What keeps me busy...

[Jimmy RFR 406]

One of the reasons why I enjoy flight simming so much is that it provides me with a sandbox to do stuff in.

 

My latest little thing has been a conversion (with full permission) of some of Gregory Putz's brilliant FS2004 sceneries into XP10.

 

Anyhow, these are in progress shots of CJN4 Assiniboia; I still have a bit more work to do. The 3D objects are his, everything else is my work.

 

Disregard the FPS showing - this is on my work/dev laptop, which is pretty far from a gaming desktop!

 

Just thought I'd share.

 

 

 

 

Edited the image links.

[Phantom88 3,284]

Neat!!! 

[tonywob 4,768]

Fantastic, good to see you getting your hands dirty. Be aware though, it's addictive.

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Be aware though, it's addictive.

 

Oh, I know!  I've spent far, far too many hours doing the same in FSX... However, XP is a breath of fresh air when it comes to scenery design; so much of it makes a lot of sense.  I like how even objects can be fiddled with in a text editor, and how easy lines, polys and forests are to create.

 

So much of XP seems to be open to mucking around in, it's a blast.  Hell, the other night I even had a go at putting my own 3D objects into the cabin of an aircraft with me.... Not exactly something easily done in FSX!

 

I doubt this particular airport will be all that popular.  It's really in the middle of nowhere.  However, it's a neat place, being an old BCATP airfield, and it's in a region I like to fly.  More importantly, it gives me a bit of experience before I take on a few much bigger (and likely more popular) projects that I have my eye on!

[tonywob 4,768]

The same here. I've done a few airfields which generally aren't very popular destinations (They are small grass strips in the UK), but they are airfields I know in real-life and really wanted to see in X-Plane. 

 

I'm currently working on a bigger airport, Liverpool EGGP. This one, I expect to be a little more popular, especially since there is a payware version for FSX, but it's becoming very frustrating working with the development tools. Although the file formats are simple to work with, I think the tools for X-Plane development are frustratingly bad for more complicated projects. The 2D view in WED is very limiting and has a clunky user interface (Try working with complicated sceneries) and OverlayEditor is irritating in that it never selects the object I want and it's so easy to move the wrong object. Neither tool will show overlayed ground textures, painted lines etc correctly, so getting the airport ground textures correct is very very frustrating. I think what would be nice is to be able to do everything inside something like Blender or 3DS, i.e. The entire airport, buildings, ground textures as one big scene. This way, it would be much easier to get more natural looking airports where all the lighting, textures match etc.. Technically it's possible using Blender layers, but the objects then all export using a common origin which causes buildings further away from the center to float in the air :-)

 

Maybe one day, someone will write a tool to do so, but at the moment FSX I think has the advantage here.

[CarlosF 1,234]

Nice work Jimmy!