akriesman

Andy, I agree with the others. The 4200 is a terrific buy for the money right now.Also, if you have a spare monitor, the NView feature is terrific for flight sims. You can move your panel to one monitor, and leave the other for outside views. I use a cheap 15" monitor for the panels. I have a good quality 19" on top of the 15" for the outside views. The effect is terrific, and the multi-view feature does not seem to affect frame rates much, if at all.Just thought I would throw this out.Allen

Yep, I have the PFC Mooney Bravo yoke. I would be living in the street, if my wife knew exactly what that cost me 2 years ago :)I would like to see GoFlight produce reasonable throttle quadrant units. I would love to pay about $200 for a good twin-engine throttle quadrant with USB support (PFC does not have the USB support).Cheers,Allen

Chris,The FS2002 LandClass logic breaks the world into tiles that are 1,200 meters by 1,200 meters each. Each of these "tiles" can be assigned a unique LandClass texture value. The value is numeric, with each numeric value represents a particular texture set in the SCENEDBWORLDTEXTURE folder.What this means, is that when you fly over a particular tile, you will see a LandClass texture that was assigned for that particular tile.For example, a downtown area for a small country town might get a land class value that represents "Low-Intensity Residential". Microsoft has provided over 100 different sets of textures with FS2002, representing over 100 different LandClass values.FS2002 already uses these LandClass textures, but the mappings are not very detailed. The additional LandClass packages that you can purchase or download from Avsim are much more detailed and better represent the true terrain types.It is not too difficult to create your own, more detailed LandClass data. The topic is often discussed in the "Scenery Design Forum".Also, if you don't like the default Microsoft textures, you can "paint" over them with something more appropriate.IMHO, the LandClass technology is very important to FS2002. The ideal ground scenery would contain the exact aerial photos for a particular region. However, the storage required for these textures would be immense, and prevents them from being shared with others.LandClass is the next best thing. It may not provide the exact results, but it can do a pretty good job with very low storage requirements.Hope this helps out some. I got a little longwinded.Allen

I'm not sure, but I think a new version is going to be released soon. I believe that the new version will better integrate with FS2002. These guys put out commercialware product quality, but it's freeware. They deserve a ton of accolades for their efforts.You might check their website for updates.Allen

GoFlight is now taking orders on a new autopilot module. It looks great, but is a bit more pricey than their other stuff at $299.This company is just killing me. There stuff is fantastic, and modular. I keep wanting to add new pieces every month or two (my wife is going to kill me).Cheers,Allen

Scott,If you want to reach Elrond, you might try to get in touch with him thru Jim Kanold or Dan Martin (Flight Ontario Group). Jim and Dan can be found over in the scenery design forum.I've not talked to Elrond in a while. But, a while back he was taking a break from flight sims for a bit.Cheers,Allen

Stunning work Chris ! What else can be said.Allen

LandClass data and textures are separate from the mesh. Microsoft provides about 121 different land class textures with FS2002 (I think very few are used with the default LandClass). LandClass in the FS2002 world is broken up into LOD5 areas of about 1,200km x 1,200km each. You can assign a unique texture to each of the 1,200 x 1,200km areas. This is not very precise, but FS2002 improves the overall effect by blending adjoining textures.IMHO, The stock FS2002 summer textures are much too green for many areas in the U.S. Also, the FS2002 textures contain very few housing subdivisions, which are very common in the U.S.The LandClass definitions/mappings that come with FS2002 are very basic. However, the USGS provides detailed LandClass data that can greatly improve FS2002.The DFW LandClass example above, is due to a combination of new textures and more detailed LandClass data mappings.Hope this helps, and thanks for the feedback.Allen

That is some terrific scenery. I just got around to looking at it.You guys never miss the little details.Allen

Here is a snapshot of my LandClass project.First, I created the DFW LandClass using USGS data (Thanks to those that helped with my earlier problems).Second, the default textures (and the FSScene textures) looked nothing like the summer textures for this area. So, I started creating my own them a few weeks ago.The new textures are hand-painted using cropped pieces of aerial photos, taken for this region. Boy, what a painful process this was to get the coloring and seam matching ironed out. A total of 79 texture images were eventually reworked.I am finally satisfied with the results. I think the textures work really well for the Southern U.S. region, especially the cities.What do you guys think ? I would eventually consider releasing the textures and land class data to the public, if you guys think it worthwhile.This particular image shows a blending of 4 textures types (I think): Commercial, Low-Intensity Residential, High-Intensity Residential, and Evergreen Forest.http://www.avsim.com/terramodels/shot.jpgCheers,Allen

That's interesting news Rene. For some reason, I could not duplicate the problem.Thanks for sharing.Allen

Hi Markus,I am afraid I really don't have any suggestions for you, as I have completely forgotten everything about Fly! and Fly2K (and do not have it installed). The Fly2K editor is much different from the integrated FlyII editor. Hopefully, there is someone around here still using Fly2k who can help you. Also, there are no conversion tools that can be used to convert Fly II models and POD files to Fly2k format (at least none that I know of).From a development standpoint, Fly! and Fly2k are very different from Fly II. Unfortunately, I just could not afford the time to support Fly2K, after Fly II came out.Take care,Allen

Mare,I wish I could help you with V1.0. However, it is completely differerent from V2.x (which is Fly II only).I have not looked at 1.0 in a year or two, nor do I even have the source or documentation anymore. I have been working on V2.0 for so long, that I really can't remember a thing about 1.0.I do know that V1.0 did not have the integrated interface that V2.0+ has. All the objects created with 1.0 had to be placed with the Fly! editor.Sorry,Allen

Here you go. The table contains the 1st 3-letters of the base filename. I do not know about the rest of the characters, but it gets me where I need to be.http://home.att.net/~mesh64/nlcd_mapping.htmlI don't know who's web page this is, but thanks for the information !Allen

If found it. Thanks anyway.

It seems like I remember reading a post, where someone cracked the land use texture filename format in FS2002 (SCENEDBWORLDTEXTURE folder).I want to replace the default Land Use textures in FS2002 (they are too colorful and unrealistic for my area).Any suggestions ? Maybe I am just imagining reading this somewhere.Thanks,Allen

Thanks for the detailed explanation Richard. You just cleared up another point of confusion for me.Allen

Ryan,Sinced I only learned this recently also, here are a few places to start.FS2002 Custom Terrain SDKhttp://zone.msn.com/flightsim/FS02DevDeskSDK15.aspNice LandClass link, can't remember by who. This page has links to other nice pages and utilities.http://home.att.net/~mesh64/landcoverintro.htmlI would read the MS Document "Creating Terrain and Land Classification", which is part of the Terrain SDK. Pay special attention to the discussion of LOD.Also, watch out for the TEXTURE folder problem (see my recent post).Good Luck,Allen

I tried those numbers, and RESAMPLE aborted itself. I thought the joke was that the RESAMPLE app would not handle numbers of this precision without being in exponential form. I will them again though (must have had a typo).DFW looks a whole LOT better now. Thanks for the help.Allen

Rhumba...CellXdimensionDeg = 0.014705882352941176470588235294118CellYdimensionDeg = 0.011029411764705882352941176470588Thanks for the laugh :)Allen

Thanks guys for the advice. I did indeed have a texture folder.Now that you mention it, I remember reading about this somewhere. Boy does it cause some strange effects. I must have wasted 3 hours on the problem. Although, I also don't ask for directions, until I have been driving in circles for 3 hours either :) My wife can verify this to her dismay.On a side note, I wrote a program that takes detailed land classification images (TIFF files) from the USGS, and converts the TIF files into RAW files containing the translated land classes (NLCD to FS LC).I was planning on having this very detailed landclass scenery generated, from my 13,500 x 10,127 pixel image files (NLCD data). I knew that I had to generate an LOD 5 area of 3.75 degrees x 2.81. What I did not know, was that an LOD 5 region only samples points every 1.2km. So basically, my very large and detailed image, is no better than a 256x256 image.I don't see how you guys found this stuff out prior to the year-late SDK's. I tip my hat to you.Cheers,Allen

I have been playing with redoing the DFW LandClass for some time now. I had been having problems, so I took it down to the smallest, simplest example. No matter what I do, I get a generic looking terrain. and not the expected city textures.For my test, I put all the same landclass values in the binary input file (256 rows x 256 columns filled with a decimal 101 value). When I fill the value with 101 (city texture), I get a moon like landscape. When I fill the value with 106 (suburb), I get a similar landscape in another shade. This is really crazy. I have read the SDK, and have a good understanding of the process. I even tried LandClass assistant, but achieved the same results.I am wondering if the RESAMPLE.EXE that I am using is causing problems. It is the version from 6/28/02 that came with the Terrain SDK.Any advice would be welcome. Here are some screenshots and other information. Remember, the RAW input file is 65536 bytes, all filled with the value 101. First, the INF file (brackets removed)....DestinationLOD=5NorthLat=33.75SouthLat=30.9375WestLong=-97.5EastLong=-93.75DestDir=.DestBaseFileName=TESTSourceType=ClassU8SourceDir=.SourceFile=new.rawLat=33.75Lon=-97.5NumOfCellsPerLine=256NumOfLines=256CellXdimensionDeg=0.0147058CellYdimensionDeg=0.0110293Here are the values from the LOD 5 calculatorAnd, hear is a screenshot showing the problem (area around the airport should be city texture 101, but it is not).Thanks guys! I must be missing something rediculously simple.Allen

Trip,If you don't mind me asking, what kind of cooling fan are you using to run your Northwood 2.2a at 2.72Ghz ? Are you just using the boxed retail CPU fan ?I was considering trying to implement a very similar setup. Cheers,Allen

Awesome pics Todd. Thanks for sharing.Glad you made it back OK. It's nice to know that I can always hit the computer's reset button, when I am having trouble gaining altitude out of Tahoe :-lolAllen

Hi Gerrish,Thanks for the info regarding SCASM. I remember Rich (Richard Harvey) mentioning that Fly II changed to the SMF format, because it directly translated to the native Direct X commands. Personally, I have never had a look at the DirectX SDK (OpenGL yes, but DirectX no).Looks like MS is following suit.Cheers,Allen