The Devil Made Me Do It

[falcon409]

After just remarking in another thread that I didn't think airport scenery addons were worth doing without a photoreal background texture, I up and did one for a group flight I plan to do next week. The flight plan calls for stops at four different airports in the UK and one of them is St. Mary's. There was a scenery already done for FS9, but after trying it, there were too many FSX problems and so I canned that and just did one for the heck of it.

No custom buildings, no extra scenery objects, everything is default FSX.

[Mr.Mugel]

Looks pretty nice! You really got some atmosphere out of the default objects!

[Bjoern]

What Lennart said!


I miss you doing airport sceneries, Ed. Was looking forward to a few US regional airport sceneries.

[Bomber_12th]

Ditto to everything said above!

Ed, St. Mary's looks excellent as you have it! Your previous airport releases are still some number 1 stomping grounds for me.

[falcon409]

Here's the other airport I couldn't find anything on and that will be part of the Flight Plan next week. . .Southampton_EGHI.

[OBIO]

You're right, Falcon. Without photo real scenery those airports look like crap! :icon_lol:

I hope you upload those....would be nice to have a couple small UK strips to fly from....oh, I'm sure there are some that come with FSX...but I have no idea what they are....but if you upload these, then I'll know that they are small strips.

OBIO

[falcon409]

lol, yep they do. I just wanted something more than default to fly into since I'll be hitting each of these twice during the entire flight plan. They'll do in a pinch, lol.:salute:

[SkippyBing]

Falcon, like St Mary's, out of interest does FSX let you model the half tarmac/half grass runway (27/09 I think) or do you have to have it all one surface?

I've been there once in real life, have to see if I can dig out any photos.

[falcon409]

Falcon, like St Mary's, out of interest does FSX let you model the half tarmac/half grass runway (27/09 I think) or do you have to have it all one surface?

I use AFX for all my AFCAD work Skippy and as far as I know it doesn't let you do half and half. I could probably cheat a bit and do shortened rwys and butt them up against the main rwy, but I don't know how that would look and if you wanted to add AI, it could get confusing, lol.

Of course the other way is to model it in FSDS or GMax and then convert to a bgl file and load it that way but that's beyond my abilities.

[Mathias]

Nice!

OT: Was that what you where thinking of when entiteling your post? :-)
XAw084OWS6Y

[falcon409]

The scenery was uploaded at 11:36AM CST :salute:

[falcon409]

There was a decent scenery from flightsim.com for Alderney and I thought I could just fix the alpha problem with the trees (black boxes we all know and love, lol). Actually I was going to simply delete the trees "bgl" and put new trees in their place, but alas that wasn't as easy as it first appeared, so I just redid it, lol.

[kilo delta]

Loving these...great to see you back doing sceneries again,Ed.:applause:

If ever you get the urge to travel a little west and create a few Irish airfields it'd be much appreciated. :icon_lol::salute:

[falcon409]

Loving these...great to see you back doing sceneries again,Ed.
If ever you get the urge to travel a little west and create a few Irish airfields it'd be much appreciated.
Any ones in particular KD?

[kilo delta]

Hi Ed.My own local field is EIAB, but there's a great big cloud over half of it in G**gle maps! EIME,EIWT,EINC ...whatever takes your fancy. :salute:

[Dimus]

Nice and quick job as always falcon!

I wish there was a way of blurring out the edges of airport pads like you can do in photoscenery. It would make things much nicer when you do not have a photo background to work with.

[falcon409]

Hi Ed.My own local field is EIAB, but there's a great big cloud over half of it in G**gle maps! EIME,EIWT,EINC ...whatever takes your fancy. :salute:
Started EIAB at lunch and back to it now. Surprisingly, it's not even included in FSX, as are many others from Ireland. Odd. . . . .

[OleBoy]

Ed, I had no clue you did scenery. Your work looks pretty darn nice!

[falcon409]

Ed, I had no clue you did scenery. Your work looks pretty darn nice!
Welllllll, I don't do scenery in the creative sense, lol. I do "Enhanced-Default Scenery", lol. Use satellite images as a guide and then remake the airport boundaries, correct rwy locations, add taxiways and aprons where needed and then throw a bunch of hangars, vehicles, vegetation, etc around and "voila", lol.

[falcon409]

KD, I've got the basics laid in, but the river that runs around it, the roads, even most of the larger lakes in Central Ireland aren't there. Beginning to wonder if there's a glitch with me scenery.
Take a look at the top-down shot. . .you see the new airport to the right. . . then look to the left and you can see what appears to be the rough outline of where they planned on putting the airport and it never got finished. . . .at least that's what it appears to be to me based on it's proximity to where I have the airport positioned. Even seems to be the same relative heading.

[kilo delta]

Hi Ed.:wavey:
Firstly...thank you sooo much for taking on EIAB.:jump:
I have UTX Europe installed which places the rivers and roads in the correct position. Are you running UTX?

[kilo delta]

Started EIAB at lunch and back to it now. Surprisingly, it's not even included in FSX, as are many others from Ireland. Odd. . . . .

Yep...MS left Ireland somewhat barren. It's odd because EIAB was included in FS9...or maybe that was FS2002,can't remember.

[falcon409]

Hi Ed.:wavey:
Firstly...thank you sooo much for taking on EIAB.:jump:
I have UTX Europe installed which places the rivers and roads in the correct position. Are you running UTX?
Glad to do it KD, especially since it was left out and yes, I am using UTX.

[falcon409]

Well, I've tried Default, UTX and GEX and irregardless, Ireland remains barren of any lakes or rivers. Too bad, because the river system around Abbey/Shrule dominates that area and without it. . . .just not the same.

[kilo delta]

It's a weird one. There's an option to reset UTX to default.I've had to use it on a few occasions after having flown in other areas outside of the EU.
The river north of the field is often used by a local pilot with a float equipped Cub. The Royal Canal is south of the field and is a popular fishing spot, The large hangar shown in your screenshot represents the Ultraflight (http://www.ultraflight.ie/) hangar where Urban Air Samba's and Lambada's are assembled. There's a Cessna Citation based at EIAB too.

[falcon409]

Some WIP shots:

[wantok]

looking good, Falcon. Like the look of the grass work.:salute:

[falcon409]

looking good, Falcon. Like the look of the grass work.:salute:
Well thanks Wantok. . .I've admired your work for a long time now, you do some beautiful stuff.:salute:

[falcon409]

Major Move in Progress, lol. . . .

I use SBuilderX for a lot of what I used to do and what I'm doing now. One of the biggest things is being able to load hi-res tiles of the airport into the program and then being able to draw new boundaries, water and roads and add them into the scenery. For some reason none of the tile servers had anything for Ireland and so I made a "best-guess" for position. Well, I downloaded a new server dll for Google Earth and low and behold it had a first rate image I could import. I loaded FSX, went to the airport and sync'd SBX with FSX and . . . .doh!! I was .2 of a mile off to the north and west of the actual location. Rwy heading was ok, and that doesn't seem like much, but that along with a much better resolution image to do the parking ramps from has made me decide to move everything to it's new position.

Shouldn't be that big a deal, lots of repetition as I move everything, but it's not like I'm moving it cross country or anything. Oh well!! Gone to bed!:salute:

[oldpropfan]

Ed, earlier in this thread you mentioned a way to fix the black trees issue, how do you do this? I've beaten my forehead flat trying to fix this in the CalClassic retro sceneries and can't get it to work. Also, can this fix be used for the see-thru problem that you sometimes get with other tree libraries and some static people libraries?

Thanks,
Al

[CG_1976]

:salute:Looking excellent Falcon

[falcon409]

Ed, earlier in this thread you mentioned a way to fix the black trees issue, how do you do this? I've beaten my forehead flat trying to fix this in the CalClassic retro sceneries and can't get it to work. Also, can this fix be used for the see-thru problem that you sometimes get with other tree libraries and some static people libraries?

Thanks,
Al
Well, the problem with the scenery I was going to fix was that I thought I could just fix the alpha channel (either lighten or darken depending on what the original was), but that didn't work, it only gave me the clear (see-thru) box instead. I think the main problem is the difference between saving for FS9 and saving for FSX. The great KPDX scenery for FS9 was the same way. . .it was an FS9 scenery and moving it to FSX gave the same problem, light poles, trees and even some building had either transparent boxes or black boxes and the only way to correct those was to physically delete them. In that case, much of that was single files so you could delete all the "Tree.bgl" files. . . .or "lights.bgl" and then replace them with an object placement program for FSX. With a lot of sceneries though the trees, light poles, signs and so on are all compiled into one bgl file, so you'd have to decompile, pull out the offending objects and then recompile. Usually not worth the trouble.:salute:

[kilo delta]

Wow! That looks brilliant,Ed. Uncannily accurate, especially considering you are using default fsx scenery objects!:applause:

[falcon409]

Wow! That looks brilliant,Ed. Uncannily accurate, especially considering you are using default fsx scenery objects!:applause:
Thanks, actually since I had to move the position of the airport I replaced a few buildings and made the parking aprons much more exact to the actual airport, so it's looking better all the time.:salute:

[kilo delta]

Thanks, actually since I had to move the position of the airport I replaced a few buildings and made the parking aprons much more exact to the actual airport, so it's looking better all the time.:salute:

Right now...I'm as happy as a happy thing wrapped in fuzzy happiness,sitting back happily with a bowl of happy and a six pack of happiness


:icon_lol:

[oldpropfan]

So it's not as easy as just fixing the alpha channel or background color. I thought I just wasn't getting the colors right. Is there a way to recompile an object file with the FSX SDK, if so I could try that and if it works get the authors permission to post the files for others to use in/fix older sceneries that haven't been redone or updated.

Al

[falcon409]

Ok, here it is with almost everything complete. I still need to add the grass and move a few things a few pixels one way or the other, lol. I added the Canal south of the airport because despite my best efforts, there are no interior waterways in Ireland. I'm going to also add the river and make the water a separate bgl file, so if you have it, you can just leave that file out and those who don't can put it in and at least have a representation of the waterway around the airport:

[kilo delta]

Thanks again,Ed. This'll be my default fsx airfield for all my GA virtual trips.:applause::salute:

[falcon409]

Thanks again,Ed. This'll be my default fsx airfield for all my GA virtual trips.:applause::salute:
You have a PM KD!!