I only wish there was a way to actually ride the skyway but if you haven't seen this one on flightsim.to it is simply incredible work.  Huge thank you the the dev!

Here are my tributes:

 

Nice!  I will load it up.  MS/Asobo have put plenty of other POI in the area, including observation decks etc.

I am driving out that way early next year hopefully, and around the Matterhorn area (Zermatt). 
I have actually used the Porter in MSFS to do a little reconnaissance of the area. 
I managed to follow the actual roads I will be taking, and even where I will be parking - very useful!

Thank you very much for your appreciation!  The project now contains also the data for North America and Japan, an  still growing!

 

For all you guys that are not aware of the project, here Is a Little trailer video, don't forget to turn the volume up, there Is some very emotional music inside, kudos to the composer

[video]https://youtu.be/vbqVgr4HfnY[/video]

 

 

And the link to the full project

https://it.flightsim.to/file/14840/project-litfts-europe

Edited October 19, 20214 yr by mamu82
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42 minutes ago, mamu82 said:

Thank you very much for your appreciation!  The project now contains also the data for North America and Japan, an  still growing!

 

For all you guys that are not aware of the project, here Is a Little trailer video, don't forget to turn the volume up, there Is some very emotional music inside, kudos to the composer

[video]https://youtu.be/vbqVgr4HfnY[/video]

 

 

And the link to the full project

https://it.flightsim.to/file/14840/project-litfts-europe

Thank you for all of your work!  Simply marvelous bringing this type of animation and modeling into the sim.  Thank you!  

On 10/19/2021 at 3:03 PM, mamu82 said:

For all you guys that are not aware of the project, here Is a Little trailer video, don't forget to turn the volume up, there Is some very emotional music inside, kudos to the composer

[video]https://youtu.be/vbqVgr4HfnY[/video]

I just watched that trailer and immediately went to download it! There are even lifts in my area I have to check out!

Projects like this (I count We Love VFR to it) just blow my mind. How do you guys do it? Access OSM Data via some kind of API and write your own scripts / code to automatically convert all of that in BGL files? What is the magic behind this? And I do not want to say We Love VFR is easy or easier to do, but your project has dots that have to be connected in the right way to make a whole lift and then it is also animated. This is just mindblowing.

I am sure this would not be possible without a lot of automation in the creation process and if we did not have OSM, it would not be possible at all. The amount of detail and beauty a single project can add to MSFS for nearly the whole world is absolutely amazing.

 

Thank you very much for putting in, what must be a ton of work, to create something we all can enjoy 🙂

3 hours ago, buedi said:

Projects like this (I count We Love VFR to it) just blow my mind. How do you guys do it?

🙂

In my case it's all based on a local copy of full OSM data, my software, and thousands of manual edits.

My program analyses the data, crosses it with exclusions like airport boundaries, or buildings, combines with FAA and NOAA data and more. For some kind of data like cooling towers or radomes it's mostly manual process to make it all as close to real life as possible. I also usually manually check all highest objects. So yeah, I think I've passed 10000 manually edited objects already.

On 10/23/2021 at 11:54 AM, buedi said:

 

Projects like this (I count We Love VFR to it) just blow my mind. How do you guys do it? Access OSM Data via some kind of API and write your own scripts / code to automatically convert all of that in BGL files? What is the magic behind this? And I do not want to say We Love VFR is easy or easier to do, but your project has dots that have to be connected in the right way to make a whole lift and then it is also animated. This is just mindblowing.

I am sure this would not be possible without a lot of automation in the creation process and if we did not have OSM, it would not be possible at all. The amount of detail and beauty a single project can add to MSFS for nearly the whole world is absolutely amazing.

 

THANKS A BUNCH for your appreciation!!!

It's is my turn now!

PROBLEM: i want to add some pylons and cable in the vicinity of an Aiport in the mountains with a ski resort in the nearby.

Tedious work to do it manually. Can I automate it? Yeah, since placement files in msfs are plain file text (xml), I can write a script to write those text files

But, hey, I know that i've seen the lifts in some charts (google maps, Open Street Map and a pletora of others). is that data available for download?

Yeah! you can gather OSM data in many ways, so i download a snippet of data and analyzed it: the Open Street Map consist of POINTS, WAYS (and relations), and with those they map anything in the world

A lift is a thing that goes from a point A to a point B, with several points - pylons- in the middle

And OSM contains a lot more than just coordinates, we have the lift name, its type, its capacity and so on 

PROBLEM SOLVED!

- download the data via overpass-api for the area i want to work on, read it in my own software ( written in the worst language in the world, VB.NET)

- for each WAY, at starting POINT place a station, in the middle POINTs place a pylon, at last POINT place a station, compile the scenery and..everything is messed up, all the object are oriented in the same way

PROBLEM: compute the bearing of each object, it is trigonometrics time (just a snippet of code to let you know how thing can get complicated!)

	            lat1 = Val(strlat1) * Math.PI / 180
            lon1 = Val(strlon1) * Math.PI / 180
            lat2 = Val(strlat2) * Math.PI / 180
            lon2 = Val(strlon2) * Math.PI / 180
            X = Math.Cos(lat2) * Math.Sin(lon2 - lon1)
            Y = Math.Cos(lat1) * Math.Sin(lat2) - Math.Sin(lat1) * Math.Cos(lat2) * Math.Cos(lon2 - lon1)
            bearingRad = Math.Atan2(X, Y)
            bearing = bearingRad * (180 / Math.PI)
	

great, we have pylons and station (of course hand designed in blender from scratch)

on so on

the cables PROBLEM was a nice one, since i can only scale,rotate and pitch/yaw objects in the scenery placement xml,  i had to design a pletora on different cable size in order to make them consistent (get the distance/bearing and pitch between two points and scale them according to the size of my various cables samples)

BIG PROBLEM: to place cables, the precise altitude of the pylons is needed, so i had to find a source for that, gpsvisualizer.com was the handiest one, but i have also try to use the google elevation data (with its own code) and the bing elevation api (another coding challenge)

and if the pylons are missing? because data is NEVER complete or perfect? the only solution is to add them manually! so I learned how to edit the osm data and started adding pylons, something like 60.000 (you can see my work here:  https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/aerialway=pylon#chronology

the 2021 spike is most likely due to my additions)...and this is where any of you can help, improving the data!! (more infos here http://projectlifts.altervista.org/help.html)

 

So i have CABLES, why don't add cabins? it's Blender (3d design software) time! and a lot of coding, again!)

last step was excluding the building under the stations and cutting milions of trees under the lifts, and easy one, just create a basic exclusion polygons and exclude vegetation polygons in the sim, import the lifts data in a GIS software (my choice is QGIS), some geoprocessing around the feature, merge the basic polygons to the processed ones, editing their attributes table and voila, deforestation and demolition problem solved!

in the end, someone says "hey, why don't add lights on the slopes, you know, OSM data have that tag!"...and a new routine has to be written, and someone @PuffinFlight  is now happy, and i'm happy too, because those lit slopes are freaking awesome!

day by day,  my little application has grown up to over 2.000 lines of code. And coding is not my daily job, so Google was really my friend!

I think that's all by now!

Would this be possible without the OSM data? Of course, but it would have taken ages to do! And free data is the key to make freewares, and I'm proud to say that any software and asset i used was free, so anyone can replicate that for free, with some spare time (I took me 6 months to get to this result, but this was a one man band, like Puffin, and I'm not a professional, so I think that now, with all the data I have added to OSM, Asobo can do that without to much hassle, and eventually obtain the right altitude of every pylon, wich is still my biggest worry/chagrin/trial !)

and if you have read this far, thanks again!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and eventually i manged to show the video in the forum too!

 

 

Edited October 24, 20214 yr by mamu82

Fantastic work! Thank you so much.

 

May I suggest you change the title of your project which seems a little misleading, at least to me.

When I first came across your project I thought it only adds lifts to the Mont Blanc. It didn't really catch my attention.

I just learned from this thread that it actually has a (almost) global coverage! Which puts this at the same level as the "We love VFR" must-have mods.

Might just have been me and my laziness of course. 

Again, thank you very much for your contribution.

Edited October 24, 20214 yr by RALF9636

On 10/19/2021 at 6:03 AM, mamu82 said:

And the link to the full project

https://it.flightsim.to/file/14840/project-litfts-europe

I couldn't get this to work.

I downloaded the full project file with the Mont Blanc file and installed to Community folder. I thought I would check out the Big Bear/ Lake Arrowhead region in southern California where the locals ski in the winter.

I spawned into Big Bear airport but didn't see any lifts there. When I tried to spawn into Lake Arrowhead airport, I got a CTD as soon as I clicked "Fly." Re-booted and tried again, with another aircraft, the C-152, and got the same CTD.

I removed the project file and the CTD went away.

I installed this mod yesterday and really like it. It adds so much immersion to the area around where I live (Sion, Switzerland) which is of course covered in ski resorts. Thanks so much for your hardwork and innovation! These kind of details bring so much to the sim.

Regarding some feedback, I did notice a few errors around Siviez and Mont Fort where the cable cars and/or cables extend into mid air beyond the mountain top. This was a bit immersion breaking, especially when exploring by helicopter, and would be great if they can be fixed (not sure how hard that is though). I only had time so far to test around where I live so not sure how frequent such errors are. 

Animated gondolas and ski lifts would be the icing on the cake. I hope this project continues to grow.

Thanks again.

5 hours ago, dobee51 said:

I couldn't get this to work.

I downloaded the full project file with the Mont Blanc file and installed to Community folder. I thought I would check out the Big Bear/ Lake Arrowhead region in southern California where the locals ski in the winter.

I spawned into Big Bear airport but didn't see any lifts there. When I tried to spawn into Lake Arrowhead airport, I got a CTD as soon as I clicked "Fly." Re-booted and tried again, with another aircraft, the C-152, and got the same CTD.

I removed the project file and the CTD went away.

Really Sorry because of the issue! Will certainly look forward into It and find where the problem Is! Thanks for reporting this this problems, really help improving!

54 minutes ago, steve310002 said:

I installed this mod yesterday and really like it. It adds so much immersion to the area around where I live (Sion, Switzerland) which is of course covered in ski resorts. Thanks so much for your hardwork and innovation! These kind of details bring so much to the sim.

Regarding some feedback, I did notice a few errors around Siviez and Mont Fort where the cable cars and/or cables extend into mid air beyond the mountain top. This was a bit immersion breaking, especially when exploring by helicopter, and would be great if they can be fixed (not sure how hard that is though). I only had time so far to test around where I live so not sure how frequent such errors are. 

Animated gondolas and ski lifts would be the icing on the cake. I hope this project continues to grow.

Thanks again.

Thanks for your feedback and glad you like It!

Actually, the issue of the altitude of the whole thing Is my biggest problem (as per description in the file and my "poem" in the post above!)

The sdk Is lacking at the moment of a comprehensive terrain API, wich Is required for perfect alignment (unless Microsoft Will be so kind to share with me the terrain elevation sources and the interpolation rules they are using to generate the terrain...or the 155.000 altitude points i Need 😅)

This Is the reason why i released a version without cables (and everything attached)

https://it.flightsim.to/file/22152/project-lifts-no-cable-version

10 hours ago, mamu82 said:

Really Sorry because of the issue! Will certainly look forward into It and find where the problem Is! Thanks for reporting this this problems, really help improving!

It's probably a conflict with one of my other sceneries. I can't remove all of my add-ons because MSFS encrypts everything in the Community folder. But I can remove the ones in Addons Linker like BigPine.

Did anybody else have a problem with Lake Arrowhead airport? It looked like just a grass strip.

21 minutes ago, dobee51 said:

It's probably a conflict with one of my other sceneries. I can't remove all of my add-ons because MSFS encrypts everything in the Community folder. But I can remove the ones in Addons Linker like BigPine.

Did anybody else have a problem with Lake Arrowhead airport? It looked like just a grass strip.

I Just did some Flights there,with my not really crowded community folder, no issue (both from big bear and male arrowhead). I have Also downloaded the freeware from flightsim.to for big bear, even changing loading order, still no problems. 

Thanks anyway for giving me the opportunity to check the area, i saw that they have Lit slopes, OSM data doesn't have that tag, i Will correct the data in order to Place the my light poles!

If you like to name some of your mods in the area i can download then and try as well!