Feedback for MaskRider and UncleTgt...

[Rami]

Hello gents,

I took on the twin heads of MaskRider's Micronesia package and UncleTgt's Caroline Islands scenery package today. Here are the results for Rhumbaflappy's new water masks. For the most part, the double coastlines are acceptable, with the exception of the following...

Gob list Micronesia

Problem airfields/areas

MN_Angaur Island
MN_Ngesebus Island
MN_Peleliu
MN_Pinglep_Island
MN_Woleai
Uilthi Atoll islands

Airfields altered but usable

MN_Palmyra Atoll 25
Pingelap Atroll Strip
Uilthi Atoll

Airbase.dat corrections needed (regardless of water masks used)

MN_Lukunor Island (Along the shoreline)

MN_Lukunor Island strip (On a taxiway)

MN_Moen SPB WSW takeoff (On a mountainside)

Pingelap Atoll Strip (In the grass, almost in the water to the left of the runway)

Ponape Fighter1 Rwy34 (Well off the edge of the runway, to the left)

MN_Yap (on the grass, away from the end of the runway)

Stock Ponape airfield (Is this even needed anymore?)

Also, following the bitmap removal instructions for Woleai, it has an unexpected consequence...(see pics)

And, is the other pic a mystery field of some kind?

[Rami]

Good morning,

The airbase.dat entry for Beru Island is in the wrong hemisphere...it is E176, not W176. :encouragement:

[Rami]

UncleTgt,

Forget the picture regarding Woleai; I forgot to read which airfields from the Micronesia pack to remove when installing the Carolines. Oops!

Edit: Add MN_Ulul Island Strip and Ulithi Atoll - Falalop Island to the list of airbase.dat entries that need revising.

Also, The Ulul Island airbase.dat entry now just sits in the middle of the water. Is that right??

[Rami]

Hello again,

I think the majority of airbase.dat entries are the result of the overhaul that UncleTgt did in the Carolines with his update, not with the original Micronesia package.

Edit: The MN_Pingelap Atoll entry is too far southwest of the lagoon and the pier. I think this is another UncleTgt revision issue.

Additionally, the Caroline Islands instructions say to remove all files for MN_Pingelap. This is not necessary, just the Atoll files. MN_Pingelap is perfectly fine as is.

[UncleTgt]

Andrew et al

This will require some thought, it was uploaded way back in 2012, so my memory may be a bit off.

Don't use Rhumbas new watermasks, they are simply too aggressive. Just use the mesh.

The airbase entries will be off, I hadn't got the hang of capturing all of the mods I did to Maskrider's bases to match the new mesh as I went - undoubtedly I will have forgotten some & the original Maskrider runway entries won't match the (new) mesh. As I was testing using FreeFlight, so long as the airbase entry was in the list, I wouldn't always record the changes made. Mea culpa.:173go1:

The Pingelap entry is an example - I wanted to recreate the Carolines pre-US liberation, so I removed any airbases that the Japs wouldn't have used. Pingelap is one of them, yet perversely I left it's entry in the airbases.dat addition list! I used sources such as Pacific Wrecks for references.

The stock Ponape is a piece of fiction, it just needs removing.

Ponape 1 is the airfield the Japs completed. The "easter egg" just to the west (your pic) is Ponape 2 which the Japs only just completed in time to have it bombed & shelled into rubble, so was never actually used as an active base.

If you have double coastlines there is something wrong. Check you removed all of Maskriders bgls for the islands I asked you to deactivate.

Or it could be the excludes aren't working & the stock coastlines are still showing.

From the readme - "Stock runway excludes (just above Runways layer works on my system,other systems need this placing directly under the Islands scenery layer)"

What I learnt as I tackled this & the later projects of New Britain & New Ireland was that there was a lot of LOD 9 mesh & coastlines that needed removing from the SCENEDB/WORLD folders to create a stock + Rhumba mesh combo install. Rhumba included the listing with his early postings when he first released the mesh but it may have got lost over time.

Found it: In his watermasks readme he says:

"As the default shorelines, roads and streams will no longer fit, it is recommended to rename their file extension name as OLD to deactivate them.

Those defaults are located in:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Combat Flight Simulator 2\SCENEDB\world\scenery"

and are named as 'pac????p.bgl'. ( Rename to 'pac????p.OLD' )."

IIRC myself & Kevin Driver created a listing of files to deactivate & it should be in the scenery uploads here somewhere...

[Rami]

John,

I actually did revert back to the stock coastlines and all of the issues disappeared, save for the airbase.dat entries. Following your instructions to the letter eliminated all of the CTD issues I was having, and removing the files on that list worked wonders.

I was actually doing it with Rhumba's files as an experiment to see how bad the results would be.

I was just keeping a running log for reference as I sort through them all individually. :encouragement:

[Rami]

John,

For Djarrot Island, the northern runway is accounted for in the airbase.dat file, but there is no entry for the southern runway. :wavey:

One suggestion for the Lukunor Island entry (not the strip) is to turn it into a seaplane entry.

Also, while I'm at it...the original Micronesia airbase scenery includes files that go into the main SCENERY folder. Are these compatible with your overhaul, or should they be removed?

[UncleTgt]

My MR Micronesia pack was from 2008, & added the Palau, Ellice Islands & PacAir sceneries to it. IIRC, the only pack that had items placed in the SCENERY folder was the Ellice Islands mini-pack. I followed MRs instructions & did add them to the SCENERY folder.
For info, anything starting 0_xcl... is a scenery exclude.

Anything ending with LM or WM is a Land or Watermask.

Those ending _3 are ground polys, whereas _7 & _8 are VTP lines or polys.

If I were doing it today I might put them in a separate scenery folder I could activate or deactivate, rather than add to the base Scenery folder.

I don't think any of them affect the Carolines area anyways.

All my big scenery projects were created on an XP machine. Now I've reloaded them & flown around the coastlines on this newer WIN 7 machine I have to say I'm spotting more & more (small area) water slopes that I'm sure weren't there when I created the scenery. Usually these can be fixed by creating more A16N flattens, but it's bugging me that they are there at all, it took sooo long to trace those bloody coastlines by hand in G2K...:banghead:

[Rami]

John,

IMHO, these do a better job than Rhumba's flattens, it might help: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/local_links.php?action=jump&catid=45&id=5988

[UncleTgt]

John,

IMHO, these do a better job than Rhumba's flattens, it might help: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/local_links.php?action=jump&catid=45&id=5988


I will give them a whirl, just remember that they were created using the older inaccurate STRM data, so they won't match the newer Rhumba mesh. Some of the old mesh is way off, as I found out when I started to look at Jean Bomber's Truk (old mesh) versus Rhumbas new mesh, and that's why some of Maskriders runways needed shifting...:frown-new:

It would have been really useful if Sander had finished his Autocoast tool, not least because we can't use G2K at all in the Western hemisphere...:dizzy:

[Rami]

UncleTgt,

I am installing New Britain and New Ireland after gotten the Carolines working correctly. I went through and installed MaskRider's Papua New Guinea as a base, and now I'm working on these two packs.

I worked through the readme and removed the .bgl and bitmap files in the instructions, but noticed there are still many bitmaps left in the SWPTO_Islands_UT texture folder that also remain in the MaskRider Papua New Guinea folder.

This leads me to ask three questions.

1) Will this cause CTD/texture display problems?

2) Do additional files need to be removed which were not initially mentioned?

3) If you are also using the darkened bitmaps, do these now have to be installed into BOTH folders?

[UncleTgt]

Rami

I think so long as the scenery bgls have been deactivated, leaving the bitmaps in the texture folder shouldn't cause a CTD. Which bitmaps are "shared"? I don't see any that have exactly the same name...

If you're worried about the "062h2su1..." type, they should load in priority sequence, with the highest level scenery stopping the Sim looking elsewhere (or in the main TEXTURE folder). this priority loading is what makes everything possible.

So long as you have a bitmap of the same name in CFS2/TEXTURE and CFS2/SCENEDB/WORLD/TEXTURE, you can have a 3rd different looking copy of the SAME NAME in your Atoll folder etc., & the Sim will always choose to load your Highest Priority Activated Scenery Texture folder bitmap first, and stop looking for any other copies ... :triumphant:

[Rami]

Which bitmaps are "shared"? I don't see any that have exactly the same name...

John,

It was on the user end of the keyboard. However, I did download your darkened bitmaps, (MR Dobodura, MR PNG) and have the following left over after overwriting what remains after the instructed files were removed...

babasewa.bmp
borborwa.bmp
efogiwa.bmp
finschaffenwa.bmp
gonawa.bmp
goraiwa.bmp
hoskinswa.bmp
ililowa.bmp
kagiwa.bmp
kandrianfbwa.bmp
kandrianwa.bmp
lihirwa.bmp
menariwa.bmp
nissanwa.bmp
oiviwa.bmp
owerswa.bmp
sananandawa.bmp
sulewa.bmp
uberiwa.bmp
wairopawa.bmp

:dizzy: :dizzy: :dizzy:

[UncleTgt]

Andrew

Chris used a naming convention for airfield backgrounds.

bitmaps ending in "...wa" are short form for "with alpha". Just remove the wa & it should be obvious which bitmap goes with which airfield. Remember his scenery covered PNG, so there will be plenty of his airfields that aren't affected.

At work right now, but I'm pretty sure my replacements used different background bitmap names, so even if you leave them in place, there shouldn't be any conflict, so long as you have deactivated the bgls though.

[Rami]

UncleTgt,

Thanks for clarifying that!

For MaskRider - I cannot find the basis for Makin Island and Butaritari in your Micronesia pack. Is that correct?

[Rami]

MaskRider,

With regard to the DEI 2018 airfields edition, I cannot get the following airfields to show, despite following your instructions to the letter...there are blank green sections where the airfield bitmaps should be. Any ideas? :dizzy:

DEI Halmahera Kaoe 0105ae/00e5ae
DEI Halmahera Sofifi 00a5aa/0085aa

[Rami]

MaskRider,

Before I add the old version, any updates on the new version of the Formosa airfields?

[dvslats]

MaskRider,

With regard to the DEI 2018 airfields edition, I cannot get the following airfields to show, despite following your instructions to the letter...there are blank green sections where the airfield bitmaps should be. Any ideas? :dizzy:

DEI Halmahera Kaoe 0105ae/00e5ae
DEI Halmahera Sofifi 00a5aa/0085aa

Hey Drew,

Try these. They are a working copy. There's a layering txt in there that shows the activation sequence. :encouragement:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/44is2v6j7bfhua2/DEI%20New%20Mesh.zip?dl=0

Cheerz,
Dave

[Rami]

Dvslats,

That worked perfectly, thank you. I installed it last night after I got home from Connecticut, and just wanted to say thanks while I'm waiting for my youngest (Jayden) to fall back to sleep.

Tomorrow, it's Saishima-Gunto. :wiggle:

[dvslats]

Dvslats,

That worked perfectly, thank you. I installed it last night after I got home from Connecticut, and just wanted to say thanks while I'm waiting for my youngest (Jayden) to fall back to sleep.

Tomorrow, it's Saishima-Gunto. :wiggle:

Glad it worked Rami. There was a discussion a while back on the folder hierarchy. These were set accordingly.

Dv

[Rami]

Glad it worked Rami. There was a discussion a while back on the folder hierarchy. These were set accordingly.

Dv

David,

It wasn’t the order...you had some files not included in the package I was downloading. :wiggle: