Bill Womack

Am I correct in my understanding that ExcBuilder only excludes the XML-generated FS9 objects, Holger? I've been looking for an easy way to do exludes of autogen and custom buildings as well, and this one doesn't seem to have options for that sort of thing. Maybe I'm behind the times on my ExcBuilder versions, though.thanks,

Hi Bob (don't know where I got "Sam" from, sorry),I don't think I'd depend on top-down screenshots from FS for getting a match on the colors. A better method would be to identify which textures are being used for the landclass you're viewing, find that texture in FS and make a 24-bit converted copy for use in your image editor. That'll give you a version of the texture that's not affecting by terrain and lighting, thus a much better absolute image to match. The textures can be matched to their landclass counterparts partially by using the terrain texture names doc in the FS2002 (I think) terrain SDK. Of course, it's only a partial match so you might want to copy all of your FS textures into a new folder and convert them all to 24-bit and then view them using the thumbnail view in your folder options to see which ones appear to correspond to the landclasses in question. It's a little time consuming, but I'll bet you like the results better.thanks,

Howdy peterock,You might want to have a look at Ground2k by Christian Fumey. It's great for making VTP polys, and you can do exactly what you've described above with it. If you choose a terrain texture that doesn't have autogen (they're marked as such in G2k) then it will get rid of the trees in just the manner you described. It's available here in the library -- just make sure you get the newest version, as Christian has been a very busy boy over the last year or so.thanks,

That looks pretty good, Sam, especially for a formula-based approach to conversion. Does it blend in pretty well with the surrounding default terrain? I'd say you've got a decent technique in the works.thanks,

Yowsah! Man, I hope they either: a. Made a boatload of money on their MegaScenery packagesor b. Had a buddy that gave them a brother-in-law discount on the images!That's a big investment in a scenery project. I'll have to bookmark that site for after I win the lottery and begin giving away ridiculous amounts of scenery. ;-)

Ah the mysteries of the ages, part 26: how do they get those great color tiles from lowly black and white? Here's one little insight: if you create ground tiles as DXT1 bitmaps, the end result is 8-bit, regardless of where you started. You got it, that's 256 colors. So first of all, your working files can indeed be 8-bit, although you'll probably work in 24 bit mode in Photoshop and then convert to DXT1 at the end, so it's all academic. The technique you talk of for creating more colors with gaussian blur sounds interesting, but I'm not sure it's how I would approach it. After all, the resultant ground tiles will be so low-res already that you don't want to do anything that will soften the image whatsoever! To answer question 2, black and white images are always 256 colors, if they're true grayscale, so that's one less thing to worry about. If you've got a black and white for starters, then you've got 256 shades of gray to work with.Here's another way to approach the grayscale conversion conundrum: start with a black and white image and convert it to RGB in Photoshop. It'll still look black and white, but at least it will have three channels now, red green and blue. Then using the channels pane, adjust the brightness and contrast of each of the red, green and blue channels and the overall color will start shifting. You'll see the results if you also have the RGB channel turned on. It's similar to what you get with the "colorize" button in the Hue, Saturation and Brightness panel, but with finer control. Once you've gotten a base color set for your image, you can then go back to the layers and start picking out groups of tones and copying them to their own layer for colorizing. I cannot imagine how you could write an action to do it all from start to finish, but maybe that's just me... some enterprising soul might be able to do just that if they gave up having a life and devoted themselves to this problem. As for me, I'm happy to pluck away with a more labor-intensive hand process for now.thanks,

Sounds like it could also be the dreaded seasonal Crash to Desktop bug. If you do a search on that term here you'll find all sorts of info on it. I have had crashes at BOI myself altering my terrain.cfg file. Search for MaskClassMap and I'm sure you'll find the fix, although it's been so long now I don't remember exactly what I did. Hope that helps.

You're quite welcome, Greg, and thanks for the support!

Hi Victor,Don't be discouraged, mate. You're doing it right, it just takes a lonnnnnnggggg time to develop a technique and get the textures looking the way you want. I am a graphic designer and artist with 10+ years of experience in Photoshop, and I can tell you that it takes many, many hours of colorizing a black and white image before it looks truly convincing. If you have the time and can hang in there and experiment with it you may find that at some point you have a method of doing it that actually works for you. And yes, I'd say you should be using quite a few selective layers of colors; you can't expect it to look right with just 3 or 4. But it's mostly art and not so much science, so it might take a lot of trial and error before you like the results. Keep at it, bro. I feel your pain!thanks,

I hear ya! Actually I use two monitors too, and I'm somewhat perturbed that they seem to have broken some of the functionality in FS9.

Baron,Did you ever fly FS2000? If so, you might have downloaded the patch for it that Microsoft provided to clear up some issues months after initial release. More recently, how about CFS3? If you had flown it when it first came out, you would have been right to think it needed patching -- that's probably why Microsoft did just that a bit later. I'm not saying FS2004 (or Microsoft for that matter) is perfect, but it rankles me that people continually state that they have some sort of anti-patch policy. That's demonstrably wrong.

LOL, Hoger... garbage in, garbage out I guess ;-). I had read somewhere that it was tomography, but even then I though "hmmm, that's weird, shouldn't it be topography?" I have to find that site where I read that and delete it from my bookmarks. Carry on,

Hi Don,You can just make a sub-folder in your FS9 "Addon Scenery" folder named whatever you like and make a subfolder under that called "scenery" and put the mesh there. If you do that though, you'll have to go into your scenery library and add an entry for the mesh scenery. If you put the mesh bgl files directly into your Addon Scenery/Scenery folder then it will automatically be loaded when you next start FS. However, if you do it this way be sure to note what files you put in there, because if you want to remove it later you'll want to delete only the files you added.SRTM stands for Shuttle (as in Space Shuttle) Research Tomography Mission. It was one of the shuttle missions flown a while back where they pointed a radar (I believe) at the earth's surface and made multiple passes in an attempt to map the planet's terrain. The resultant datasets have been partially released to the public, which is only fair since we (the American public) paid for it. I'd be interested to hear what you think of it once it's installed. Good luck!

I've been experimenting with sticking some FS9-style XML-generated windsocks in my scenery, and although the process does render a working windsock, it's so crappy looking that I hesitate to use it in a project. The problem is the pole -- instead of being a nice stick-looking affair, it looks like two fairly large rectangles crossed in the same fashion as we use for making trees. See the picture below for more clarity. Are the rest of you getting this kind of look? My first thought was that maybe I was missing a pole texture, but I kind of doubt that textures would even be needed if the polys were thinner. Thoughts?http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/69525.jpgthanks,

There are some very, very nice helos for free download at http://www.hovercontrol.com. I got an Augusta 109 that's really great looking and flying just last night from that site. Jordan Moore's work is top-notch, and there are some works by other authors on their site too. In fact, if you like simulated rotary wing flying, HoverControl is an excellent all around resource. Check it out! I'm seriously considering getting Aerosoft's Manhattan scenery so I can practice big-city helo flying soon. I think it's a welcome change of pace from fixed-wing operation.thanks,

That worked great, Jim. Nice and fast! Thanks.

Does anyone have an install of the Bonanza that they'd like to share? I've been trying since yesterday to download the one from francesim.com, but it keep stalling on me and the transfer rates are abyssmal. I'd like to try it out!thanks,

I have to admit that I don't think I've ever seen this problem in my FS. However, I know that FSUIPC has an option to turn off wind when your wheels are on the ground, which sounds like it might fix this problem. As soon as your wheels leave terra firma the winds kick in, so you need to anticipate crosswinds, but at least it might stop what sounds like an annoying problem. I don't know if the free version of FSUIPC offers this control or not, but it's definitely there in my paid version.thanks,

Hi Joel,I installed them for my 9700 Pro a couple of days ago. So far very smooth sailing; no problems to report.thanks,

Hey, that's no problem as far as I'm concerned. Skepticism is normal and I wouldn't have it any other way. But while you're off being skeptical and second-guessing what they did, I'll be over here enjoying smooth performance and having a great time in FS!thanks,

Hi Steve,From what I've been able to tell, the goal of FSGS is to help you wring the last drop of performance out of your system. They can't work miracles with a sub-par PC, but your specs are not so out of date, so they could probably help you. They won't charge you to ask; you should bring this up with them. The service is conducted entirely over MSN with voice, so yes I'd say that's pretty essential. MSN is very easy to use and you could just set up a Hotmail account to log in with and just delete or ignore it once you're done. A mic is a very cheap bit of kit, so I'd say it wouldn't hurt to have one around. Just my opinion ;-).thanks,

Sure, here ya go:http://www.fs-gs.com/services.htm

No, I didn't purchase anything else other than what I already owned. I updated all my various drivers to their latest versions and that was it for software installs.

Hi,Sorry to be so vague about what they had me do, but I am obscuring what actually took place because the advice given me was quite specific to my combination of hardware, and I wouldn't want to lead anyone down yet another technological rat hole by representing my tweaks as the best for their system. And, of course, at FSGS consulting is their business. Wouldn't be very sporting of me to go spreading around for free what they charge for. thanks,

Sorry for the length of this post, but I think I may just have found the perfect "add-on" for FS, and I've got to share my experiences. There's a new company on the block called Flight Simulator Graphic Solutions. Their primary offering is a service deigned to help FS users tweak both their hardware and software settings in order to get the maximum performance from their PC when running FS, or any other application for that matter. My first reaction was skepticism. If I had a penny for every tweak posted on FS-related forums that I've tried (usually to little or no effect) I'd have my own real aircraft by now. I figured this would be more of the same -- at best some obvious stuff that I'd already tried; at worst a bunch of technical hogwash that would consume hours of my time and leave me with a botched system or right back where I started. However, a few things conspired to change my mind. I'd read glowing reviews from their customers on their own web site (http://www.fs-gs.com), but more importantly, I'd read an independent account of working with them from a very satisfied 'simmer in a recent issue of PC Pilot. So, in a moment of weakness (and dissatisfaction with my FS performance) I decided to send them an email and explore the possibility of getting some help. The final factor that helped me decide was that they promised me they could bring a great deal of fluidity back to my flying experiences, and were willing to postpone payment until I was happy with the result. It's hard to find fault with an offer like that.I had an initial MSN Messenger session with their head engineer in which he pointed out some things that were badly astray in my system. These were due to ideas I had about PCs and performance that dated back to the mid '90s, and turned out to be dated indeed and quite ill advised. Once I had corrected those problems, we had another marathon 4-hour session in which he systematically went through my PC with me, offering advice on what to tweak, delete or add in order to get my system down to its leanest and meanest. The end result? It's hard to overstate just how much of an improvement I have seen in my FS performance. I had recently purchased an add-on commuter aircraft that looked great to me, only to discover that it gave terrible frame rates from the VC. After the FSGS tweaks, this baby ran smooth as silk. I'm now able to turn my sliders up to full or nearly full for everything. Stutters had been my main nemesis before. Now, they're all but non-existent except in the most demanding of environments. In short, it's been a total upgrade of the enjoyment I get from 'simming. Now I can't wait to get finished with my work each day so I can get in a flying session before dinner... and maybe one or two more before bed!As a developer, there has been an important side effect of all this optimization, and it wasn't clear to me until we had gotten all the kinks worked out of my rig. When designing, it's very important to understand the performance impact your creations will have on a user's simulator. Now that I have my machine running at peak efficiency, I can know for sure that if I see a performance hit with a new design, it's time to go back to the drawing board. Before I could only speculate as to whether my system or my scenery caused slowdowns. Now I know for sure that the sim is running nearly perfectly, so if it starts to hiccup, I know who to blame ;-).I didn't really mean for this to run on so much, but if I had found a piece of software that enabled my to really smooth out my FS performance, I'd sure as heck run to the forums and tell everyone about it. Well this isn't software, but the effect is stunning never the less. I think it might have been one of the best investments I've made in years in my hobby. If you're not happy with your FS performance, I'd be willing to bet that these guys can help. And the best part of it is that it's not a bunch of techno-snake oil, it's just good solid computing practices coupled with a deep understanding of what your PC needs in order to run software as demanding as FS as well as possible. I can't recommend their services highly enough.thanks,