FS2004 Limitations. How far can we go?

[3Green 80]

Tired of FS2004 ATC telling you to expedite your climb or descent?Search the ATC.dll for hex string:DC1DC0F46C20DFE0F6C4410F85D2FEFFFF and replace it with:DC1DC0F46C20DFE0F6C441E9D3FEFFFF90But make sure you remember the last altitude ATC clears you too,, cuz they won't ever remind you to expedite your climb or descent again..RJ

[Johan_Dees 84]

hey RJ, how did you found out? are you the guru we all waiting for ?

[Socrat 0]

I'm a man with "head in sky" (don't know correct English phrase to my language for this, but want to say "dreamer"). Today I thought again about water textures and how people sometimes make things much more difficult than it is necessary. So I thought how could we get much more realistic and high quality water textures. Still thinking about program like ADE or AFCAD. I actually don't know what program designers use when they work with vector data of water surface, but I think about that these vector data doesn't contain any information about color of the water textures. Why to use the same set of water texture for whole world? So imagine this. You would have the program like AFCAD or ADE to open your scenery. You would open aerial photo (e.g. from google) of the water surface. You put it under your scenery and place it in correct place. Then you can switch between scenery and this photo. Even make transparency could be helpful. You could switch to mode of editing water surface colors. Now, if you know eyedropper tool from Photoshop to select color. You would just take the tool, and click on some place of water on photo.E.g. For example you have mountains, darkgreen forest trees in shadow, and the water surface of dam, which has almost the same dark green color like the trees, but on some place more gray.(See attachment)So you click on the green-gray places and then on the dark green places of the water. What the program would do - it would take the information about color of this point from photography and insert it to the area of vectors.Then designers would have thousands of water surfaces tuned to hundrets of tones. So when the program would say, "here is dark green color," so it will find the dark green texture of relevant kind (river/dam/lake/bay/sea) and display it. Simple. You would just click on photo, and this information would be inserted to scenery.

Edited February 6, 2012 by Socrat

[Johan_Dees 84]

you can't, because the water color is a base, and the sky will reflect in it and change the color dynamically.

[Socrat 0]

you can't, because the water color is a base, and the sky will reflect in it and change the color dynamically.

Maybe it could be problem. I don't know how the reflection works. Maybe it would be possible to add transparent layer with effect. I know just that I don't like the default FS inland water. Inland water with reflection from addons also still far of reality. The default inland water is too light and blue.Concerning the reflection, I watched Seine river in Paris, and realized that there are still more colors of reflection. It depends on weather conditions, daytime, position and maybe from view. Why GoogleEarth's photos have no reflection? For example when sky is dark and cloudy so there is white reflection, but when there is clear sky, so there is blue reflection. In evening and night there is many orange and other colors reflection from city. Edited February 8, 2012 by Socrat

[Socrat 0]

What environment/weather is the best by your opinion? I've tried Flight Environment pro, Active Sky v6 (This one is really good - by my opinion - it is better then GE pro and better then Active Sky Advanced ... I did not try the newest version of AS, but ASA consumed too much resources of my PC, simply too slow. Well I thought it should be something extra). I am interested when Active Sky will finally develop more sophisticated clouds, to be dynamic, changing its shapes slowly. I did not noticed any change, if the clouds are moved by wind or something. Especially from mountains it is well observed, when you stand on a mountain and the winds are blowing fast there, so even if the sky is fair, in Active Sky clouds are fixed. Even if the wind is 5 knots, I think this is not so simple. Down it seems like winds are not blowing, but you go up, and then you see that the winds are never on one place but going around you.REX - I did not try this addon-yet but what I have seen, this is better then Active Sky, and the water textures looks perfect. I must buy it.

Edited February 8, 2012 by Socrat