California Scenery is on Condor Club

Everything related to creation of new sceneries for Condor...

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dgtfer
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California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by dgtfer » Thu Nov 17, 2016 10:42 pm

f9.jpg
Despite its name this scenery covers the entire West Coast of the United States and Canada from Los Angeles to Vancouver.
This scenery is composed of 2000 Teragen tiles (80x25), twice the size of AA, and that is more than a million square kilometers, an area equivalent to France, Swiss, Germany, Benelux and Denmark together.
Like in "Alpine Arc" most of our work has been focused on texture quality and accuracy of elevation mesh.
It's dimensions cause some constraints mainly due to file size during program loading.
To limit these effects we had to restrict airports facilities (except for Skylark North in Mountain Valley), and like in "Alpine Arc" there are no trees or other 3D objects.
To avoid saturation in flight, causing crashes and blue screens, we have limited the resolution to a standard 1024x1024 pixels per dds tile, only completed with high-resolution tiles in some notable gliding places. If necessary you may reduce resolution of these textures with the Condor Club textures reducer.
There are 646 airports, selected from more than 1,400 registered in the area, which have all been tested. Those with takeoff problems have been excluded, except for a few, deemed essential due to their positions like Tipella for example. So be careful and test your takeoffs before launching a competition task!
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Ikarus
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by Ikarus » Fri Nov 18, 2016 10:13 am

slt Michel,
what a great work. I can imagine the huge amount of time and the intellectual callenges to produce this high quality scenery. Thank you very much. Without people like you, CONDOR (V1) would be dead since a long time.
btw: I am an incorrigible optimist. If, one time in the future (lol), V2 will be available, can this scenery also be used for it ?
best regards
Icarus DB1

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dgtfer
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by dgtfer » Fri Nov 18, 2016 11:51 am

I don't know, for now it hasn't been tested! maybe OXO could tell us more?...
I just hope that V2 will have a better memory managing than V1.
It would be nice if we could have PDA maps in JPG format, California map is about 400 Mo and that is actually the real size limit for Condor sceneries.
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OXO
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by OXO » Fri Nov 18, 2016 1:35 pm

dgtfer wrote:I don't know, for now it hasn't been tested! maybe OXO could tell us more?...
I am not allowed :(
I just hope that V2 will have a better memory managing than V1.


It will
It would be nice if we could have PDA maps in JPG format, California map is about 400 Mo and that is actually the real size limit for Condor sceneries.


Good suggestion. I will make a note.
Chris Wedgwood,
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pstrzel
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by pstrzel » Sat Nov 19, 2016 10:45 pm

Looks like I won't be flying California. I get "Out of memory while expanding memory stream" error, so it doesn't even load.

I'm not sure if this is related, probably not, but there were also some "broken" texture files in the downloaded 7z files. This only happened on Textures_1, Textures_2. See attachments. The rest of the 7z files were fine. I tried a few times with the same result. As you can see, the total "broken" files are 271 & 285 respectively.

:(
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BOD1
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by BOD1 » Sat Nov 19, 2016 11:19 pm

Try to download again these files, something probably went wrong during download.

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pstrzel
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by pstrzel » Sun Nov 20, 2016 5:31 am

Well, what do you know, re-downloading did fix all my problems. :D
Thanks!
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dgtfer
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by dgtfer » Sun Nov 20, 2016 9:48 am

Troubleshooting Informations:

After a complete unpacking of downloaded files, you can check the contents in the various directories:

1. In the root directory Condor \ Landscapes \ California you must have at least the following files:
• California.apt : Airport File size 46 KB
• california.for : forests map size 128000 KB
• California.obj : objects list size 0 kb
• california.tdm : thermal map size 128001 KB
• california.trn : elevations map size 256001 KB
• California.ini : config. parameters size 1 KB
These files are mandatory and any alteration would prevent the use of the scenery or spoil its network compatibility.
You also need to the files:
• California.bmp : PDA map size 384 001 KB
• California.cup : TP list size 113 KB
These files must exist but may be modified or replaced.
You'll also find the CaliforniaNB.bmp file, which is an alternative PDA map, to be used only in case of memory problems at launch (see below).
2. In California \ Textures directory , there are a total 25342 dds tiles, including the empty.dds tile (oceans are untextured areas).

Known issues

Loading time :
If you cannot enter in a network flight because of a too long loading time, try after a reboot to launch and enter in the same place in solo flight, then close Condor and try to reconnect in the network flight.
Memory size:
During Condor’s loading, especially for network flights, you may encounter crashes with the error message "out of memory while expanding memory stream." To avoid memory saturation of your computer, close all unwanted background programs : ctrl + alt + supr -> open Task Manager, in Process tab close Condor.exe and all programs that are not needed by Windows operations and rerun Condor.
Whenever possible, run annexes programs (such as CondorNav or Cunimb) after entering flight.
If the problem persists even after a full restart, you can try to connect using the alternative PDA map CaliforniaNB.bmp. It is 3 times lighter than color maps and that saves over 250 Megabytes of memory. But it’s black and white, and only readable for the first zoom levels (4, 8 and 16km). In this case you should use in addition ZAD’s CondorNav.
In flight:
This scenery has been tested on different machines, both in solo flights and network, and we have not encountered serious problems in flight.
Like in AA, display may still appear jerky when turning with PDA map displayed (screen 1). As this problem is strongly emphasized when force feedback is enabled in Condor, we advise you to disable it (in Setup / Input uncheck Force feedback).
Last edited by dgtfer on Sat Sep 30, 2017 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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dgtfer
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by dgtfer » Fri Dec 09, 2016 3:58 pm

.
Last edited by dgtfer on Fri Dec 09, 2016 4:39 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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dgtfer
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by dgtfer » Fri Dec 09, 2016 4:21 pm

A post from Tklenke about California loading problems résolution:

So I am still having problems with the scenery crashing during the terrain loading. The recipe that seems to work is.

1 - Start another scenery (for example slovenia)
2 - start a flight and exit the flight
3 - exit condor
4 - Now load the california scenery and start a flight.

If I don't do these steps, then I get a crash every time.

Another thing. Have you noticed that the thermal activity is very low? I compared California to Sierra Nevada scenery using the same weather settings at the same location. With Sierra Nevada scenery, I could see about 4x as many thermals. Any idea on how to increase the number of thermals? Even with the most bombastic settings, there are not very many thermals.


The difference with Sierra Nevada Scenery comes from thermal maps but is also due to a problem from condor meteorological engine in high lands
here you can see an extract in the same place of the 2 thermal maps:
Sierra nevada.tdm.jpg
california.tdm.jpg
In SN you'll have more thermal activity in flat lands especially in the North-Eastern part of the map, while you'll have better Thermal Activity in mountains in California Scenery. This is intentional, California Thermal map is based on summer ground coverage map, with vegetation, cities, rocks, marshes ... and of course these choices are distorted for another season, but you may always modify your settings accordingly.
We have also magnify the thermal activity in high grounds like High plateaus, because we've seen in other sceneries that in this places thermal activity was abnormally low, for example around lake Tahoe. but we've decided to avoid large zones with 100% thermal activity, because in real life these zones do not exist!!!
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Danrihn
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by Danrihn » Sat May 13, 2017 12:06 am

I'm having a lot of difficulty getting the California Scenery to upload correctly
I am using the 7Z application but it wont download into the Condor/Landscapes
Can you help?
Dan Rihn

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dgtfer
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by dgtfer » Sat May 13, 2017 7:35 pm

When you download the 7z files They should be in your documents directory.
You have to unzip them in your Landscapes directory.
It will create a California directory.
The resultant path must be: Condor / Landscapes / California.
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Danrihn
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by Danrihn » Sun May 14, 2017 8:33 pm

thanks I figured it out using WinZip and also fixing the files in the Condor directory as mentioned in previous posts
I still get the occasional crash during startup, but when I do a re-start it seems to work well.

I fly out of Mountain Valley Airport in Techachapi California and I must say that the scenery in Condor is very good.
I love flying over the airport and seeing my hangar! Very nice detail

I've been using Sierra Nevada and San Diego (I also fly out of Warner Springs). This left a huge gap in the scenery for the southern Sierra Nevada mountains, so its very nice to finally have the complete Sierra Nevada mountains.

I will say that the lift and cloud bases are lower than we usually see here, that's also true of the San Diego scenery
The Sierra Nevada scenery seems to be more realistic in that regard

But overall, Great job, Bravo!

Thank you,
Dan Rihn
ASH 31Mi
7DR

sadatoni
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Re: California Scenery is on Condor Club

Post by sadatoni » Wed Jul 26, 2017 6:21 pm

There I was, flying along in a Tchin Tchin race when I got the dreaded out of memory error. The last few lines of errorlog.txt:

Landscape refresh start at 11:50:35 AM.
Landscape refresh stopped at 11:50:36 AM.
NetPlayer disconnected: A.Corlier.
Landscape refresh start at 11:57:32 AM.
Landscape refresh stopped at 11:57:32 AM.
Landscape refresh start at 12:08:37 PM.
GetMemory at 12:08:37 PM: Out of memory.

I know it's not a issue with the total amount of memory I have (16G). I hope V2 is 64-bit and not 32-bit code.

John
N5503T CN(0OU)

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John Ferguson

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