Israel - the Holy Land. FS2004 scenery

[Guest seev_39]

Hi all,I have an unusual offer to make you all. Hope it will get some response.For the last 5 months or so, I am working on a detailed scenery for Israel - the Holy Land, utilizing those three excellent programs known to all of us; ground2k, EZ-landclass and gmax. The country (700 km long and 130 km wide) is divided into 4 parts;1. Galilee, 2. Central Coastal Area with Tel-Aviv.3. Central mountains and Jordan Valley with Jerusalem, 4. Southern Desert with Dead Sea.So far I completed part #1 which was recently uploaded to Avsim and other sites. A friend, Alex Lawrence made additional gmax objects for that part, mainly around the port of Haifa. Those were also uploaded here at Avsim. I am working now on part #2 and hope to complete it in about a month time.The scenery is made in the highest LOD and shows realistic coast lines, ports, highways, rivers, important secondary roads and rail roads, cities, towns and villages of 1,000 residents and above, accurate vegetation, sand dunes, quarries, and other land uses needed for flying VFR. The scenery is enhanced with lighting to enable easy VFR navigation by night. Re-meshing is done wherever needed. Actually I am remaking every square mile of the country, because the default FS2004 scenery is ... o.k. you know what it is. When completed the whole scenery will consist of 200-250 BGL files. I realize now that what is really missing are the historical landmarks of the Holy Land, and there are many. Part of them are also important landmarks for pilots flying VFR. Just to name a few; The Church of Annunciation at Nazareth, The Church of the Beatitudes near the Lake of Galilee, The Monastery on Mount Tavor, The 5th century monasteries in the Judean desert, The walls of old Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Ancient Caesarea with the Roman theater, Masada, Ancient Akko (St. Jean de Acre) with the Crusaders castle and walls. And many, many others. I thought that maybe one or two of you guys is interested in making some of those sceneries for the benefit of our community. Needless to say, the sceneries must be in gmax and in high quality. Pictures and details are available on the web and from other sources. I will try to provide additional pictures and details whenever possible. Publication will of course be done by each designer for his work with full credits going to him or her (upload as a separate scenery).Looking forward to hear some voices.Have funSeev

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi SeevI have been having a look at part 1 of your scenery. Great stuff, well done! We shall all look forward to the next part.One little point about your posting inviting designers to create some of the landmark buildings though. Whatever makes you say "the sceneries must be in gmax and high quality"? Models made to a high quality by any technique will serve equally well, surely. Indeed, models made with alternative tools such as NovaSim or FSDS2, or even hand-crafted in SCASM, are likely to be marginally superior to those made in gMax (providing that they are suffiently carefully made with adequate detail) because they won't suffer from the minor errors unfortunately introduced by the current gMax-BGL interface (unless corrected by expert designers who know how to intervene in the assembler code produced). Even models made with older tools such as Nova, FSDS1 or EOD can also be equally accurate and indistinguishable from newer models - their only drawback being that they may not be compatible with future versions of FS in years to come - but that's hardly much of a consideration at present. So don't put any willing participants off unnecessarily simply because they are lovers of one of the other tools and, perhaps justifiably, prefer their favourite to gMax.Your own work is fantastic - thanks!CheersGerrish

[Guest seev_39]

Hi Gerrish,Many thanks for the compliments.I humbly accept your reproach. It was certainly a mistake to limit developers to one technique. What I actually meant was; lets use a program that is frame rate friendly

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi SeevNo apology needed, and please don't think I was 'putting you down' at all! This is just a favourite hobby-horse of mine, as many other followers of this forum will tell you!!! I'm always making a bore of myself about it. (And incidentally your message did sound entirely positive.) It's just that there is a widespread misunderstanding that gMax is actually 'better' in some way than other tools. This just isn't true (apart from the fact that it is free!) - each of the tools has their own advantages and disadvantages and none is perfect or 'the best'. gMax is fairly powerful and easy to use for creation of complex, realistic, models once the learning curve is overcome, but it doesn't always create the best-made or highest performance models. FSDS2 is also excellent, but also has one or two minor errors, whilst NovaSim is better than either in many respects but has its own minor limitations and a user interface that some find a little awkward and 'unusual' (unless they are long-term users of its predecessors, Nova and VOD). All three produce more-or-less equally 'quick' models - NovaSim may have a very slight edge here overall, especially as gMax does rather tend to encourage people to create models with a higher polygon count all too easily. The older tools are still using pre-floating-point coding techniques of course, so their models will tend to be rather inferior in terms of effect on frame rates, but this is rarely a major issue when modelling individual 'landmark' buildings -it only becomes more important when modelling lots of objects in relatively close vicinity.But here I go again, banging on about one of my favourite topics!!! What a great hobby FS scenery design is ... room for all of us and always enough going on, and new things to learn, to keep us all interested and keep minds alive!Cheers (and greetings from the UK)Gerrish

[arno 1]

Hi Gerrish,Good points. But I think it would make sense to ask for a program that uses the FP commands. These seem to be better on the frames.For the NL2000 scenery one member had made some parts in FSDS1. He had not designed them really efficient, so after that we optimized them a bit. Then we converted both these objects (optimized and not) to FSDS2 with the floating point commands. I then placed these objects in a test scenery and compared the frames:FSDS1: 19 framesFSDS2: 21 framesFSDS1_opt: 29 framesFSDS2_opt: 38 framesSo using the FP commands seems indeed better for the frames, especially when the object is designed with some care :).

[Guest GerrishGray]

Hi ArnoWow! You certainly got a big difference - although it seems to be your optimisation that was the bigger factor.Perhaps this is a subject for one or more interesting threads on their own ...Gerrish

[arno 1]

Yes, might be a better to make a separate thread, to prevent this one getting to much off topic :). I will start one.