Victory! The CFS2 world is ours.

[Sander]

Finally....
Today the first completely correctly mapped VTP1 lines to ever come out of my beloved cfs2autocoast tool, my preciousssss.
It's been 8 years in the making... this battle has been won.
I've learnt SOOOO much from it; programming in the .NET framework, GIS data, raw BGL code, the inner workings of the CFS2 graphics engine, down to DirectX level... BELIEVE ME, THE WAR IS FAR FROM OVER. CFS2 FOREVER!
91138
(if anyone is interested in testing out the tool and/or helping with creating content please PM me; I lost most of your e-mail adresses unfortunately)

[Fibber]

......and HE comes with presents no less!!!!:wavey: As with all YOUR work I can't wait to see how this changes our little fantasy world.:salute::icon29::guinness::isadizzy:

[rhumbaflappy]

Hi Sander.

PM'd you with my email address. Really looking forward to this.

dick

[misson]

Always I felt admiration for the people here that works with scenery. I´m not a man with enought patient for that. My question is if there is some way to make coastlines easy, because there are many theaters that need them.

[MaskRider]

Great news Sander!

Looking forward to playing with the production-design AutoCoast. I have been away from scenery making for the last few months but just before taking a break I was quite busy pushing the old prototype AutoCoast as far as I could- with excellent results, too, I might add. This may get me back into the groove again.

Well done!

MR

[Canion]

Congratulations ..! :applause::applause::applause:

As if CFS2; Fenix ​​bird has soul.
The continuous expansion! :ernae:

Long life CFS2.

Thank you so much ..!

Now I have to find time for this.

[Ettico]

Bwa, hahahaha! CFS2 will yet rule the combat flight sim world! Other sims don't stand a chance against this ancient, unstoppable juggernaut!

[UncleTgt]

PM sent

[Cody Coyote]

Great news Sander!. Thanks for your long dedication to this cause. :salute:

[Rami]

Sander,

I second all the congratulations in this thread. This is outstanding, and I thank you for all your efforts and contributions! :ernae: :medals: :medals:

[Jaxon]

Great News - Congratulations!

This will definatley breath new life into CFS2 and bring it to a higher level.

CFS2.013 so to speak.

[Jagdflieger]

Wow!!!

[Sander]

Thanks guys! :icon29::icon29::icon29: back at ya!
I'm really super excited. Still have to grind down some details and write up some documentation and do some more platform testing before this goes nuclear... But I can tell you that it seems the quality of the texturing seems to be on par with the MS Pacific.
I'm a bit embarrassed that I haven't taken a minute to swap out the default water textures, but here it is:
91180

[Sander]

And the stock FS9 textures for lakes aren't that great, and the dual carriage motorways everywhere, but that can be easily replaced with some 1940s style BMPs.
91182

[Sander]

Time for bed..... :)
91184

[Canion]

These curves look very sensual! :jump:

[Sander]

Oh yeah

91228

[The B24 Guy]

This is great news. I am very happy for you.

Nothing is more rewarding than creating something.

Can't wait for all the scenery guys and gals to get there hands on this tool.

Regards,
B24Guy

[Sander]

They just have! :)
First preview version is released.

[Canion]

Wow ..! delivered on time!
Just gave a look at the tutorials, I will have dedicate time to get it going.
Thank you very much to keep the dedication and compromise. :salute:

[misson]

They just have! :)
First preview version is released. could u provide a link to us? thank u!:medals::icon29:

[Allen]

It is not out for the public yet. You need to Private Message him for a link.

[kelticheart]

Oustanding job, Sander! :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

Is this new Autocoast tool going to fix rivers and railways as well?

I am asking this because I am doing some bridge work over the Po river in Northern Italy Po Valley, using your early release ETO textures and landclass, quite appropriate for this part of the country.

Unfortunately, railroads are entirely missing and I am going nuts placing Canion's RR tiles in proximity of airports or bridges that were there in WWII (which Rami will do his best to blow up.......). Since these scenery objects are rather short in length, the total count of objects per each scenery is going skyhigh. Fps will not benefit from all of these objects either, even if they are flat tiles.

Rivers are also a problem: they are either missing entirely, and there's quite a network of Po left and right affluents in the entire valley, or they are displayed as lakes in the areas where they are rather wide in real life.

Altogether a fictional representation of real life Po Valley. If you care for an example, I am attaching a new file to the La Spezia thread of my latest effort:

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?79601-La-Spezia-project-development-thread&p=825777#post825777

which includes the road and RR bridges in Piacenza and Achim's Reggio Emilia airport with the Reggiane aircraft factory nearby. Both have a trainstation and dual RR tracks as they were (and still are) during WWII. All of available scenery objects uploaded here are necessary: ETO repaints of CFS2 stock hangars/buildings by Captain Kurt, Canion's libs, Wolfi's libs, Dave Mangum's German buildings, Gary Burns' RAF BoB library updated by Pen32win, Mask Rider's PTO objects and Leroy10's early trees.

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

P.S.: I replied to this thread before opening the La Spezia Project thread. You had already answered there to my question here. Thank you!

[Sander]

could u provide a link to us? thank u!:medals::icon29:
If you're interested to stick your hands in the mud, PM me your email address and I'll add you to the mailing list.

[Sander]

Oustanding job, Sander! :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

Is this new Autocoast tool going to fix rivers and railways as well?

I am asking this because I am doing some bridge work over the Po river in Northern Italy Po Valley, using your early release ETO textures and landclass, quite appropriate for this part of the country.

Unfortunately, railroads are entirely missing and I am going nuts placing Canion's RR tiles in proximity of airports or bridges that were there in WWII (which Rami will do his best to blow up.......). Since these scenery objects are rather short in length, the total count of objects per each scenery is going skyhigh. Fps will not benefit from all of these objects either, even if they are flat tiles.

Rivers are also a problem: they are either missing entirely, and there's quite a network of Po left and right affluents in the entire valley, or they are displayed as lakes in the areas where they are rather wide in real life.

Altogether a fictional representation of real life Po Valley. If you care for an example, I am attaching a new file to the La Spezia thread of my latest effort, which includes the road and RR bridges in Piacenza and Achim's Reggio Emilia airport with the Reggiane aircraft factory nearby. Both have a trainstation and dual RR tracks as they were (and still are) during WWII. All of available scenery objects uploaded here are necessary: ETO repaints of CFS2 stock hangars/buildings by Captain Kurt, Canion's libs, Wolfi's libs, Dave Mangum's German buildings, Gary Burns' RAF BoB library updated by Pen32win and Leroy10's early trees.

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

We'll probably re-do all of Europe to a higher standard quality. I don't know why so much stuff is missing from that particular area; it could be one of the tiles that caused ground2k to throw fits; I don't remember. Either way, with this tool it will become "child's play" (=relative to the ground2k method) to zoom in on your own backyard and lay down whatever you want.

[blohmundvoss]

I can still remember a post from years ago when Sander patiently explained to everyone who was eagerly waiting for the next instalment of his rework of Europe that it took hours and hours of effort to produce and compile each LOD5 area.

Having had a chance to try his new version of cfs2autocoast I can tell you that in the meantime he's been a very, very busy man.

Having produced the file for the tool to compile I hit 'go' and decided to make some coffee while the software did its job but I'd barely stood up before the operation finished. It took me more time to find the FS9 source files than it did for the tool to finish the job. Even allowing for the fact that I was carefully reading Sander's tutorial and working with an unfamiliar tool the whole thing took less than 30 minutes. I'm sure if I organise the source files and my working folders better I can cut this down even further.

Given that all I did was do a quick & dirty conversion of the stock FS9 files - no customising or editing - I think the end result is still pretty good. Finding good screenies to illustrate something like this is always difficult - and I haven't had time to explore the whole converted area yet - but here are a few to give you a flavour.

The area I worked covers part of North Korea including the Yalu River and the Choisin Reservoir. As you can see, some lovely curved roads and rivers which are a far cry from the straight, angled lines of the earlier versions of cfs2autocoast.


91545915469154791548

I know some of the real scenery gurus have volunteered to test the tool as well but, speaking for myself, I find it a friendly and easy way of providing a means of cranking the handle and producing some long-missing elements from too much of the cfs2 world. Yes, there's no substitute for the terrific output from the scenery designers we know and love but there are too few of them and they can only do so much Any tool that gives the less-talented of us a chance to join in gets my vote. Trust me, if I can produce something like what you see above, anyone can.

Well done once again, Sander. I'm looking forward to the next version already! (And did he really say autogen? .. . whimper, whimper.)

Now I'm off to do a test in Malaya and, oh yes, the Eastern Front.

Cheers
BuV

[Jaxon]

Good looking, B&V!

I hope we can get the work done in combined effort. We just need one nice Europe, America etc.

Sander,
I stopped working with your old tool, because it took hours to compile (what was worth it anyway) and I found it hung up the next morning without feedback.
My scenery was very dense (NorthSea-Baltic Sea Channel with a lot of hand edited lines) - no chance to find the error.

Is there a feedback built in now?

[rhumbaflappy]

Hi Jaxon.

I'm sure Sander will have some info for you. The main advance of this version of cfs2autocoast is that it will read .sbx files from SBuilder for FS2004. We can have land/water polys, and all the line features of FS9. If you can compile them for FS9 with SBuilder, then you can compile them for CFS2 via the .sbx file form FS9. In other words, we can use SBuilder9 to check our work. hat solves a lot of problems.

Dick

[Sander]

Hi Jaxon,
Yes the idea is to get a single common world. That's why I got the community involved at this point. To do all the tiles myself would be too much work. As you know, Rhumbaflappy has a lot of experience getting real-world data sets together, there are designers who "own" area's (N-Africa etc.) , so they will have the chance to complete the region around their existing works.
The who/how/when is still to be determined.

I don't have much error feedback enabled in the "release" version of my tool, but all the errors I found in the projects I tried, I solved by algorithm (or ignore).
If users run into problems, I can run the source through my Debug version to find out what's going on. Hasn't happened so far.
(There are still some minor glitches in the texture mapping, and we lose a polygon here and there, but no crashes).

[blohmundvoss]

Good news and a bit of bad news.

I ran a test on the Kota Bharu area on the Malayan coast - and it took cfs2autocoast3 thirteen seconds to compile all the .bgls (489 VTP lines, 963 polys and 816 LWM fills). A few more screenies:

91573915749157591576

I then ran a test on an inland area - the Kursk region in Russia. LOD5 no. 957130 - and ran into the following error message when I ran it through the tool:

'Unhandled exception has occurred in your application'

When I looked at the reported details I saw the following message (followed by a list of loaded assemblies). I did tell the tool to ignore it and continue but the compilation process just seemed to be frozen at the very start.

************** Exception Text **************
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
at cfs2AutoCoast.Form1.LoadSBXfile()
at cfs2AutoCoast.Form1.Form1_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.EventHandler.Invoke(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Form.OnLoad(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl(Boolean fIgnoreVisible)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.CreateControl()
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmShowWindow(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.W ndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)


Over to you Sander!

Cheers
BuV

[Ettico]

Hi guys,

Those screenies look tantalizing.

But I have a problem. I don't have fs9 and don't know where to find it. I do have fs8, but I don't know if that would work.

[Sander]

I know SBuilder is problematic to install when you don't have fs9, and I don't know if SBuilder would read fs8 BGL's... If I remember correctly, there's no altitude data in the LWM's, so all lakes would be at 0ft if anything.
For you, this tool might become interesting when we start working with other data sets in SBuilder, and I'm working at building a mock fs9 install to make SBuilder operate correctly on computers without an actual fs9 installed.

[UncleTgt]

Ettico,

I'm in the same boat, & I advised Sander as such. I really do think it would help bring fresh scenery builder blood to the game if we could get SBuilder to install & use CFS2 as the config "agent".:ipepsi2:
That's partly because I believe we should be using GIS data (as per Rhumbaflappy's new world mesh) & not the less accurate MSFS 9 data as our data base & the tools should reflect that aim.

Also, FS9 is getting harder to find these days, but not impossible.

I ordered a new copy of FS2004 for £15 delivered (UK) from FlightstoreDOTcoDOTuk, & I see you can pick it up still through Amazon & other web retailers.

Hope this helps.

Now back to watching if G2K has finished compiling latest bit of New Ireland coastlines ... :icon_lol:

[rhumbaflappy]

The nice part about FS9 files is that we can rather quickly flesh out the world. It would be much more accurate than CFS2's default. Then we have a basis for improving the BGLs as an ongoing project. We can replace LWM polys BGLs and shoreline BGLs, while, for example, leaving the roads and rails for later. Sander's vision was to use FS2004 vectors as a starting point for defining the world.

Sander and I were just now discussing how to set up a file repository, where new files can be added and then updated. He mentioned SVN as a possibility. I know many projects have nightly builds that can be updated.

We also can think about some sort of guidelines or 'best practices'. For example, the LOD5 extents is a very good basis for scenery files. FS2004 organized files along these lines. They used continents as folders for FS9. FSX uses LOD2 as folders. It's just a matter of organization, but these things keep everyone on the same page. So if you make water polys... make them for the entire LOD5 area.

One limitation we have is that we need to work in FS9 lines and polys in order to use SBuilder's ability to load either SBX or BGLs. The upside of this is that we can rebuild FS9 right along side CFS2...

Dick

[blohmundvoss]

Well, if we're looking for volunteers to do the grunt work - count me in. I have the time these days and it looks like we have the tool as well.

Once Sander considers the software is stable enough I'm happy to co-ordinate my efforts with anyone else to make the best use of our time.

Cheers
BuV

[blohmundvoss]

I'd already mentioned to Sander that I wanted to see if we could merge the stock FS9 files with some of the existing freeware scenery already made to improve them. Obviously we'd need the permission of the original developers to do this formally, in the same way we have for planes etc, but I thought I'd try a private experiment.

A freeware package was posted in 2003 for the 'missing' German canal system and associated rivers that I'd already played around with in Sander's earlier release of cfs2autoast. Sooo - I thought I'd try to incorporate the LWM .bgls for the Kiel Canal (between the Baltic and the North Sea). I certainly wasn't expecting what I got.

The following screenies are

1) the original .bgls in LWM Viewer
2) those .bgls loaded into SBuider and merged wih the FS9 LWM for the relevant LOD5 area (950120) - and, as you can see, all seems well.
3) three screenies showing how the canal has turned into the Grand Canyon

Weird.

9161891619916229162391624

(This stuff is getting addictive. I feel the need to study SBuilder and Ground2K in detail.)

Cheers
BuV

[Sander]

Obviously the original LWM BGL does not contain altitude data. The flatten BGL will then go down to sea level.

[Sander]

Ettico,

I'm in the same boat, & I advised Sander as such. I really do think it would help bring fresh scenery builder blood to the game if we could get SBuilder to install & use CFS2 as the config "agent".:ipepsi2:
That's partly because I believe we should be using GIS data (as per Rhumbaflappy's new world mesh) & not the less accurate MSFS 9 data as our data base & the tools should reflect that aim.

It is a project goal. That would still be at least a year off to get production ready. Using FS9 is a necessary evolutionary step.




Now back to watching if G2K has finished compiling latest bit of New Ireland coastlines ... :icon_lol:

In a future not very far away you'll also be able to compile g2k projects directly and quickly with cfs2autocoast.

[UncleTgt]

It is a project goal. That would still be at least a year off to get production ready. Using FS9 is a necessary evolutionary step.



In a future not very far away you'll also be able to compile g2k projects directly and quickly with cfs2autocoast.

I'm relaxed about this timescale, & fully appreciate the need for the evolution :sheep:


Anyone that's looked at the bgl filesizes in my recent G2K projects can appreciate that some times they take a while to compile ... New Ireland is a baby in comparison, last night's work took a mere 34 minutes to compile :icon_lol:


Jean Bomber gave me the best advice with G2K. Break big projects into many smaller ones, & save files OFTEN!

The big advantage of CFS2autocoast will be something like New Britain won't take 12 months to finish :isadizzy:

[Sander]

..., & save files OFTEN!
...
That goes for ANYTHING you do on a computer, and I'll add to that:make backups OFTEN!

[blohmundvoss]

I spent some time today on a couple of things.

I did produce .bgls successfully for the Kharkov area in Russia after my failure around Kursk

I compiled .bgls for the rest of Korea and ran into some more error messages;

For LOD5 981180 (same message as before I think but I include the text anyway:

************** Exception Text **************
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

at cfs2AutoCoast.ASMFileVTP.ASMWriteVTP1(String Path, String workingdir, Boolean CleanUp, Boolean BackupExistingBGL)
at cfs2AutoCoast.SBXFile.CompileSBX()
at cfs2AutoCoast.Form1.Button2_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventAr gs mevent)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks) at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.W ndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

For LOD5 981190

Illegal point call for X in point 1
Illegal point call for y in point 1

(both repeated)

Unlike the previous error this didn't stop the files from compiling and they load successfully in cfs2.

For LOD5 982170

************** Exception Text **************
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

at cfs2AutoCoast.ASMFileVTP.ASMWriteVTP1(String Path, String workingdir, Boolean CleanUp, Boolean BackupExistingBGL)
at cfs2AutoCoast.SBXFile.CompileSBX()
at cfs2AutoCoast.Form1.Button2_Click(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnClick(EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.OnMouseUp(MouseEventAr gs mevent)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WmMouseUp(Message& m, MouseButtons button, Int32 clicks)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ButtonBase.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Button.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.ControlNativeWindow.W ndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)

I hope this helps.

Cheers
BuV

[Sander]

Yes, thank you for the feedback. I suggest we take bugreports to the Landscapers & Architects forum in the future :) this thread will get a bit messy otherwise and distract from the progress. Looks like we have that place all to ourselves at the moment.

Edit: bugreports here please: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports

[Sander]

I'd already mentioned to Sander that I wanted to see if we could merge the stock FS9 files with some of the existing freeware scenery already made to improve them. Obviously we'd need the permission of the original developers to do this formally, in the same way we have for planes etc, but I thought I'd try a private experiment.

A freeware package was posted in 2003 for the 'missing' German canal system and associated rivers that I'd already played around with in Sander's earlier release of cfs2autoast. Sooo - I thought I'd try to incorporate the LWM .bgls for the Kiel Canal (between the Baltic and the North Sea). I certainly wasn't expecting what I got.

The following screenies are

1) the original .bgls in LWM Viewer
2) those .bgls loaded into SBuider and merged wih the FS9 LWM for the relevant LOD5 area (950120) - and, as you can see, all seems well.
3) three screenies showing how the canal has turned into the Grand Canyon

Weird.

(This stuff is getting addictive. I feel the need to study SBuilder and Ground2K in detail.)

Cheers
BuV

About the LWM polygons of the canal: can you check what the Altitude is of those polygons in SBuilder?
About learning about ground2k: don't waste any time on it! The whole purpose of cfs2autocoast is to remove it from the toolbox because it is so cumbersome, unstable and limited. Sbuilder: yes please! The help files are really good.

[blohmundvoss]

For all the jet jockeys out there, just in case they feel neglected - a few final screenies.

9165491656

LOD5 976250 north of the DMZ and 976240 around Hanoi.

If you haven't already guessed - I love this tool.

Sander - I'll check the freeware files and report back. I'll also post an extra bit of info about the repeated error in the Landscapes forum tomorrow. Time for bed.

Cheers
BuV

[Rami]

Sander and others,

Though the technical details are way above my head, the enthusiasm and life of this thread are amazing! Keep it up! :ernae: :salute:

[kelticheart]

Sander and others,

Though the technical details are way above my head, the enthusiasm and life of this thread are amazing! Keep it up!

I'll second that! I have been drooling all over this thread since its beginning........

BuV's screenshots of the first results are fabolous!

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[blohmundvoss]

Sbuilder: yes please! The help files are really good.

Sander

I'm trying to work out how I can answer your question about altitude re the Kiel canal files.

Unfortunately all I can see when I launch the SBuilder help files is the table of contents. If I click on any of the items the 'info' screen on the right remains blank.

I seem to always have this problem with html help files. (And I just know there's a simple answer . . .)

Cheers
BuV

[UncleTgt]

BV,

Which sim were the bgls made for?

IIRC If its FS8, I don't think the bgl will contain any altitude data.

Can you attach the bgl here, or point me in the right direction to find it?

[Sander]

Sander
.....

I seem to always have this problem with html help files. (And I just know there's a simple answer . . .)

Cheers
BuV

Computers and simple answers: yeah right!
On Windows 8, you'll have to unblock the file: right-click the SBuilder.chm file, select Properties. Then click on Unblock.

Otherwise, this may help:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/917607

[blohmundvoss]

Computers and simple answers: yeah right!
On Windows 8, you'll have to unblock the file: right-click the SBuilder.chm file, select Properties. Then click on Unblock.

Oh I don't know - Right click-Properties-Unblock seems simple to me! :icon_lol::icon_lol:

Worked like a charm, anyway. Thanks very much for the tip.

Cheers
BuV

p.s. it was a lot easier than the two hours I spent a few days ago on an ActiveX file I needed to run SBuilder that started off as missing and that my Registry then refused to recognise. God bless the 'net and techie forums . . .

[blohmundvoss]

BV,

Which sim were the bgls made for?

IIRC If its FS8, I don't think the bgl will contain any altitude data.

Can you attach the bgl here, or point me in the right direction to find it?

Uncle

I think I got the package from Flightsim (or maybe Avsim).

This is the file-id from 2003:

FS2002/FS2004 Canals/rivers in North Germany.
Included in LWM-style:
Weser, Ems, Eider, Hase, Leine, Aller, Nord-Ostsee-Kanal, Mittelland-Kanal, Kuesten-Kanal, Dortmund-Ems-Kanal, Steinhuder Meer.
V1.1 to avoid crashes in FS2004
By Rainer Duda

He also made packs for eastern and southern Germany as well, all aimed at 'filling in the blanks' in the FS9 LWM.

The files work well enough in FS9 as you can see from the Kiel ('Nord-Ostsee-Kanal') Canal below.

9168491685

Cheers
BuV

[Sander]

..... but I'd barely stood up before the operation finished. It took me more time to find the FS9 source files than it did for the tool to finish the job....

Well, here's a little tool for you to make it even easier to get your stuff loaded up. This VB script will use a low-down-and-dirty method of "SendKeys" to operate SBuilder for you.
Extract the file, somewhere on your desktop or where-ever. Edit it with notepad to set the correct path, where it says:

sBuilderPath="C:\Users\Public\Documents\cfs2\Designtools\SBuilde r\sbuilder.exe"
Make sure there's a single set of double quotes around the path.
Save the file (keeping the .vbs extension; if you save under another filename, make sure to set the file type to "All *.*", otherwise Notepad will add .txt

Now you can drag-and-drop any HP9*.bgl file from FS9 on it. Then STEP AWAY FROM THE KEYBOARD and let the script (attempt to) load all the related files. When it ends, SBuilder will be at the "Save project as .. " prompt.

There are "wait" moments built in to allow sbuilder load and do its work. If the script runs faster than your computer can load the files, you can increase the intervals by increasing the value of

Sleepfactor = 200

I may or may not integrate this script in cfs2autocoast, but here it is for you to make life easier right now.

[blohmundvoss]

Great, Sander - I'll give it a try.

At the risk of asking an awkward question - does it also pick up the 'troublesome' UT*.bgls? No problem if it does of course - I'll just be forewarned.

Cheers
BuV

[Sander]

Great, Sander - I'll give it a try.

At the risk of asking an awkward question - does it also pick up the 'troublesome' UT*.bgls? No problem if it does of course - I'll just be forewarned.

Cheers
BuV
Yes. The trouble will be fixed in the code, not worked around by just leaving the UT out. Welcome to the world of beta testing.

[blohmundvoss]

Yes. The trouble will be fixed in the code, not worked around by just leaving the UT out. Welcome to the world of beta testing.

If this is the biggest problem I have to live with, you'll never hear me complaining.

Cheers
BuV

[Sander]

Just add to the Manual:

To enable a group of developers to work on the same code and achieve a common goal, we need a common repository of source files to work with. This brings certain complexities and possible conflicts when working on the same area.
The are several types of standardized professional source code management solutions, such as SVN, GIT, Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation etc. Each of these work with the principle of code check-in/check-out, versioning, locking etc.
Once a repository is made and populated, it can easily be moved from one hosting server to another, so it’s very flexible. Also forks can be created (for instance: from 1940’s to Modern for the jet jockeys)
Since this project will eventually contain A LOT of files, the compile and other file handling operations must be automated as much as possible, to avoid the waste of time and human error. The scripts must be autonomous/portable (from computer to computer) so all path references must be relative.
Since SBX files are plain text files and rather large, the repository will contain ZIP files. The compression/extraction will be done by cfs2autocoast.
The repository is not limited to cfs2autocoast stuff, we can include anything in the CFS2world that we want/can get permission for. If we include airfields, objects, GSL et cetera, we could make some serious impact in the unification and preservation of existing add-ons (strict standards and testing procedures must be implemented)

[Talon]

Sander,

I've always had alot of respect and appreciate all your work through the years.It's great to hear you have accomplished what you have beem striving for all these years.I'm for anything that improves the CFS2 world especially the Pacific.

[Sander]

Sander,

I've always had alot of respect and appreciate all your work through the years.It's great to hear you have accomplished what you have beem striving for all these years.I'm for anything that improves the CFS2 world especially the Pacific.
Thanks Talon, right back at ya. I hope one day our little virtual museum will be in such shape that I can finally go fly all your missions (Pacific Ocean with waves/reflection? 3d clouds? Dreams may come true!)

[rhumbaflappy]

cfs2autocoast3 conversion of FS9 SAME folder ( South America ). Took about 4 days with some editing in SBuilder9. Sander's program batch compiled the 204 SBX files in 63 minutes for the whole continent. Here's a picture of Cape Horn:

92366

Dick

[Sander]

With the latest version, we've certainly passed a milestone. With Dick and the other testers cranking out SBuilder files, and me tweaking the code, we're now at the point where the basic functionality is in place and stable enough to complete the world.
:medals::icon29:

[blohmundvoss]

Just to whet peoples' appetites . . .

First a few from Korea: (1) the Imjjn River valley, scene of the famous 1951 battle (2) the Naktong River valley, part of the Pusan perimeter in 1950.

924919249292493


Finally, a few from Vietnam (1) near the airfield at Kep (2) a river that flows through a hill (3) the Paul Doumer Bridge in Hanoi, a major target in Route Pack Six. [the road bridge is a modern addition and didn't exist in the 1960s although there was a pontoon bridge, according to maps of the time].

92494924959249692497


Cheers
BuV

[kelticheart]

:jawdrop:.........

when will be able to see some of this beauties uploaded?

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[Sander]

I must say, in the context of continental Asia, the Pactex textures look pretty good!
Concerning the roads/railroads crossing the bodies of water: I think those are an eyesore; in FS9, but even more so in CFS2. I'm going to implement a filter to remove those.
When are the beauties uploaded? We must get it right the first time. The packages are going to be BIG and we don't want to burden the download hosting provider and the end user to overload.
There are still a number of issues to solve, there is still a lot of content to be created/converted and there is still integration to be done to make sure it works together as much as possible with the plethora of existing add-ons. Fortunately, it's not a one-man-show; there's a few people in the community working together. These people also have real life to deal with, so I'm not committing to a release date or definitive feature list.

[Shessi]

Double :jawdrop: :jawdrop:

Just beautiful. Many thanks BV, Sander and the team for the tasters. Even from 4700 and 70,000ft they look good.

I appreciate the task you are doing and the number crunching involved, but is there any easy way of giving us euro-philes a taster of what it might look like in Europe?

Sander, like your attitude towards getting it right first time, saves a lot of tears later on.....Personally, even if it took another year to do, then so be it.

Cheers

Shessi

[Sander]

.......Personally, even if it took another year to do, then so be it.

Cheers

Shessi
Don't worry, it's going to be a LOT sooner than that.

[blohmundvoss]

I must say, in the context of continental Asia, the Pactex textures look pretty good!


They do stand up pretty well - although I think they're a bit too tropical for Korea. (I am planning to try my hand at landclass editing to recreate the paddy fields that cover the flat areas close to the Naktong and other major rivers. Massive undertaking at a country level of course but a LOD5 cell or two would be good practice.)

Shessi -

How about an area we haven't seen - the Eastern Front? (The textures here are a very old set that I just love when it comes to Russia). A few screenies around Kharkov . .

925009250192502

Cheers
BuV

[Sander]

I remember that set! Comtex I think. At the time, it was a very incomplete set, and there were some duplicates in some classes, making it a bit monotonous, and some edge masking was messy. I think combined with the EURW city textures and a bit of elbow grease it could be brought up to standard, and indeed be suitable for Eastern Europe.

[UncleTgt]

BuV,

Paddy field textures ... try the set I did in my New Britain scenery.
You can renumber them to "b" for those out of PTO coverage areas, or even change the "5" to a different number.
Using EZlandclass you can patch over an existing texture set, just add as a new scenery layer. The game will always use textures in the add-on scenery's own "texture" folder first, so "005h" can stay as grassland everywhere else..

hope this helps.

[Shessi]

Thanks for that BV.

Looking good! But doesn't quite come up to the standard or quality of your Korean shots.

Cheers

Shessi

[Ettico]

That will do nicely.:jump:

I've already started DCG-ifying Europe in anticipation of the coming scenerific upgrade. I've built 4 corridor-shaped DCG campaigns for Western Europe 1943. It's feasible now, with AIRBOSS re-assigning useless CAP's to bomber escort. The existing SdC scenery isn't bad, but it will get much better.

[kelticheart]

....How about an area we haven't seen - the Eastern Front? (The textures here are a very old set that I just love when it comes to Russia).....

Comtex textures are my very same choice when it comes to the Russian front!

They are very dark and I wonder why a common perception of a Russian scenery is very dark in summer.

Splendid screenshots BuV!

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[blohmundvoss]

Sander

Any ideas?

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports&p=832216#post832216
(http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports&p=832216#post832216)
Cheers
BuV

[Sander]

Sander

Any ideas?

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports&p=832216#post832216
(http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports&p=832216#post832216)
Cheers
BuV

A little patience please.

[blohmundvoss]

I know this is only a sim but it's remarkable how these new features reflect reality sometimes. I took a flight over Route Pack 3 in North Vietnam yesterday and made some discoveries.

(1) Looking north-west you can see Route 101, one of the main supply routes feeding the northern sources of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. North Vietnam is on the right and the mountains bordering Laos are on the left. In the distance is the northern end of the Mu Gia Pass. (2) Looking in the opposite direction, this is the junction of Routes 101 and 137. There was a ferry across the river, the Song Trac, which flows towards Quang Khe at the upper left. (3) Route 137 winds southwards through the Ban Karai Pass into Laos.

925409254192542

Of course if an O-1 Bird Dog had flown over this area in the 1960s it would have been quickly shot down. The batteries of 37mm and 85mm AA guns that defended the supply routes meant that only 'Misty' FACs, flying F-100s, could hope to survive.

Finally, a quick look at the infamous A Shau valley (although the landclass is a bit odd for the slopes!)

92543

Cheers
BuV

[Shessi]

BV,
Thanks for the screenies, good to see. For me I really like that there are no blurries at any distance, so gives that uniform quality effect, which helps with the impression of depth.

Re-farming on hillsides, as you know it would be terraced type fields. Maybe a simple fix would be to turn some of the straight farm-line field texs through 90 degs, this might give a better impression of hillside farming?

............and who'd a thought it, sightseeing with CFS2!

Cheers

Shessi

[Sander]

BV,
...
Re-farming on hillsides, as you know it would be terraced type fields. Maybe a simple fix would be to turn some of the straight farm-line field texs through 90 degs, this might give a better impression of hillside farming?


I'm working on algorithms to interpolate the Landclass with Mesh to eliminate this exact phenomenon (well, not creating terraced fields, but rather Rock or Grass depending on the angle of the slope)



............and who'd a thought it, sightseeing with CFS2!

Cheers

Shessi

VFR ;)

[Sander]

Big progress today; Streams and rivers now cut their way through the terrain better: instead of going over the fields & crops (the lines are now interacting with the terrain textures)
926769267892677

Even with this extra task, all of EURW compiles in 1:20h on my 3 yr old laptop; not bad :)

Still a few minor bugs to fix, and 2 more features to build in and we should be good to go.

[Sander]

Wow, this is also a massive improvement for the coastlines. This is a shot approaching the English coast.
92680

[kelticheart]

Big progress today; Streams and rivers now cut their way through the terrain better: instead of going over the fields & crops (the lines are now interacting with the terrain textures)
92677

Even with this extra task, all of EURW compiles in 1:20h on my 3 yr old laptop; not bad :)

Still a few minor bugs to fix, and 2 more features to build in and we should be good to go.

What an improvement !!!!!... I think I know exactly where that shot was taken.....;)

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

May I ask if the same logic will be applied to roads, which in many cases in the old EURW do not stop at river banks, but cross directly the stream on the water?

There's also another minor problem: when river beds are quite wide they are displayed as small lakes, while they should show up as a dry beds with a small stream in the middle.
It's the case of the Po Valley above, where the Po tributary rivers, flowing from the Alps southward, have a constant volume of water and bed shape throughout the year. They only raise their level during the wet season and in the spring when snow melts. They are all fed by glaciers, which keep them going even during summer.
On the other hand, the tributary rivers flowing northward from the Appennini are almost dry during summer with a sort of medium to low stream during the other seasons, but they are subject to sudden flash floods if big rainstorms hit the mountains. The Appennini do not reach the same altitude as the Alps, so there are no glaciers to keep a constat water feed to the northward tributaries.

This is what causes large bed rivers, normally paved with stones and corrosion debris, with a relatively narrow and shallow water stream in the middle, which can extend up to the banks in very little time during flash floods, expecially in summertime. Large river beds are also man-maintained as such, as a measure to allow enough room for flash floods to expand and slow down, instead of flooding the surrounding farmland or, worse, towns and cities. In the fall of 1966 this is exactly what happened with the river Arno when it flooded Firenze, caused by a containment dam up in the mountains that collapsed under a huge flash flood.

These Appenini rivers are very dangerous and we know them very well. Many people lost their lives because they were fishing while standing on the dry bed of the river and paying no attention to the sudden thuderstorm up in the mountains. It still happens every so often. Crossing these rivers that were normally small streams while, all of a sudden, became furious walls of muddy waters and debris, caused a lot of troubles to the advancing Allies during the liberation of Italy from 1943 to 1945.

I don't know if CFS2 can be instructed to display the areas where these dry river beds expand as such. The Italian boot is all like that, except north of the Po river. Zooming in the above screenshot shows all of them as small, narrow lakes which, in reality, are not there.
If it doesn't, I guess we'll have to live with it as we did so far.

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[Sander]

What an improvement !!!!!... I think I know exactly where that shot was taken.....;)

:applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

May I ask if the same logic will be applied to roads, which in many cases in the old EURW do not stop at river banks, but cross directly the stream on the water?

Yes, I'm going to change the layer ordering in reverse, so roads/railroads cross underneath streams. Perhaps generate 3d Bridges at those points.



There's also another minor problem: when river beds are quite wide they are displayed as small lakes, while they should show up ....
I don't know if CFS2 can be instructed to display the areas where these dry river beds expand as such. The Italian boot is all like that, except north of the Po river. Zooming in the above screenshot shows all of them as small, narrow lakes which, in reality, are not there.
If it doesn't, I guess we'll have to live with it as we did so far.

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

Sorry, not by me. With global generic synthetic scenery at this scale, with the limited choice of available land class values and
limited resolution, and limited source data, and the fact we only have the one single static season, this is just about as good as it gets (I'll bet FSX doesn't get it right either). I'm going to further enhance it by eliminating fields & crops running up hill sides and placing Rock textures on very steep slopes.
After that, it's going to be hand work (not by me!) to make further enhancements.
The main visual effect of the "riverbedding" as I've done now, is to break up the monotony of the landscape: instead of endlessly repeating agriculture, the fields are now grouped in smaller patches which makes everything look better and more credible in general.

[Robert John]

wow I just can not believe the land in cfs2 is getting better and better.
Thank you.
RJ

Train lines with cuttings and embankments?.

[Dumonceau]

Hi there,

I'm from the Dark Side (FSX) but I do want to tell you guys that if this gets released as a package with detailed instructions, I will reinstall my CFS2 for sure!!

What the CFS2 community here has done for their sim is just awesome, and freeware at that!

This is just... Too much for words!

Dumonceau

[Sander]

wow I just can not believe the land in cfs2 is getting better and better.
Thank you.
RJ

Train lines with cuttings and embankments?.

Re-meshing the lines did not make the feature set for the first release. Have to draw the line somewhere, so to speak :mixedsmi:

[Discus]

Wow, this is also a massive improvement for the coastlines. This is a shot approaching the English coast.
92680
Well Sander. This are marvellous news!!! It´s amazing! It gets better and better each day!!:jump:

Thanks a lot for all your work!:medals:

Cheers, Discus

[Sander]

Cheers! :icon29:


Hi there,

I'm from the Dark Side (FSX) but I do want to tell you guys that if this gets released as a package with detailed instructions, I will reinstall my CFS2 for sure!!

What the CFS2 community here has done for their sim is just awesome, and freeware at that!

This is just... Too much for words!

Dumonceau

The idea is to make a complete set with the "current state" of airfields/cities/landmarks/objects etc. included, instead of how it is now where you have to install 1000's of different zip's with separate "fix" zips etc., with links to even 10000 more zip's you have to install first, and can not be found on the original websites any more :isadizzy:

That's also the big challenge :)

[Dumonceau]

Cheers! :icon29:



The idea is to make a complete set with the "current state" of airfields/cities/landmarks/objects etc. included, instead of how it is now where you have to install 1000's of different zip's with separate "fix" zips etc., with links to even 10000 more zip's you have to install first, and can not be found on the original websites any more :isadizzy:

That's also the big challenge :)

Sander,

My CFS2 disks are standing by!! The SOH CFS2 community is really an advocate of this sim!

I'm dreaming of getting into a Spit of 349 (Belgian) Sqn and blasting some He-111's and Ju-88's out of the sky!

Question, without extra aircraft, how big of an install would the world wide CFS2 be??

EDIT: and will the water, sun and sky textures also be upgraded? I mean, the screenies you people post look almost as good as FS9 with enhancements!!

Take care!

Dumonceau!

[blohmundvoss]

Big progress today; Streams and rivers now cut their way through the terrain better: instead of going over the fields & crops (the lines are now interacting with the terrain textures)
926769267892677

Even with this extra task, all of EURW compiles in 1:20h on my 3 yr old laptop; not bad :)


This should please Shessi !! (It certainly pleases me).http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/images/icons/icon26.gif

Cheers
BuV

[rhumbaflappy]

A huge limitation of CFS2 is that it is frozen to one season. We overcome that by having different installs for each needed season, so missions can be run in the correct scenery environment. It is possible to make a different landclass for each season, that could simulate dry areas, or other seasonal differences. But a landclass tile is about 1km in size. To make a convincing riverbed, we could resort to larger and varied line widths with an appropriate texture. Other differences could be displayed as VTP1 polys, which have the same size limitation of about 4.5 meters per pixel... the same as FS9.

Dick

[Shessi]

Oh! BV, it certainly does mein freund...;)

Sander,
Yes, I couldn't agree more that the varied types and levels of texs, meshes and scenery make it a nightmare to get right. Rami's excellent work with his ETO install instructions, is a masterpiece, and works! I do appreciate that it will be a lot of hard work, but with these stunning upgrades it will do it justice and look just.......:icon_eek:

Cheers

Shessi

[kelticheart]

Yes, I'm going to change the layer ordering in reverse, so roads/railroads cross underneath streams. Perhaps generate 3d Bridges at those points.



Sorry, not by me. With global generic synthetic scenery at this scale, with the limited choice of available land class values and
limited resolution, and limited source data, and the fact we only have the one single static season, this is just about as good as it gets (I'll bet FSX doesn't get it right either). I'm going to further enhance it by eliminating fields & crops running up hill sides and placing Rock textures on very steep slopes.
After that, it's going to be hand work (not by me!) to make further enhancements.
The main visual effect of the "riverbedding" as I've done now, is to break up the monotony of the landscape: instead of endlessly repeating agriculture, the fields are now grouped in smaller patches which makes everything look better and more credible in general.

Roger that!

Fine by me Sander, one more question and then I'll stop being a pain: can those wide river beds be reduced to show up as regular streams instead of small lakes or do we face again the same problems you mentioned above?
I know it's impossible creating seasonal changes while CFS2 is running, the only way to do it is changing set of world textures before loading it each time.

I never meant that, sorry if I conveyed such idea.

Thank you again!

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[kdriver]

Is it possible to decompile this file? If it could be broken up into small geographic areas, a number of texture sets could be used for the one installation, e.g. EurW for northern Italy and Mediterranean for southern Italy.

In any case, you're doing a terrific job Sander. :applause:

Thanks,
Kevin

[Sander]

Is it possible to decompile this file? If it could be broken up into small geographic areas, a number of texture sets could be used for the one installation, e.g. EurW for northern Italy and Mediterranean for southern Italy.

In any case, you're doing a terrific job Sander. :applause:

Thanks,
Kevin
Done.

[Ettico]

Big progress today; Streams and rivers now cut their way through the terrain better: instead of going over the fields & crops (the lines are now interacting with the terrain textures)

Even with this extra task, all of EURW compiles in 1:20h on my 3 yr old laptop; not bad :)

Still a few minor bugs to fix, and 2 more features to build in and we should be good to go.

What??

:isadizzy:

Oh, I get it. You've got autocoast doing that during compilation. That's brilliant. Exactly what I would have done if I had the brains.

Great work, Sander.:salute:

[kdriver]

Done.

Well done!

[kelticheart]

Done.

This is terrific news indeed!

I always had this texture problem in Italy! Finally!

The only way I could get around it was to have two installs, one for the north and one for the center/south/islands.

Thank you!
KH :ernae:

[Sander]

And today, I've made the routine to place rocks on steep slopes, and remove fields that are running up the hills. It's not very sophisticated and I still need to play around with the threshold values to see what works best, but here's a before-after preview of the result (somewhere in Switzerland)
92781

[Sander]

Pretty dramatic effect :mixedsmi:
92782

[Captain Kurt]

Awesome indeed

[Discus]

Sander

These is awesome! It´s a new world for CFS2! This will make an split before and after this great steps. Thanks for posting the pictures of your progress.

Cheers, Discus

[Worthless]

Magnificent!!!

[Shessi]

Sander,
I laugh every time you post new bits, it's just superb....

You clever so and so!!

Cheers

Shessi

[Dick]

Brilliant work, it will make a huge improvement. Many thanks for all of your efforts.
Dick.:applause:

[gius]

Marvellous new world!!! Congrats Sander:jawdrop:

[Cody Coyote]

Remarkable, just remarkable! Can't wait to fly in the "new" CFS2 world.

[Sander]

The fun thing with bringing the various aspects together is that -even though it is rather rough technique at a very low resolution- it brings a lot of variation, and surprises.

[kelticheart]

The fun thing with bringing the various aspects together is that -even though it is rather rough technique at a very low resolution- it brings a lot of variation, and surprises.

Sander you are a genius! Forgive me for being so direct, had those screenies been posted anonimously without comments, I would have not been able to tell in which simulator they were taken.

I would have probably discarded them as being another addon for FSX with a sigh, thinking CFS2 is far too old for anything so sophisticated.

Isn't that wrong!!! :redfire: CFS2 FOREVER!!!! :redfire:

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[Sander]

Sander you are a genius!



Hardly! Just a frustrated end-user (with an obsession for maps and interest in WWII history) who could not live with seeing the unfulfilled potential of the graphics engine, and happens to be a scripting guy. There are many geniuses in the FS design world that helped directly and indirectly with advice and tooling that was required to get this far.



:redfire: CFS2 FOREVER!!!! :redfire:

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

Amen! (Well, at least let's squeeze some more fun out of the old beast)

[Robert John]

Hi Sander,
I am still speechless.
RJ

[voyager]

Thanks Sander

The best of both worlds!!!

voyager

[rhumbaflappy]

Hi All.

Something to remember is this is Step 1. Use Fs9 polys and lines to create a better world for CFS2.

Step 2 is to find better sources of polys and lines to improve Step 1.

Step 3 would be to use satellite and aerial imagery, as well as historical mapping to fine tune what had been made with Step 2.

It is a long process, but there should be something for Step 1 sooner, rather than later. Some frustration with errors in the FS9 data right now... not so much any big problems with Sander's programming.

Dick

[Sander]

Meanwhile, I've made some routines that enforce the tree line roughly according to the table found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_line. Here's how it looks around Mont Blanc from the French side...

92831
92832

[Shessi]

Sander,
So, with the tweaking you are doing will you/we will be able to have pre-selected and accurate forests, rivers, lakes, roads, shorelines and possibly railway lines(?), for specific areas?

Will that be possible with block algorithm settings or will that take a huge amount of time and effort in each area?

Such things as definitive Ardennes, Black Forest, the Dam-buster lakes etc etc will be possible?

Shessi

[Sander]

Sander,
So, with the tweaking you are doing will you/we will be able to have pre-selected and accurate forests, rivers, lakes, roads, shorelines and possibly railway lines(?), for specific areas?

Will that be possible with block algorithm settings or will that take a huge amount of time and effort in each area?

Such things as definitive Ardennes, Black Forest, the Dam-buster lakes etc etc will be possible?

Shessi

Interesting question! I guess I've been a bit vague in what EXACTLY the tool does (from the end-user perpective) and what is and more importantly what is NOT possible. I'll try to go over those points:

The output of rivers/lakes/roads/shorelines are derived from an existing data set. Because the FS9 data detail and formatting matches up with cfs2's capability, this is what we use at the moment. Not for specific area's, but for the whole world.
Because there is no complete digital data set in existence for the roads/rivers/streams in the 1940's, true historical accuracy will bee incredibly difficult to achieve on a global scale.
Since we first load the data in SBuilder, it will however be much easier than before to "zoom in" on specific area's of the world that played a significant role in WWII and make adjustments to enhance realism, but it will still be a manual process (using aerial photo's and period maps). The old method was using ground2k, and that was pretty painful work.
The tweaking I'm doing now (past week), enforces a few "laws of nature" on the EXISTING STOCK Land Class data by processing the combination of Mesh, Land Class and Lines. In the stock data, the Black Forest, Ardennes etc. already exist, but the texturing is rather bland. Enforcing laws of nature makes the terrain look much more varied and credible. But it's still impossible to achieve 100% accuracy. Some improvement can possibly be made with better land classification source data, but, again, that's unlikely to be available for the 1940's (for instance, the town I live in has about 100.000 inhabitants now, in WWII it was just a tiny town of about 3000! The exact spot where my house is, is now "towns & crops" texture in CFS2, but was Fields in 1940).




Hi All.
Something to remember is this is
Step 1. Use Fs9 polys and lines to create a better world for CFS2.
Step 2 is to find better sources of polys and lines to improve Step 1.
Step 3 would be to use satellite and aerial imagery, as well as historical mapping to fine tune what had been made with Step 2.
It is a long process, but there should be something for Step 1 sooner, rather than later. Some frustration with errors in the FS9 data right now... not so much any big problems with Sander's programming.
Dick


So, is it going to be a definitive Dam Busters lake, Ardennes, Normandy, Leningrad etc.? As far as I'm concerned, at this stage we're just laying down a new foundation for the whole world, with a higher credibility level than the default. Perhaps it's definitive, perhaps not. It will be when the last developer hits the Compile button the last time and says "that 'll have to do". We're approaching the 14'th anniversary, so who knows....
As Cesar says: live in the now!

[Sander]

Low tree line level, really obvious in the Norwegian Fjords: 92852

[Ettico]

Low tree line level, really obvious in the Norwegian Fjords: 92852

That's how it should have been all along. Why couldn't Microsoft do that? :salute:

[Sander]

That's how it should have been all along. Why couldn't Microsoft do that? :salute:

You know, I'm a systems administrator working mainly with MS technology, that is a question I ask myself every day with every product they release... half baked bug ridden releases all the time. Don't get me started.

[rhumbaflappy]

That's how it should have been all along. Why couldn't Microsoft do that? :salute:

This is a very good question. At the time CFS2 was being made, the most complete, and free, sources of data were the Digital Chart of the World and the Olson Land Classification. These sources were pretty crude, but they have been the basis of all further flight sim data. Over the years, these have been refined a bit, but traces remain in FSX/P3D.

The short answer is the Aces team had limited time, resources and budget.

Microsoft would have needed to vastly increase it's FSX budget to include all the best commercial data... for CFS2, it just wasn't even available for the project. We're lucky we even got CFS2, as it was a rushed project to preview the development process for FS2002. FS2002 was a huge step up from FS2000, regarding terrain. But for CFS2, they did have the ability for better terrain, and better detail. We still haven't tapped the full range of VTP1 poly representation, which gives us full control of the view down to 4.8 meters per pixel, just like resampled photoreal. Now, CFS2 wouldn't even be politically correct. And Microsoft has changed it's direction. They will spend billions on cell phone development. Nothing on flight simulation.

The Open Street Map project is a good example of what can now happen. Microsoft is allowing Bing! map data to be traced without restriction for the OSM project, which greatly helps with the legal restrictions previously holding up that project. This will yield much better free data down the road.

To date, we still have very few sources of free vector data that accurately portray the world's coastlines, roads and waterways. That would represent the Step 2 I posted above. We can trace lines and polys from better sources, but that would be Step 3 referenced above.

Dick

[Sander]

....... We still haven't tapped the full range of VTP1 poly representation, which gives us full control of the view down to 4.8 meters per pixel, just like resampled photoreal. ...

Dick

Ummm.... sorry, but it has been tapped into......but it's really difficult to create that type of content. One of my previous attempts:92860

[Sander]

.... They will spend billions on cell phone development. Nothing on flight simulation....

Dick

And getting your personal and professional data into THEIR cloud...

[Shessi]

Sander,
Thanks for the explanation, makes more sense now. It's remembering how the scenery is built up of several layers, and just what you are modifiying to achieve the results. I like the fact that the 'ones' and the 'zeros' are doing most of the work for you...;)
I remember you doing the above, wasn't it Texel?, potentially good but it's always the resolution that lets texture down in CFS2.

Ettico,
I was thinking the same, and thank you Dick for that potted history, and the reasons why. I think we all forget that the availability of non-military, free, world-wide, digital data has just exploded in the last 10 years...linked of course to greater internet and storage capability.

Cheers

Shessi

[Sander]

Sander,
Thanks for the explanation, makes more sense now. It's remembering how the scenery is built up of several layers, and just what you are modifiying to achieve the results. I like the fact that the 'ones' and the 'zeros' are doing most of the work for you...;)
I remember you doing the above, wasn't it Texel?, potentially good but it's always the resolution that lets texture down in CFS2.
...
Cheers

Shessi
Yes, it was Texel. And I do think the result is pretty good; the hard part (and I'm not too happy with) is the color/contrast balance. The hard work is in getting the scale and resolution correct. Once that's done, it looks pretty good in the sim but it takes a long time to load; in rendering, the VTP textures get the lowest priority, therefore it remains blurry for a long time on approach and if the sim is busy doing more important stuff (aircraft and effects), it really is just a pixel soup when the area covered is so large. You certainly wouldn't want to cover every visible pixel with VTP textures.... not practical even if it is technically possible.

[Allen]

Hate to rain on the parade a little. How bad is the load times?

[Dumonceau]

In the meantime, I've reinstalled CFS2 and so a clean install is standing by for whatever you guys release!! :salute:

[kelticheart]

......We're approaching the 14'th anniversary, so who knows....As Cesar says: live in the now!

Well, the improvements, compared to what we are used to, are already so great that I do not think there will be many unhappy users when all of the above will be released!

Anyway...


...with every product they release... half baked bug ridden releases all the time...

Hear! Hear!


... And getting your personal and professional data into THEIR cloud...

Nothing new on the Western Front, the same ole'......:rolleyes:

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[Sander]

Hate to rain on the parade a little. How bad is the load times?

Fine.

[Sander]

This is the last week I can spend on programming for the foreseeable future.
Therefore, I now have to wrap up on functionality and focus on testing/bug fixing.
I'm ironing out a few minor things now, and will ship the final preview as Release Candidate tomorrow to the test team.
That should give me a few days to polish up and get the final release out the door.

Stuff to do:
-Change layer ordering to CFS2 style
-Prevent roads/rails to run over water
-Implement extended VTP data area
-Test stand-alone build environment and MAKE scripts
-Import custom landclass.raw with SBX
-Various minor bug fixes

Some of the features that unfortunately didn't make it for this version, but will remain on the to-do list:
-Utility lines (electricity pylons)
-Bridges/railway crossings (with corrected crossing angles)
-LOD8 Mesh with stream/road/rail correction
-Land Class editor (I have not found a way to read SBuilder's land class function)

Another thought: it would be cool if I could pre-release a demo region. Somewhere with nice ocean shore, islands, lakes, mountains and cities... any ideas? Somewhere in the USA perhaps? Or Scotland? Norway? It would be like a 20/25 MB download, and include a complete texture set. And we would need a nice military WWII airfield there obviously, or a mission with a carrier.
:salute:

[kdriver]

Northern Norway has all those features - Narvik, Tromso, Lofoten Islands, Bardufoss airfield, carrier missions.

[Shessi]

Sounds goods! Be great to see what you've been up to.

Norway might be good, or even Iceland? both with mountains, water and lots of dramatic landscape?

Cheers

Shessi

[Shessi]

Sander,
With all this 'construction' going on, would it be possible to programme/automate the population of the CFS2 world with trees and buildings, as in CFS3/FS9/FSX? Use the info that determines what is displayed on certain tiles to put trees and buldings etc?

They would of course have to be of an extremely low poly level, muti-LOD, with low res texs, so would not have too much FR hit.

Shessi

[Sander]

Test team: sorry I missed my (self-imposed) deadline today; family obligations....


Sander,
With all this 'construction' going on, would it be possible to programme/automate the population of the CFS2 world with trees and buildings, as in CFS3/FS9/FSX? Use the info that determines what is displayed on certain tiles to put trees and buldings etc?

They would of course have to be of an extremely low poly level, muti-LOD, with low res texs, so would not have too much FR hit.

Shessi

Hi Shessi,
There is one obstacle: we know which Land Class type is placed on each LOD13 tile, but not exactly which texture (the fields/city types that consist of 5 or 7 textures). It can't be a very complex algorithm, but we need to know, in order to have perfectly aligned objects. If we just placed them at random, the visual result would not be worth the effort, IMO. Once somebody reverse engineers that algorithm, we could go a long way....

Then, we could make an equivalent of AGN files (could be as SCASM API's, or tables of object/heading/location).

To populate the whole world, might be a bit too much: In my experiments, I found that you need AT LEAST 20 objects on each LOD13 tile. There are 65536 LOD13 tiles in an LOD5 tile. There are about 1164 populated LOD5's in the FS world. Given that a rough estimate of about 80% of these consist of land, that would be 1.220.523.840 objects.... At minimum each object would consist of: 16 byte GUID + 2x4 byte Coordinate x,y, 4 byte altitude, 2 byte(?) heading, 2 byte(?) scale = 16 bytes. But I suspect it will probably be more. In best case:
19,528,381,440 bytes = 19070685 KB = 18623 MB = 18 GB! So, for each object added to an each LOD13 tile, it's almost an extra GB of disk space (if the whole world is covered)
When I think of it, if 1 object with multiple buildings/trees is made for each texture variation, it could be a lot smaller. Edit: no that wouldn't work because be need to be able to exclude single buildings/trees where there are roads/rivers/rails/water...
Either way, the impact on the FPS would be considerable. The trick for that is to keep the amount of different objects as low as possible; it's much easier for the graphics engine to display 100 instances of 1 single object than to display 25 different objects only once.
Don't even think of putting that all in the GSL.... Maybe with some clever SCASM programming we could get some collision detection working, but that's as far as it could possibly go.
But it would be FUN and COOL for sure!

[Shessi]

I'm glad you worked that one out! LOL...18Gb:icon_eek:

In fact it would be more, as it would have to include texs and any LODs etc.

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of when you say one object, not many. What I thought of was having large areas of trees and/or buildings, but made as one object...a large modular process for the world. The viewing distance of the trees/buildings would be very close, so the sim wouldn't have to draw them into the distance.

I played with the API's and vis settings when I did my Kammhuber line, just placing large plates of multiple searchlights, covering from Denmark to mid-France, had no hit on FR's at all. Mind you, they were only a couple of polys each, compared to what trees and buildings would take to build, and the millions of them there are!


That's interesting about which texture is displayed. That surprises me, I thought it was an exact science, knowing which tex goes on which part of the tile, but obviously not! I suppose that's why anyone re-texturing the CFS2 world has to be more general in what they do.

C'mon M$ give us the code!! ;)

Cheers Shessi

[Sander]

I'm glad you worked that one out! LOL...18Gb:icon_eek:

In fact it would be more, as it would have to include texs and any LODs etc.


No, you'd be using Objects (same as GSL Objects, but placed in the Procedural Scenery layer instead - the dp is not used in that case), so the textures would be reused for each instance of it's parent object.

[Sander]

.... Bardufoss airfield,.....

ok, Norway it is!
93010

[Rami]

It's looking good Andrew. :applause:

The question is will Sander's new accurate coastlines either drown or leave your scenery high and dry. Your rendition of Narvik is totally waterlogged with his new Norway scenery. I suppose it all depends on how soon he releases his new package.

Kevin,

I'm dreading that moment. But thank you for the compliments!

P.S. - Has anyone given any thought about Ettico's Eurotargets on the Rhine and Hamburg, for example?

[Sander]

Please don't dread; such a negative vibe.
Before I release that stuff we need to decide which add-ons to make the packages compatible with. I'm willing to invest time on each, and if there are more developers helping out with it, but only if the add-on can be fully integrated with the new cfs2 world (=packaged & distributed together). For instance, I'm already reworking some of the parts of the Netherlands from the original beta package.
The bulk of the work I've done so far just involved getting the software and World source files together, now comes a period of editing details in SBuilder. Since it's taken 3 months for the first stage, and considering how much got done, I think it would be realistic to set a 3 month time frame on releasing the World Scenery.
A few years ago I made personal inquiries with most scenery developers if it's OK to use their stuff and received permission for everything that was out at the time.

[Rami]

Please don't dread; such a negative vibe.

Before I release that stuff we need to decide which add-ons to make the packages compatible with. I'm willing to invest time on each, and if there are more developers helping out with it, but only if the add-on can be fully integrated with the new cfs2 world (=packaged & distributed together). For instance, I'm already reworking some of the parts of the Netherlands from the original beta package.

The bulk of the work I've done so far just involved getting the software and World source files together, now comes a period of editing details in SBuilder. Since it's taken 3 months for the first stage, and considering how much got done, I think it would be realistic to set a 3 month time frame on releasing the World Scenery.

A few years ago I made personal inquiries with most scenery developers if it's OK to use their stuff and received permission for everything that was out at the time.

Sander,

I'm not angry or boohoo-ing your efforts, it's just that I'm getting that sinking feeling one gets when they realize they've built their house upon the sand. All the GSL ports I've done in Europe are based on Eurw, and if that changes, I'm in for heaps upon heaps of scenery redos and mission rewrites, something I'm dreading after finally finishing more than 650 missions for that area of CFS2 and feeling like I've finally put it to rest.

That doesn't even take into account Achim's airfields and Ettico's EuroTargets. I heard though the grapevine that my Narvik is waterlogged in the new Norway, for example.

But progress is progress, and I will do what is needed, when the time comes.

[Sander]

Sander,

I'm not angry or boohoo-ing your efforts, it's just that I'm getting that sinking feeling one gets when they realize they've built their house upon the sand. All the GSL ports I've done in Europe are based on Eurw, and if that changes, I'm in for heaps upon heaps of scenery redos and mission rewrites, something I'm dreading after finally finishing more than 650 missions for that area of CFS2 and feeling like I've finally put it to rest.

That doesn't even take into account Achim's airfields and Ettico's EuroTargets. I head though the grapevine that my Narvik is waterlogged in the new Norway, for example.

But progress is progress, and I will do what is needed, when the time comes.

But what you don't seem to realize is that it now only takes a few minutes to make corrections to the terrain in the SBuilder source files, rather than the painful process of re-aligning with mission builder and FSSC. Granted, given the sheer amount of add-ons to consider, it'll still be a bit of a chore, but an easy one.

I haven't taken the time to download and install all the stuff created during my hiatus. I could follow your Europe installation guide, but we'd also need to do Pacific (Xavier/Maskrider/...). The cfs2autocoast code is almost done now, I'm going to start "dressing up" cfs2 again with everything I can find.

Please let go of the sinking feeling; I need all the enthusiasm, help and support possible to pull this off.

[Robert John]

Hi Rami,

Don't worry about the new mesh that sander is doing it could be used as a separate entity, we could name it something like CFS4 that is backward compatible with cfs2 with adjustments, the new mesh may encourage new developers, is cfs2 coming near the end of its life or is this a new beginning.

Robert John

[Rami]

But what you don't seem to realize is that it now only takes a few minutes to make corrections to the terrain in the SBuilder source files, rather than the painful process of re-aligning with mission builder and FSSC. Granted, given the sheer amount of add-ons to consider, it'll still be a bit of a chore, but an easy one.

I haven't taken the time to download and install all the stuff created during my hiatus. I could follow your Europe installation guide, but we'd also need to do Pacific (Xavier/Maskrider/...). The cfs2autocoast code is almost done now, I'm going to start "dressing up" cfs2 again with everything I can find.

Please let go of the sinking feeling; I need all the enthusiasm, help and support possible to pull this off.

Sander,

You said what I wanted to hear. If you can do it with minimal or no damage, and/or make corrections with minimal effort on your part, (if I have to fix something here and there, it's no biggie) I'll back you 110% and jump in with both feet.

One other thing I forgot, because it involves mesh: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/local_links_search.php?action=show&userid=39530&sort=d

[Sander]

Hi Rami,

Don't worry about the new mesh that sander is doing it could be used as a separate entity, we could name it something like CFS4 that is backward compatible with cfs2 with adjustments, the new mesh may encourage new developers, is cfs2 coming near the end of its life or is this a new beginning.

Robert John
Thanks for backing me up, but I'm NOT doing Mesh (in FS terminology, Mesh refers to the Altitude mesh). I'm doing LWM, VTP and Land Class. The Mesh we'll (continue to) use is Rhumbaflappy's SRTM conversion. The fact that the Mesh stays the same, also helps reduce the problems with existing scenery.

[Sander]

Sander,

You said what I wanted to hear. If you can do it with minimal or no damage, and/or make corrections with minimal effort on your part, (if I have to fix something here and there, it's no biggie) I'll back you 110% and jump in with both feet.

One other thing I forgot, because it involves mesh: http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/local_links_search.php?action=show&userid=39530&sort=d

Todob is also in the test team.
It's all a matter of installing the packages, fly to the area, asses the damage (if any) from the fs9 lines/water, load up LWM viewer to pinpoint the location, load the corresponding SBuilder file, move a few points around and/or delete some FS9 stuff to fix the problems. Export the SBX, et voila, it's part of the new world.

[blohmundvoss]

Hi Sander

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports&p=835637&posted=1#post835637

Cheers
BuV

Edit: cured! Whoppee!

Edit 2: if you haven't followed the link, proof that the landclass files produced by the new version of cfs2autocoast work in the non-Europe areas as well. My Naktong River valley, Korea, before and after.

9319693197

I've just noticed an anomaly with Pactex - but a bit of texture set editing should sort that out! A few 'karsts' would look good.

9319893199

I like the 'cleared' look that now applies to the flat river valleys in Indochina as well

932009320193202

Cheers
BuV

[Jaxon]

Sander,
this is all so very amazing!
Fortunatly I am in the middle of renovating my new old house and hurry up before the winter comes around...
Unfortunately all my spare time is filled with that.

So I sit at the side and watch all the progress happening here.

I am afraid your nice toy will end in a nice beta stadium and all development lost due to HDD failure or whatever, when I will have the time again to try it out.
Please, please, do me a favour and backup often. Put in on a thumb drive, load it up online somewhere...
Do what you think is right but handle your baby/our CFS2 future with care!

Thanks
:-)

[Sander]

Sander,
this is all so very amazing!
Fortunatly I am in the middle of renovating my new old house and hurry up before the winter comes around...
Unfortunately all my spare time is filled with that.

So I sit at the side and watch all the progress happening here.

I am afraid your nice toy will end in a nice beta stadium and all development lost due to HDD failure or whatever, when I will have the time again to try it out.
Please, please, do me a favour and backup often. Put in on a thumb drive, load it up online somewhere...
Do what you think is right but handle your baby/our CFS2 future with care!

Thanks
:-)

The tool is pretty much ready for production use; a few minor things to iron out before going final, but in the whole world could be built and released right now with the current release by any member of the test team, if I were to drop out again right now ;)

Backups are second nature to me; I'm a systems administrator in real life after all. I think I've been working on cfs2autocoast on at least 4 different PC's over the years.
Rest assured, in the end, the availability of cfs2autocoast will not be an issue. The new challenge will be keeping track of the painstakingly reworked SBuilder source files for the unified cfs2 world.

enjoy the ride and your get your house sorted.

[Ettico]

I took the plunge and purchased fs9 from Amazon. When it arrives I will have all the necessary tools for converting fs9 scenery, but not a clue how to use them yet.

[rhumbaflappy]

Hi Ettico.

By the time you figure out what we're doing, we'll be done. :)

We should have something in a month's time, I would think. We'll probably also save the SBuilder9 SBX files, so we can go back and correct what errors the end-users find. I'm starting Africa after doing Oceana, Australia and South America, Ian has Asia, Sander has been working on Europe and some of North America, I believe. That might leave potions of North America to go (?)

It will be a good base to work from. In the future, I would think we'll continue with LOD5 segments, and replace the rough coasts with a more accurate rendition, as well as correcting rivers and perhaps some road-work ( although it's impossible to define what roads existed in 1939 - 1945 ). There's 6144 LOD5 areas. Some are just ocean... lots of work for the future. Many thanks to Sander for providing not only a way to make VTP1 lines, but also a way to use SBuilder9 as a design interface.

Dick

[Ettico]

Hi Ettico.

By the time you figure out what we're doing, we'll be done. :)

Fine by me. But at least I'll know what you're doing.:icon_lol:

Actually, the reason I grabbed fs9 is because Sander's earlier estimate was 3 months.

Plus, I can go ahead and create some SBX files while you guys are working, and learn how to edit them.

[Ettico]

Got fs9 installed and Sbuilder registered.

Immediate roadblock: "runtime error 339: component TABCTL32.OCX not correctly registered"

edited to add: Fixed. Downloaded and installed the missing culprit.

[Sander]

Got fs9 installed and Sbuilder registered.

Immediate roadblock: "runtime error 339: component TABCTL32.OCX not correctly registered"

edited to add: Fixed. Downloaded and installed the missing culprit.

Hi Ettico, glad to hear you're up and running.
If you have more problems, errors or questions please post them here (http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports)

[Ettico]

Hi Ettico, glad to hear you're up and running.
If you have more problems, errors or questions please post them here (http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforums/showthread.php?80942-cfs2autocoast-Test-team-bug-reports)

Thanks Sander,

I wouldn't say "up" or "running" are accurate descriptions of my current state.:isadizzy: The stuff is installed. I just happen to have a mouse with a wheel. That's about it for me so far.

[crashaz]

Interesting....

[Sarg Willy]

more Preview pic,s ??

[rhumbaflappy]

Niagara Falls:

94458

Lac_Manicouagan:

94459

Delavan_Wisconsin:

94460


Dick

[bobhegf]

It would be nice if someone could fix the land class at NAS Norfolk VA.

[rhumbaflappy]

Within the confines of CFS2's landclass, this could be changed. The problem with landclass, is it is a broad brushstroke. Of course another problem, is this for 1943? And, Sander's program doesn't allow for VTP1 polys to draw concrete for the base. But such a poly could still be made via Ground2k, or using groundpolys via the Maskrider technique.

Dick

[bobhegf]

I can do the concrete ,no problem using a paint program or FSSC. The problem is the shape of the shore line.

[rhumbaflappy]

Hi Bob.

Yes the shoreline can be changed using an image as a background in SBuilder9, and then using Sander's CFS2Autocoast to translate the saved SBX file to CFS2 bgls.

Dick

[Sarg Willy]

Thanks Dick , screens looking fantastic !

[kelticheart]

Thanks Dick , screens looking fantastic !

I'll second that! :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause: :applause:

I also can't wait for some new CFS2 scenery releases!

Cheers!
KH :ernae:

[Pat Pattle]

I haven't visited these forums for ages (having buried my head in cfs3) and this work is simply stunning!! :applause: What a labour of love and dedication. Well done. :medals:

Being able to use fs9 textures - and our own I take it? -has transformed the look of this sim. I'll be re-installing cfs2 for sure.

Thanks for re-kindling my interest!