George Grimshaw`s KBOS

[Paul J 349]

.. appears to work quite well in FSX SP2. I didn`t try it using SP1, but having added Flight Scenery`s Portland KPDX and its scenery recently, I took a look through my old "FS9 Redundant" folder, and saw George`s Boston V2.0 just sitting there! This made waves when it was first published (it`s free), so I tried it, and apart from some ground flashing I can`t see too much that would prevent a really, really nice airport being added to FSX. It gets better all the time! :(

[flilotUK 0]

...and apart from some ground flashing...

The flashing actually gets really annoying after a while, and causes perf degredation/stutters when flying into BOS in a heavy payware jet, and when taxiing. Also in certain camera views the buildings half vanish.It's a shame because i loved the add-on airport for FS9 - one of the greatest freeware airports ever released IMHO.

[Paul J 349]

Agreed. I didn`t spot any buildings disappearing yet, Carl. Any idea how to stop the flashing happening?

[flilotUK 0]

Any idea how to stop the flashing happening?

No. I think its due to the way FS9 style textures are dealt with in FSX SP2, which is why some FS9-ported-to-FSX add-on aircraft needed fixes post SP2 to correct missing textures and other issues.

[greggerm 312]

The flashing is due to how the very-high resolution ground textures were made to work in FS 2004 ...In FS9, you could get away with creating very large "ground polygons" which were in effect extremely thin 3-D models on the ground. Since 3-D models were able to use high-resolution textures, they were a clever workaround to make the ground in these beautiful sceneries.FSX introduced the MSFS world to the "Round Earth" model. These 3-D ground polygons suddenly didn't fit the bill - the Earth curved underneigth the poly, thus creating rendering errors and texture problems. With the introduction of SP1 and SP2, Microsoft added in the capability for specially formatted large polygons to form-fit to the curved Earth. The polygon needed to be broken up (tessellated) into triangles of a certain size, and the sim would the tessellated vertices to curve the polygon to the Earth's surface.FS9 scenery designers would need to revisit their packages and tessellate their ground polygons in order to let them wrap to the surface of the Earth. As far as flashing trees are concerned, this is a texture format issue which would require the re-creation of the texture and perhaps the recompilation of the BGL file - that one... but not necessairily an impossibility. It's too bad Vauchez seems to have fallen off the face of the planet. With the changes implemented in FSX SP1 and SP2, he and other scenery developers have a great bag of tricks to make the new sim look just as good, if not better, than the older versions.-GregFor more on creating high-rez ground polygons, read it from where I got my information!http://www.simpilotnet.com/index.php?optio...6&Itemid=32

[Paul J 349]

It's too bad Vauchez seems to have fallen off the face of the planet. With the changes implemented in FSX SP1 and SP2, he and other scenery developers have a great bag of tricks to make the new sim look just as good, if not better, than the older versions.-Greg

Thanks, Greg: Yeah; I sorely missed the Portland scenery, and wasn`t aware that it could be used with a little tweaking and a slightly blind eye. The other major loss, of course, (for me) has been the large North American airports which George and Martin produced - and also, I guess the Cloud9 products, too - particularly LAX. I`m not about to fly off to St. Maartens or Kai Tak in my MD-80: there are no one-to-two hour regional hops near it.. It really is too bad. :(

[nigelgrant 4]

apart from some ground flashing I can`t see too much that would prevent a really, really nice airport being added to FSX. It gets better all the time! :(Hi PaulOver recent months I have been trying to resurrect my best FS9 airports with mixed success. Where I have done a reasonable job, I have uploaded these to share with others, firstly getting the original designer's approval to do so. So far I have uploaded Calgary by CanUK (payware), Stansted by John Young, Milan Malpensa by ISD (I could not get their approval, they seem to have disappeared), and most recently Stockholm Arlanda and Copenhagen Kastrup by Swedflight (payware).My approach is to create an ADE file (Scruffy Duck's great program) from the FS2004 AFCAD, and a flatten file for the airport from SBuilderX; after this, by trial and error, I remove various bgl files from the scenery folder until I find which are causing the problems in FSX. Sometimes these problem files are major object files which happen to have the offending situation embedded within them - I give up on that scenery and move to the next. Often the aprons and taxiways are not shown by the AFCAD file, so I often have to re-create these in the ADE file.In the case of Boston, I have found that you can get rid of the flashing ground textures by removing the file ground.bgl but then you have to remove the grassUND.bgl file as well, since the grass in the airport all gets messed up. The ground.bgl file is the photoscenery file so you lose all the nice highway interchanges and you have cars zipping over grass areas - still okay because when you are landing or taking-off you shouldn't be looking at the traffic coming to the airport! I also removed the RwyTire.bgl file since the black rubber on the runways became overpowering I created an ADE file so also removed the AFCAD file I was using.But the shorelines are a bit messed up, I have UTX USA and KBOS shorelines do not always match up, but it's still good enough to fly in FSX but not good enough to seek George's permission to upload. It is very nice scenery, try some more experiments yourself, it is rather fun but can be quite laborious going through the trial and error of removing files and having to reboot FSX each time.NigelVancouver