Is it possible to make the converted content override this low quality content?

[AlbacoreTunaMan 16]

I noticed the same thing.  I was hoping all those BC and Yukon airports bordering Alaska would now be the FSX version.  If you go in a little further from the border, the FSX airports do kick in.  I am flying north from Bella Coola, BC to the Arctic along this edge to see how this overlap works.

[stonelance 136]

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out that transition, and unfortunately there didn't seem to be a good way to handle it other than to override large portions of the Alaska DLC.  When they created the Alaska region unfortunately they didn't create a clean cut at a QMID boundary, and even worse, not all of the data is clipped at the same place, so it would be extremely hard to merge nicely.

[AlbacoreTunaMan 16]

Thanks Steve. With all the other "clean up / enhancement " tasks ahead, this one is relatively minor.  Just getting us to where we can all fly the World in Flight is huge.   

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Patrick Germain over at FSDeveloper has come up with a neat program CVXExtractor. It decompiles FSX CVX vector scenery to Esri Shapefiles, and a few other formats. I may be able to 'snug' decompiled data from FSX along the border of the Alaska scenery, and recompile it to the LOD 5 bounds. Then the missing airports could be recompiled with ADE. I don't know if landclass or mesh would need to be redone, but I suspect not.

 

I'll have a look.

 

Dick

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Flight's Alaska-Canada border seems to fairly match FSX as far as vector files go. The Canadian data is very sparse in that region for both sims. Flight has some missing shorelines.

 

I think I did find several APX files that were skipped in the conversion process, and that would explain missing airports. I'll look at it agin.

 

Dick