Guidelines

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

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GR

Guidelines

Post by GR » Sun Apr 03, 2005 9:07 am

Condor Scenery Development Guidelines

As of the time being, the Condor Scenery Toolkit for adding and manipulating sceneries in Condor: The Competition Soaring Simulator is still in the development and will be released as soon as possible.
However that does not mean that those who plan to work on their scenery projects cannot start their work. You can start with the 3d objects which will populate the scenery...

Tools which can help you (we use them) with the development are as follows: Guidelines for creating 3d scenery objects are as follows:
  • Try to keep faces count as low as possible. If there are very complex objects needed, you will need to create different LODs (Level of Detail). LOD1 with full faces count then LOD2 with as minimal as possible faces count. Aim is to not exceed 500 faces per object.
  • Use only one texture per object or even better, use one texture for more objects. Keep in mind that this is a flight simulation and most of the times, you are not close enough to the objects to see any real details except its main shape. Texture size should be also kept to as minimum as possible. Max should be 512x512.
  • You can use 1bit alpha channel in textures to avoid extra faces (ie: fences, you can have only a quad with alpha texture which defines the detail of the fence).
Guidelines for creating terrain mesh which is compatible with the Condor Scenery Toolkit:
  • It is recommended to use NASA SRTM digital elevation data with 90 m resolution, which is accessible for the entire globe at: http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/cbanddataproducts.html.
  • For practical reasons, the size limit of terrain is 512x512km. However larger terrains could also be used. Normal terrain size is 320x256km.
    When working with terrain mesh, keep in mind that the size must be dividable by 64.
  • You can also create fantasy terrain with various programs (terrain generators or image drawing applications). The format of the terrain must be in 16bit raw file format (signed integer).
  • When you are creating textures for your terrain, texture resolution must be around 10 meters per pixel (+/-50%).
  • Such prepared terrain will be set for the upcoming Condor Scenery Toolkit.
Last but not least, this forum is dedicated to discussion about scenery creation for Condor: The Competition Soaring Simulator.
Last edited by GR on Thu Aug 31, 2006 12:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

GR

Post by GR » Thu Apr 06, 2006 4:44 pm

Adding airports

Airports' data must be located in the following folder:
Condor\Landscapes\<LandscapeName>\Airports\

Each airport has 3 object files and as many textures as needed. Textures and object files can be in the same folder, however Slovenia uses separate folders for easier texture name organization.

Lets look at the object files first:

AirportNameG.cx - contains all ground surface objects like runways, airport surface, parazone, etc. - in short all surfaces which needs to be on the ground level. It is separated from other 3d objects to eliminate/minimize the "z-fighting" issue and to define the non-collidable objects.
Names of the objects are not important. Texture files need to have correct path to their location. Starting point is Condor's root folder.

AirportNameO.cx - contains all structure objects which are 3 dimensional - houses, hangars, trees, etc.
Names of the objects are not important. Texture files need to have correct path to their location. Starting point is Condor's root folder.

AirportNameS.cx - contains 2d surface type objects of rectangular shape(!) which are used to define areas of the different type of surface for interaction with the glider. Currently only two types are used: Grass and Asphalt.
Each surface object needs to use given naming convention: Grass1 ... GrassN

How to create the given dataset:
  • You need to use 3d modeling software where you create the whole airport and when you are done, you then separate objects into correct file. (You could use Landscape editor and place 3d objects on the location, however it is not recommended to do this approach.)
  • When modeling, the scene center reference point (0,0,0) is located at the center of the "main" runway. Orientation of the airport main runway must be N-S. This insures that when specifying the orientation of the airport in Landscape editor, it will rotate correctly.
  • All objects in scene need to be 1:1 scale.
  • When modeling airfield, please try not to get too much in detail. Try to keep scene as simple as possible - no need for the high poly models. Use the existing official airports as a guide for complexity of the scene. It is understood, that not all airports are simple, however pragmatism is expected from the author.

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