Questions for MaskRider...

[Rami]

Good morning, Chris...

After releasing the scenery in the Mediterranean, I promised Devildog73 that I would help him by building a harbor (Kirin? Perhaps today's Keelung?) on Taiwan for his BPF effort before doing the last three days of the Battle of France.

I'm taking the opportunity to update my Pacific installs. I completed updating my installs for the Aleutians, and for Asia, including installing UncleTgt's Andaman and Nicobar islands, and am going to do the Southwest Pacific today.

I plan on doing a specific installation for airfields compatible with Rhumbaflappy's new watermasks, and another for the stock coastlines. In your experience, which packages are best compatible with each?

Would it also be possible to update the airfields on Formosa to GSL? I did this for Port Darwin, it might be worth doing again...

[Shadow Wolf 07]

I use the non-gsl Formosa package in one of my campaigns. It sure would be nice if the airfields and nearby cities/ports were in GSL. I salute your efforts Rami and BTW: I used the stock coastlines in mine.

[MaskRider]

Good morning, Chris...

After releasing the scenery in the Mediterranean, I promised Devildog73 that I would help him by building a harbor (Kirin? Perhaps today's Keelung?) on Taiwan for his BPF effort before doing the last three days of the Battle of France.

I'm taking the opportunity to update my Pacific installs. I completed updating my installs for the Aleutians, and for Asia, including installing UncleTgt's Andaman and Nicobar islands, and am going to do the Southwest Pacific today.

I plan on doing a specific installation for airfields compatible with Rhumbaflappy's new watermasks, and another for the stock coastlines. In your experience, which packages are best compatible with each?

Would it also be possible to update the airfields on Formosa to GSL? I did this for Port Darwin, it might be worth doing again...

Hiya Rami,

Hmmm. I have been sort of toying around with a Taiwan/Formosa rework for ages and ages- ever since DD73 first approached me about doing some work there at one point. With one thing or another that has come up in my life, I admit that I kinda punted on the idea. However, it has been niggling away at me.

As for Kirin being Keelung- I am not sure. I have seen it spelled as it is currently spelled, Chi-Lung, but don't know that I have seen it spelled Kirin. For all I know it very well could be. Now that I think on it there is a Kiirun airfield included with my Formosa pack.

I know when I was researching for DD73 I amassed quite a bit of info on the area around Keelung including the nearest airfield which I think was called Jin-shan airfield. I found quite a bit of info about it and even had its runway pinpointed and dialed in. It is no longer there today although there are some historic markers identifying its location. I think the runway area is currently covered with an enormous nursery. I am currently looking for those files. They are around someplace- just requires some digging around. If I remember correctly I saved the runway as a polygon and the historic markers as place-marks in my GoogleEarth set-up.

WRT which packages would be most compatible with each of the mesh/mask combos, to tell ya the truth I am not familiar with any one else's Taiwan/Formosa scenery pack but my own. Mine was built to fit stock mesh, masks, coastlines, roads and rivers.

I suppose I could quickly do a re-do the old Package- dump the api macros and create a GSL file for it.

Not a prospect I will be salivating to get into, ;^) , but its doable!

Cheers,
Chris

[MaskRider]

Went to Google Earth. Sure enough I had penciled in the runway location, Also, if memory serves I might have also done a very quick bare bones version of the airfield in FSSC just to have a gander at what it l looked like.

Chris

PS Its seems to me that there was a rather lengthy thread related to this Taiwan project at some point.

[Rami]

Chris,

I'll have Devildog take a look at this thread. I am working on something right now that will be a surprise for many of you...more to come.

[Devildog73]

I actually have a flatten and some scenery developed for it already. It is pretty raw, but will give you an idea of what is there.

I will send them along in an email to you Rami.

[Devildog73]

Also,
Let me fire up the sim and I will send you screenies of what I have there by Chris' Kirun airbase.

[Devildog73]

Formosa Screenies:
You can see it doesn't play well with Rhumba's mesh nor with UncleTgt's Tropical textures.
I lost the bgls for Kiirun Harbor in my WIN 7 crash.

[MaskRider]

Nah. There is no way that it would "play well" with them. I can eliminate the macros and replace them with dynamic scenery objects in a GSL layer. That will take care of the blowing-up stuff part of the equation. But, the MR Formosa fields will still only fit in with the stock mesh, masks, coastlines, rivers and roads. To get things to play nicely with Rhumba's mesh and masks will require a whole new playing field using G2K to build some nice fresh coastlines and detailed harbors- as well as a whole new collections of airfields. That Kiirun Airfield wouldn't even be included in a new rebuild. Turns out that the nearest airfield to Keelung was the above-mentioned Jin-Shan field, 9.5 miles to the NW. Building a nice tidy Keelung harbor would be fun but also very time consuming. It isn't anything that I could whip up over-night. I would definitely want to rebuild the coastline all the way from the Taipei river mouth (whatever that river is called) all the way around to Su-Ao on the NE coast. That's just for starters. Redoing Taiwan/Formosa is a very temping but daunting project. It I were to jump in, it would become my magnum-opus as it were! ;^)

I also have a couple of other projects in the pipeline, twisting in the wind- such as the Halmahera island group in the NEI.

MR

[Rami]

Chris,

I'm actually working right now on taking Dog1's enhanced stock airfields and reworking them to fit Rhumbaflappy's new mesh. I stumbled onto them and Gavinc's moved stock airfields, which I am updating with "modern" objects.

[Devildog73]

Would any of our civilian FS version's Taiwan sceneries work in CFS2 and Rhumba's mesh and masks for coastlines?

[dvslats]

Hey Guys,

"Hacking" the *.bgl for Heng Chun airstrip of the api's is another alternative.
This took about ten minutes. It will need gsl work though if anyone is up for that.



This is with Rhumba mesh, so the coastlines are "no shore" plus not flattened.
Did this muddy up the water? Hope not.
Something to think about.

Cheerz, Dave

[MaskRider]

Hiya Dave!

Yeah. I basically did the same thing. I have the original sca files for the Formosa airfields. I opened them in notepad, deleted all the api macros and recompiled them. Still have the original macro-laden bgls loaded in order to add the dynamic scenery objects for GSL. Tedious. Naturally, I am not satisfied with the original layout so it is developing into way more than just placing identical scenery objects on top of the original api macros.

MR

[MaskRider]

Would any of our civilian FS version's Taiwan sceneries work in CFS2 and Rhumba's mesh and masks for coastlines?

I have no idea!

MR

[MaskRider]

BTW, the first liberty port I ever sailed to after joining my first ship in Yokosuka, was Keelung.

MR

[Devildog73]

BTW, the first liberty port I ever sailed to after joining my first ship in Yokosuka, was Keelung.

MR

I never got to Taiwan. Sailed on the USS Blue Ridge from Japan to Korea once on an exercise and then monitored the exercises between US and South Korean Marines and Navy.

[Devildog73]

I'm going to install CFS2 into another location and build BPF on a fresh completely stock install and see what Formosa looks like with Chris' Formosa sceneries minus Kiirun airfield.

[Devildog73]

Very interesting.....

I just flew around Taiwan in FS2004 and FSX.
Neither of them have a harbor at Keelung even though there is one there in real life and according to all the BPF information I have read, there was one there in WWII.

[dvslats]

Hi DD and MR,

Did you see this one?

https://imrehg.github.io/taiwanmap/

Follow the link under the heading "More info".

[MaskRider]

Hi DD and MR,

Did you see this one?

https://imrehg.github.io/taiwanmap/

Follow the link under the heading "More info".

Hiya Dave,

Good find!

I already had the maps he uses for overlays from the University of Texas but, no, I had never seen the "Taiwanese City Maps in WWII and now" web site. That is very cool. A tremendous amount of time and effort went into that! I find myself doing a lot of overlaying/fitting old maps on top of Google earth images in my work but never had the talent to undertake such a task as Mr Imreh has accomplished. very neat.

Thanks very much for the heads up!

MR

[dvslats]

I find myself doing a lot of overlaying/fitting old maps on top of Google earth images in my work but never had the talent to undertake such a task as Mr Imreh has accomplished.

And the time. Oh lord! Kudos to Mr. Imreh.

[MaskRider]

Very interesting.....
I just flew around Taiwan in FS2004 and FSX.
Neither of them have a harbor at Keelung even though there is one there in real life and according to all the BPF information I have read, there was one there in WWII.

Hiya DD,

Oh yes. Keelung has a very neat harbor and had one during the war too. Observe the following image from the U of Texas maps collection. It is a map of Keelung harbor during the war. It hadn't changed much when I used to go there during the early 1970s. We would always tie up at the warehouse warves indicated by the arrow just past the "Inner Harbor" notation. If I am not mistaken it was the same warf where many of the in-port scenes in the movie "The Sand Pebbles" (1965) were filmed. The scene where they conduct the port-side repel borders drill was definitely right there. I also made it to Kaosiung (sp?) a couple of times.

MR

[Devildog73]

AVSIM has a set of 12 scenery downloads plus a few updates and patches from the Formosa Group for FS2004.
I'm going to D/L them all and install into my FS2004 and see what they cover and look like.

[MaskRider]

Would it also be possible to update the airfields on Formosa to GSL?

Hiya Rami,

I have a nice GSL version of Formosa ready to go. Well, almost ready. Just need to rework the readme and zip it all up. Shall I go ahead and upload it when ready?

Chris

PS: Were you suggesting that I might also GSL-ize Darwin and the rest of the original Aussie airfields?

[Rami]

Chris,

1) Yes, absolutely.

2) Darwin was done (GSL-ized) for the Port Darwin raid package, but the rest of the Aussie airfields are kind of a tough call because they are not highly utilized; if I recall, I used only one other one for the RAAF 75th Squadron.

So you'd be doing a lot of work for not much gain.

3) Since I have you waiting for a reply, I am currently working on taking the stock airfields that Gavinc moved to fit Rhumba's new coastlines with Dog1's enhanced stock airfields, converted to use Rhumba's new coastlines. No one had bothered to do this, and I also found myself enhancing some of Gavinc's original work.

My question for you is...with regard to the stock coastlines, which airfields have essentially been "replaced" by your work? I know Henderson in the Solomons has, for example.