Fixing old scenery in FSX

[Willy]

I've got an old fictional scenery that was originally done in CFS that I got to working in FS9. I'm trying to see if I can get it going again in FSX. The first try, it loaded, the buildings show up with an issue and it needs a bit of landscaping. The Afcad I did for FS9 though seems to work ok.

During WW2, Southend England airport (EGMC) was known as RAF Rochford. The scenery has kept the Rochford name and I gave it an ICAO code of EGRD when I got it going in FS9. It appears in FS a short distance from EGMC so I figure the CFS coordinates were probably a bit off, which I'm fine with.

Buildings: The original building textures are 256 color bmps. All of the black areas (0/0/0 RGB) around the buildings are showing up in FSX which they didn't do in FS9. The hangers are supported by girders which the black on the is showing as well. But I can still park an aircraft in them. I just can't see in or out of them. Canelo's Cantina (the FS 98 or 2000 Alamo was used with the Canelo's name painted on it) also is showing black around it as well. I'm wondering if I either deleted out the black bits or maybe used an alpha layer also black to make it invisible would work.

Landscaping. It needs leveling out and and exclusion put around it as I have hills on top of the runways at one end and trees scattered about the place randomly. I got around this in FS9 by making entries for both excluding and flattening in the Rochford entry in the scenery.cfg. However, apparently in the scenery.cfg doesn't contain seperate entries for every add on scenery and just has one entry titled add on scenery which I assume covers everything in that folder.

And comments or suggestions would be most helpful.

This scenery is kind of a sentimetal thing as it was made for everyone at Combat Flight Center (predecessor website for SOH) by one of the CFS 1 scenery gurus and we used it in online multiplayer as a base of operations back then.

[Willy]

A couple of screenshots of what I'm talking about






I just tried to make the black invisible using solid black on an alpha layer, but I used a dds format. Maybe if I did it as a bmp?

[ian elliot]

You could try running the objects through MDLconX and saving them as a FSX bgl library, i think the program may handle objects that old, its a useful utility to have anyway. not sure about texture's, but you could open them up in your paint program and create the alphas yourself, maybe save them in DDS format. As for the flatten and background, you may be able to open the afcad with ADEX, create a new background/flatten using the Flatten-mask-class-map-exclude autogen function, and then delete any original flatten bgl's, where's this scenery found, might have a look at it myself.

[Willy]

Thanks for the suggestions Ian. Although some of it is beyond my current skill level. I've got ModelconX, but it's kind of like a dog watching television. I know there's something going, but no idea what.

I've came to the conclusion that those old scasm models don't support transparent bits as FSX does them. As a work around for now, I've been playing with the textures painting in some aircraft in the black spots along with a wall behind them. Kind of hokey looking, but better than the black holes.

I've had better luck with the 3 buildings (Operations Bldg, the Cantina (which I've renamed "Ickie's") and the original "Outhouse" next to the Cantina. They are showing the usual scaling issues with CFS 1, but I think I can do some more paint trickery to make it look better. I've already "repainted" the buildings using the FSX Alamo textures (the originals were FS98 Alamo textures) and have them in .dds.

I tried to trick FSX into the exclude flatten thing and amazingly (to me) it worked. As in FS9, I went to the scenery.cfg file and in the section for Addon Scenery, I added the flatten and exclude data from the previous version. I checked and it didn't seem to be working. Then I went back a bit ago and picked up a Fw 200 Condor flight I was messing with that I had headed for Southend. When I got in sight, the flattens and excludes were working. Beats me why it didn't work the first time I checked them.

I do have a big black square on the ground nearby that I'm going to have to sort out though. But I do have it somewhat workable.

[Willy]

Oh, I forgot to add that the scenery hasn't been available for download in over a decade. As far as I know, what I have is the only existing copy. At one time back then it was in the library here. The original designer Ralf Treibel has been off the radar for about as long. I was going to fix it up for FS9, but it had some other issues there that I never could get around. (the original runways "ghosting" in and out when flying about depending on the angle of the view). For some reason, they haven't showed up in FSX.

But if you want to take a crack at it to see if you can do anything, pm me your e-mail and I'll package it back up and send it.

[Willy]

After a few days of trying everything I can think of, I got off my rear and decided to just do a total redux in ADEX now that I've got that installed and running. I ended up ditching everything that wasn't compatible.

A new flatten/exclude has solved those problems.

I've decided that while I'm at it, to "upgrade" a bit. There's still two runways, but instead of parallel 1/19s I moved one to 9/27 for when the wind isn't being cooperative. Otherwise the layout is going to be close.

I'm going to have to use standard scenery objects for now. Maybe later I can figure out how to do some custom ones.

[Astoroth]

I remember that scenery! Man, that was years ago, lol.