Photoreal, Detailed Airports and forest

[OXO]

Hi all,

We feel that one of the most important things for the true immersive feel of Condor 2 is having detailed airports with hangars, trees, static objects etc.

Without them the launch and landing experience is very diminished, and certainly student pilots will have difficulty using the visual cues to properly plan and execute a good circuit and landing.

We understand it adds to the workload

Does anyone have an idea of anything we can do to encourage authors to include these objects?

[arneh]

Indeed creating detailed airports does take a lot of time. I estimated I spent about half my time on the updated Southern Norway 4 scenery on airports, and even then I re-used most of the 3D-objects from the Condor 1 version, and dropped some of the airports.

I think it would help if there was a library of 3D-objects we could use to create airports (hangars, club-houses, static planes, trailers, cars etc.). You've said we can use the c3d objects from Slovenia 2 in our sceneries, but that doesn't help for airports, as there we need to create a new c3d object which includes everything. We would need to have the objects in .obj or some other format our 3D-editors can import.
If we had a library of useful 3D-objects to easily insert in our airports that would make it much faster to create detailed airports. And if it's any help I can contribute from my objects, although most of them are from Condor 1 and low detail, so I'm not sure they are all that attractive

If I could have a couple of wishes for additions to the airport objects, I would like to have a plane for a background texture for the ground of the airport area. This way you could use much higher resolution for the ground than what using a terrain tile allows. I've sort of misused the asphalt-object for this, but it's not a good solution since it makes everything asphalt, and it also darkens the texture and washes out the colours. But the result look so much better that I still do it for a few airports:

I would also like for an easy way to insert trees into the airport object. It's usually easier to accurately position trees with a 3D-object, than trying to paint accurately into the forest-tiles (even if I appreciate the higher resolution in C2!). Could be done similar to inserting the windsock object, i.e. with proxy objects with a specific name which is replaced by actual trees by condor.

[Paul_UK]

I think it mostly comes down to how easy the user interface and resource library is for creating the airports.

In another flight sim once a company released a piece of software that made it easy to pick and place various objects very simplistic I created many a detailed airport. Up until that point though the task was quite labourous and once you start spending more time creating than you do flying the balance is lost. That piece of software made it so easy there was no reason not to.

I have had a quick scan through the instructions for creating airports and there is a lot to digest and just scanning it hasn't made me think I'd look forward to the task. If I find some spare time I may ask the developer of the local UK sceneries whether I can add a detailed airfield into his scenery and that one would be of my local club.

I was going to ask if a mask needs to be used to place trees in detailed airports or whether you can just drop them in place as an object, which in my opinion would be easier, alas as mentioned at the end of the previous post I'll need to figure out how to create masks for tree placement.

[Kessa]

Could you perhaps put together a simple beginners guide of how to get started with editing scenery?

The reason I ask is that I'm interested in the process but don't have a lot of spare time so that rules out doing full landscapes (and having had a very quick scan of the landscape tool instructions I got the sense I'd need to dedicate a lot of time to learning how to do it!).

However, if it's not too complicated to get started I don't mind helping add some airports etc and a video tutorial is often a lot quicker to learn from than having to read through pages of info

[OXO]

We can certainly separate out the objects in Slovenia 2 for reuse by developers. This would be c3d files and textures. I'm not prepared to release all our work to the internet in obj form.

Would this be useful? Can anyone see a problem with this?

[arneh]

We can certainly separate out the objects in Slovenia 2 for reuse by developers. This would be c3d files and textures. I'm not prepared to release all our work to the internet in obj form.

Would this be useful? Can anyone see a problem with this?

It would be useful, but not for creating airport O-objects. Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know it's impossible to combine several c3d-objects into one. Maybe if the Object Editor had an option to merge c3d-objects it would help. It would then also need an option to re-position (and possibly resize) the various objects too, to put them in the correct position for the airfield in question.

Still a worse way than having all the tools of a proper 3d-editor available (and cumbersome if you want to change something in your own airfield obj-files as you then need to redo all the Object Editor merging and re-positioning). But if you're not willing to release the 3d-objects as obj then having a merge and re-position option in the Object Editor would help. (BTW it's just the airfield relevant objects like hangars, club houses etc. which would be needed as obj, not all your high-quality glider models).

If only c3d-files is an option, what is the disadvantage from Condor's side of having those objects as regular objects, and not in the airport O-file?

[OXO]

There's no disadvantage from Condor viewpoint in having airport objects as regular items.

[arneh]

There's no disadvantage from Condor viewpoint in having airport objects as regular items.

Ok, good, then c3d files for airports could still be quite useful. So if you could release the objects from the Slovenia airports as c3d files then that would help!

Thank you!

[dgtfer]

We feel that one of the most important things for the true immersive feel of Condor 2 is having detailed airports with hangars, trees, static objects etc.
Does anyone have an idea of anything we can do to encourage authors to include these objects?

I have personally 3 wishes, for features that would greatly help in airports installations creation, and could increase their realism:

The first would be to be able to load and draw independently a .dds tile in Landscapes Editor, with an option for water area visualization.
With big sceneries, we must uncheck the draw textures option (F1 key) and we have to work blindly with objects insertions...

It also could be nice to be able to visualize a selected .for tile, for the same reasons... And maybe modify them directly in LE...

The third would be to be able to insert very high resolution textures independently of Grass or Asphalt objects. And it would be even better if that texture could stick to the ground, instead of being on a single horizontal plan....

[GregHart1965]

Object library - I can contribute some files, I need to make some objects into the new format and will post links when Ive had a chance to do this. We can start a new "Object Library" thread with C2 objects.

Ground resolution - C2 seems to be able to handle very large .dds files easily. I have used 8192x8192 dds patches and C2 does not even blink at the high resolution. Im fairly sure it would handle single 16384x16384 dds patches easily too (IE 3 times the resolution of C1 due to 768 terragen in C2 and only 256 terragen in C1). This gives a very crisp image which if used cleverly with grass and asphalt surfaces can look really cool.

[OXO]

It’s on my list to do it. Just need to find som time

[dgtfer]

Ground resolution - C2 seems to be able to handle very large .dds files easily. I have used 8192x8192 dds patches and C2 does not even blink at the high resolution. Im fairly sure it would handle single 16384x16384 dds patches easily too (IE 3 times the resolution of C1 due to 768 terragen in C2 and only 256 terragen in C1). This gives a very crisp image which if used cleverly with grass and asphalt surfaces can look really cool.

Yes 16384 dds could work, but they are 35cm per pixel, and that's still a bit coarse for very close texturing, and if applied to the whole dds tile we've got a humongous size just for one tile (about 333 MB!) It would be better to apply these very high def textures only to a selected part of the airfield surrounding.

[dgtfer]

Another small improvement for photoreal sceneries: more precise directions of runways. For long runways , entire degrees are not enough precise, and if we want to match the ground texture we must modify the direction in the G object.

[EDB]

That is not a small improvement... That's a big improvement.

I have it on my Beta wish-list from the beginning. With another one... The moving of the runways...
- Being able to rotated the runway in decimal degrees, so we can line them up with orthophoto textures.
- Being able to move runways the same way as moving other objects in the CST LE.

For Nephi I had to Photoshop all the textures near the runways except for one to align the textures with the Condor runway...
I wish I could have used that time on other more important things.

[bluefang]

Since this seems like the most appropriate airport "wish-list" thread and I would like to add my requests as well as chime in to say that all of the other requests are great!

1. For a given airport, and a given take-off direction - it would be great to specify the actual spot on the runway where gliders are staged for start. It seems that Condor keeps wanting to start half-way down the runway - and when the runway is only 500 meters, this is kind weird.
2. Smoothly sloped runways. I wish this was easier to do. I understand that the height maps are converted to control points for the terrain mesh, and hence there is little control over the resulting undulations when an airport is not on flat terrain - but in the real world, there are indeed runways that are not on flat terrain - and it would be awesome to figure out a way to simulate this experience.
3. Airport textures for runways. I believe currently that runways are meant to be textured by the global texture tile - however, this is not really high enough resolution for realistic looking runways. As has been mentioned, there are work arounds - but it would be awesome if we could apply a real texture to our runway / airport objects.