Saturday 26 February 2011

Review of progress so far

So, I've managed to complete the first phase of my project, but it has thrown up a range of problems I've had to overcome and some more questions for the future.

I got myself into a bit of a muddle with the first two models and ended up with textures, sketchup files and exported information in many different folders.  Add to that different versions of the files as I played around with them and tweaked them and I forgot which was which.  In future I intend to be a bit more disciplined about keeping notes and saving files in a logical file structure!

A lot of the time involved was editing the photo images for the textures.  I managed to close files in photoshop without saving them a few times (duh!) and had to got back and redo everything again.  Towards the end I found the easiest way was to save each file repeatedly as I edited it so as not to lose any work.  This was just plain stupidity on my part I have to admit, so I learned the hard way.

I've also used several other libraries that I found - I downloaded a RWY12 library which Instant Scenery 2 can use happily, so in order for anyone else to use my scenery straight off I need to make sure all the necessary files are included in the final .zip - again I could have made life easier for myself here by making a note of exactly what I used and where it came from but in my enthusiasm for putting it together I didn't.

The only minor problem I stil have left is that the parked cars don't show up straight away in FSX.  When I load the scenery bgl into IS2 they appear, and stay when IS2 is turned off....   Maybe it's something to do with the settings relating to which scenery items are displayed at what density setting, but my FSX is on maximum so I wouldn't have thought that would have affected it - it _should_ show everything.  I'll play around with it tomorrow, and if all else fails I'll delete the vehicles and re-add them to see if that fixes it.  Failing that, I'll need to source some vehicle libraries somewhere else.

I made this area pretty much as detailed as I could, given its proximity to the airfield.  Other areas in my plan that are further away may have slightly less detail as they most probably will be seen from further away and I don't want to impact on performance levels so much that the sim becomes unflyable.  As it is, I've circled my scenery and EGGP with REX2 on and all scenery settings to max and still been getting 30+ fps.

3 comments:

Christopher Low said...

"I've also used several other libraries that I found - I downloaded a RWY12 library which Instant Scenery 2 can use happily, so in order for anyone else to use my scenery straight off I need to make sure all the necessary files are included in the final .zip"

I really wish that other scenery designers would do that. It would make life a lot easier for the end user!

François said...

Hmmmm... due to copyrights constraints that is usually not possible ;-)

Kevin Firth said...

Francois, I've made sure any libraries I used were made freely available for use by people such as myself - I will not be ripping anyone elses work off! :) k