Hi. Chris Wilkinson writes: > > If flightgear lacks something some other sims don't it is a wide > selection of newly developed a/c models/liveries and custom-made > sceneries. My attempts to compile fgsd, taxidraw, and ppe have > been disastrous, with dependencies between all these somehow not > gelling together to give me working software.
1. Forget ppe. It's a dead project as far as I can tell, and (almost?) everything you'd do with it you can do with Blender or AC3D instead. In addition, I know Blender has lots of helpful documentation and online tutorials available. 2. taxidraw . . .I never had any problems compiling it. If you are, speak up, preferably over in flightgear-devel where the folks who work on it (particularly David Luff) are most likely to see your post. People can't help you if they don't know you need help. 3. fgsd has its own mailing list, fgsd-devel, where compile time issues sometimes get discussed. See http://fgsd.sourceforge.net/ Be aware that fgsd is currently in a state of serious change -- Fred's working away like crazy on it -- and that consequently a lot of the build requirements have changed recently. > So here I am putting > a question to the fgfs community and devs... > > fgfs, in my view, has developed into a great framework, with highly > accurate flight dynamics (for the most part), and a large feature > set. I am now of the opinion that adding new features and turning > it into the most accurate flightsim on the planet is not going to > attract more users unless they can download their fave a/c and fly > it at a recognisable fave airport with their fave livery. > > I have wanted to land an Emirates 777-300ER at NZCH on runway 20 > with the view of the Port Hills to my left, and then on take-off > turn a sharp left and see Hagley park below and other noted > landmarks that make my birth city recognisable from above. I've got > satellite imagery to create that reality but the tools I require > cannot compile on my SuSE 10 system so I cannot add them to fgfs. It's important to be careful about terminology. FG uses "scenery" to refer to not only ground structures and other such objects, but also terrain detail. FG scenery (in the sense of terrain) is built by a sister project, TerraGear, that uses publicly available datasets to set the surface elevation and the land cover (urban/forest/river/whatever) at various points. These datasets have a disadvantage in that their spatial resolution is not so great (well, the elevation data isn't too bad -- 30.5 lateral resolution or less, IIRC -- but the landcover data isn't so good, which is why you see roads and rivers passing through airports and stuff like that). There are better datasets out there (using VMAP1 instead of VMAP0 data), but we don't have access to global coverage and so there'd be issues on the boundaries between regions where one dataset vs. the other is used; plus the way in which this data is placed into the terrain would actually mean more polygons for better resolution data, which could possibly cause problems for folks with slower machines/video cards. In order to improve the actual terrain, you'd need to be able to build TerraGear and edit its input data. That's very non-trivial. The hope is that we'll soon have a database available where people can submit terrain tweaks; TerraGear will then draw from that database in the process of building "official" scenery (terrain). But in the meantime, changing the terrain is hard. Changing airports . . .you need TaxiDraw, and either TerraGear or patience. TaxiDraw doesn't change the airport, but rather changes a written description of the airport layout, which TerraGear then uses to create the airport and embed it into the scenery. The written description can be submitted (to David Luff directly now? or still to Robin Peel?) and in principle it'll show up in the next TerraGear "official" scenery build -- hence the patience part. If you need help getting TerraGear and TaxiDraw compiled, there *are* people who will help you -- TerraGear on its own mailing list, TaxiDraw on flightgear-devel. For adding buildings/landmark objects to the scenery, since you're on Linux, you really only need Blender and the Gimp. You shouldn't have any issues with compiling either of those, because you shouldn't need to compile them, since they both come with SuSE for free. For making aircraft liveries, the Gimp should be all that's needed. Again, there should be no issue whatsoever with having this working on your machine. > Of course getting a 777-300ER model working would be tricky, even > taking an existing fs2k2 or 2k4 model would be highly awkward. I > *can* make a reasonable job of a new livery... I'm not aware that it's possible to import FS2k4 models. It seems like with every release, MS obfuscates their file formats still further, requiring big feats of reverse engineering to figure it all out. It was possible with older models, I understand, but I don't know that it is with newer ones. Regarding making new liveries . . .if you can do it, yay, more power to you. Some people seem to have an easy time of it; I find it really difficult. In principle, the issue is straightforward -- take the existing texture, and modify it in-place with the appropriate color/text/whatever. The problem, I find, is that the mapping of "region of texture" to "section of plane" is often surprising. I've had cases where I'm working on the tail, and go a little bit too far without realizing, and some of my changes show up on the underside of the nose. Sometimes one section of the original livery gets mapped, in whole or in part, to two different parts of the plane (e.g. a big chunk for the side of the plane, and then a tiny portion of that big chunk is used to color the nose); changing that side of the plane then changes the nose, and if you've got text or a design down the side in the new livery, you've now got a fragment of that running across the nose. I don't know how to fix that without actually changing the UV mapping of texture to model, which is embedded in the model itself and therefore means a different model. Anyway, some people seem really good at solving problems like this, but I'm not one of them. > My question is this - how important is it to the devs and general > community to see new a/c and custom scenery? Obviously this is a developer-dependent question. Some developers think it adds a great deal, while others don't care so much. Speaking only for myself, I love the stuff. > What is it with the > current tools that could be bettered to allow non-techy users like > me to enthusiastically add a/c and sceneries? Currently I think it > is too difficult to get those softwares running let alone designing > with them... Well, the "getting them running" I hope has been addressed -- really there shouldn't be a problem there. For most of what you want to do, you need Blender and the Gimp, and if there's a problem getting those running then SuSE has somehow really majorly messed up, since SuSE provides binary packages for them that you should be able to install and run. For SuSE 10, see: http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/professional/blender.html http://www.novell.com/products/linuxpackages/professional/gimp.html which I found in less than 2 minutes from their homepage. If they don't install and run after dependencies are satisfied, chew SuSE a new one. In the case of TaxiDraw and fgsd, there are people (in the correct fora) who will help get them installed if you run into trouble. In the case of TerraGear, the same is true, but that's bound to be harder, yep. But even without all this -- even if there were no problem getting the software installed and running, I agree, it's difficult to create new scenery -- certainly harder than in the FS2004 world, where you've got applications designed and customized for that one purpose, and with some thought put into making it as easy as possible. Modifying TerraGear input data and rerunning is not trivial. Making buildings with Blender and the Gimp, well, they're both well-documented, but they're also powerful and all-purpose and so it's not as easy as if there were some custom-made app just for creating buildings and landmarks. And I agree that re-doing liveries is hard. In the absence of custom apps, I think the main thing people can do in the short term is write HOWTOs and tutorials, and people have been doing that. In the longer term, I think fgsd has the possibility of making terrain tweaking easier; if it can export changes to the upcoming terrain database, that'd do the trick IMHO. Not sure what the long-term solution to livery issues is; there, I'm not convinced the problem isn't just me anyway. -c _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-users 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
