In the file library there is a new scenery for Ancona Falconara Italy (LIPY). The scenery is very nice! Payware quality. It is a donationware scenery, but if you don't want to donate the readme file tells you what file to delete to get rid of the donationware signs in the scenery.

 

The scenery is made by Gianluca Giovannini and Team Phoenix. The file name is zz_-_ancona_falconara_LIPY_2013_phoenix.zip

 

(just so no one gets confused this is a FS9 scenery)

It is very nice, and just down the road from another Italian favourite, LIPR Rimini.

And like that one, also a shared-use military airport, so all kinds of AI can visit there.

 

That's what I have been doing: installing all sorts of AI!

I don't much like the cruciform trees used, is all - otherwise a cracking FS9.5 scenery, and many thanks to the authors!

 

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Nice screenshots. How are those helicopters working as AI? I did not install the AI helicopters cause they are not true AI planes and didn't think they would work right as AI.

Thanks I thought we should show a bit of the scenery here, just great to have a quality FS9 offering pop up.

The A109's have a separate bit of the airport to go to, so just do a takeoff run on their own little taxiway.

Not too intrusive at all.

I use Flight1's AI helos too, and added a few heliports for vertical T/O+Landing movements using various other Italian helos. 

Gianluca and friends have a nice selection of work in the Team Phoenix portfolio:

http://www.gianlucag78.altervista.org/Scenari.htm

and I'll follow them with interest.

Very nice scenery, but some things need fixing.

First, the fps hit is huge if you don't delete or de-activate the file "Lipy_volgrass_56_2500.bgl" in the photoscenery folder.

Then as always when installing a new scenery, I go through the textures, and usually find lots of inconsistancies. This scenery was no expection.

Lots of 32bit files with 100% opaque alpha channels (and some dxt3 as well), that should be dxt1 with no alpha.

 

But this didn't take long to fix and now it works very well!

Neumanix, you are so very sure you are right about texturing. I must admit you have been right before - your DXT fixer program is invaluable and has a great effect on some things. But with respect, the textures needn't necessarily be DXT1. In fact, my sim CTDs when I encounter a DXT1 texture in scenery, so I always convert everything to DXT3 with mipmaps before installation.

Sure, a texture without alpha detail (i.e. just white pixels) can be in dxt3 as well, but there's no point in doing so.

Whats more important is to not leave textures as 32bit unless you really need some highly detailed alphas.

 

I have never heard of CTDs caused by dxt1 textures though. That would mean almost every single addon scenery would be unusable for you.

 

I'd just like to see developers stick to the few simple rules regarding textures for FS9.

I think it's a graphics card thing. I'm running on an AMD laptop. And yes, sceneries are a problem. I convert all my scenery textures using a batch file and a combination of imagetool and nconvert before install...And sometimes things fail anyway and I have to hunt down the lone texture file that didn't convert and fix it. But I have written some effective batches to automate the process for general purposes.

 

 

First, the fps hit is huge if you don't delete or de-activate the file "Lipy_volgrass_56_2500.bgl" in the photoscenery folder.

 

Got to try this, I tried the scenery and my framerates dropped to 10! Very nice though.

 

Thank you for the info!

Sascha

 

 

First, the fps hit is huge if you don't delete or de-activate the file "Lipy_volgrass_56_2500.bgl"

Didn't do anything on this rig... I do go down to 18fps when on the ground, and looking at the refinery, though.

What I am finding seriously distracting, is THOSE TREES

Any ideas on how to improve/replace them?

If you can locate the library being used, you can take a tree model that you like and replace its GUID with the one used by the trees currently in place using ModelConverterX. But that will affect all sceneries using that library equally...

 

 

If you can locate the library being used

Ah yes... well now.

 

 

Then as always when installing a new scenery, I go through the textures, and usually find lots of inconsistancies. This scenery was no expection.

I have run dxtfixerx on the 3 LIPY folders and no error was reported...

 

 

I have run dxtfixerx on the 3 LIPY folders and no error was reported...

So did I and didn't find any dxt3 alpha issues either. There were other issues in this case as I stated in my post.

Lots of 32bit files with 100% opaque alpha channels (and some dxt3 as well), that should be dxt1 with no alpha.

These?

What effect do they have in the sim?

I was told long ago not to mix DXT1 files with a DXT3 environment.

What would be the effect if converted simply to DXT3?