Jim Robinson

That's what tipped me off Tom. Noticed it playing around in ADE (9) this AM, I thought "there's no way that'll work" so I tried it and sure enough it did, lol. Then after I posted that I started wondering if that's actually documented in the SDK and yep, second sentence on beacons: Guess I missed it. ...but it doesn't really give you a code example, at least not without some interpretation. Another thing I just tested out is that the name of the attachpoint isn't critical either providing the attachpoint name in the placement matches the attachpoint name in the .mdl. "attachpt_charlie_brown" works fine as long as they match, lol. Probably wouldn't even need the "attachpt_" part of it but the AttachToolGmax script of course adds that prefix automatically.

New development for me here, and I've been messing with this stuff for about 15 yrs now. I did not know this, but I had a play in FS9 this morning and it appears it's totally possible to simply place a standalone beacon in FS9. I'd read that it was possible in FSX/P3D but I took it that it was something new in the FSX SDK and not possible in FS9. Not true however, I tried it and it worked just fine. version="9.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd"> lat="46.918017818" lon="-114.081358118" alt="20.0F" altitudeIsAgl="TRUE" pitch="0" bank="0" heading="0" imageComplexity="NORMAL"> type="CIVILIAN" baseType="AIRPORT"/> Everything I've ever read, and the general consensus among developers, always seemed to suggest you had to have a tower object and it had to have an "attachpt_beacon" in order for your beacon to show up. That code would look like this (which is basically right out of Opa's beacon tutorial with the coords and some formatting changed): version="9.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd"> lat="46.918017818" lon="-114.081358118" alt="0.0F" altitudeIsAgl="TRUE" pitch="0" bank="0" heading="0" imageComplexity="NORMAL"> name="7f38bfbc4a40e2953c3f5c8482fa2c87" scale="1.00" /> attachpointName="attachpt_beacon" pitch="0" bank="0" heading="0"> type="CIVILIAN" baseType="AIRPORT"/> ...but, suppose you had a tower that didn't have a beacon attachpoint, you could accomplish basically the same thing like this, which is simply an object placement and a beacon placement in the same XML with the beacon height adjusted to sit at the top of your tower: version="9.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd"> lat="46.9180178269744" lon="-114.081358015537" alt="0.0F" altitudeIsAgl="TRUE" pitch="0" bank="0" heading="0" imageComplexity="NORMAL"> name="e411b80f05c45bafaccefcb5b77f6101" scale="1.00" /> lat="46.9180178269744" lon="-114.081358015537" alt="20.0F" altitudeIsAgl="TRUE" pitch="0" bank="0" heading="0" imageComplexity="NORMAL"> type="CIVILIAN" baseType="AIRPORT"/> ...where name="e411b80f05c45bafaccefcb5b77f6101" should be replaced with the actual GUID of your tower object (the GUID I used in this example is actually a tree, so I'm placing a tree with a beacon on top of it, lol) Learn something new every day, if I don't - the day wasn't worth getting out of bed for! :) Jim

I actually did get it to compile a while later with COASTLINE using the P3D version of bglcomp but then I didn't see anything on the map at all, lol. (and that was in P3D so not an issue with trying to use a P3D .bgl in FSX) It was an easy enough test to duplicate all my "BOUNDARY" vertices and assign them "COASTLINE" however so I tried that which put both in the .bgl, but nope that didn't help either. I did a little searching though and Dick Ludowise had this to say: So I don't know where that leaves us because there's definitely a terrain waterpoly there with a hole in it for the island. I've gone as far as decompiling the default cvx1415.BGL, setting my Island as a hole in both the hydro polys and the GPS hydro polys and recompiling, replacing the default cvx1415.BGL with my modified one. I oppose anything that involves modifying default files so I don't see this as an acceptable solution even if it had worked, but this was a test that I can easily undo, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this. I tried moving my mesh file into the 0101\scenery folder and even renamed it "dem0101.bgl" while disabling the default dem0101.bgl. My conclusion is officially: Damifino! :)

Lol! It's been a year or so since I first watched that video and I actually attempted to reproduce that flight with the Carenado Premier 1 when I first saw it. It wasn't terrible but I got bit by the usual FS nemesis of misjudging where to turn final. To me it looks like even Premiere 1 driver didn't exactly nail it, it didn't look to me like his turn onto final was exactly 90°, but yeah, more cameras would have helped. He was complaining about something not working with his cameras, I couldn't understand what he was talking about.

I was supposed to be a spoiled rich kid but my parents totally dropped the ball! :)

Lol! I know, I was doing some "fuel burn" stuff recently with the Citation XLS+ and the wheels started turning so I looked at the national average for jet fuel, did some quick math, and decided I'm really glad I'm just simulating! That's just the fuel! ...and if the weather doesn't cooperate and you have to take the alternate you just spent another $1500 and didn't end up where you were trying to go! I'm thinking all these expensive toys may be a little outta my league :)

Just finally got around to checking this out. Firstly my mesh is about 100 nm off the coast of Oregon, pulling my mesh and Orbx's PNW mesh into TMFViewer there's no overlap of coverage. Secondly my mesh is LOD14 while theirs is LOD12 so mine should trump theirs even if there was an overlap. Also checked my mesh against the default mesh for the area and there's no overlap there either. I did notice the BNXWorld*.bgls in the Scenery/World/Scenery folder so I decompiled one of them out of curiousity and found it to be "Geopol data" (geo-political boundaries) so I did up a quick and dirty BNX_fantasy_island.bgl using the vertices I already had from shifting the shorelines. Now there's actually and outline of my island both on the GPS and the sim map: Better than nothing I guess but still no mesh/terrain showing up. The BNXWorld bgls decompiled to "COASTLINE" as the geopol data type, I tried to do the same but bglcomp errored telling me I had to use "Coastline" or "Boundary" so I tried "Coastline" and got the same error. Then I tried "BOUNDARY" and it compiled without error so I dunno if things would be any different if I were allowed to use "COASTLINE" as the geopol data type. There's just a tiny little blurb on Geopol boundaries in the SDK, doesn't really tell you what they do or how/why you'd use them. I thought maybe this would be the key to telling the sim that this was "land" and it should therefore be displayed on the map but I guess not. Puzzling, lol.

Hey mate. :) Yes I did make mesh. It was weird, at first I couldn't actually land on the island, it bounced me off as if I was landing on water. Later I added some landclass for an unrelated reason and suddenly I could land. Nope, the island doesn't show in the FSX map nor the GPS. I dunno what the h*ll's going on, lol.

Michael, you might enjoy this video. "Premier 1 Driver" lands a bizjet on 27 at Telluride! Sorry it's so long, the whole flight from KEGE basically, but skip forward to about 32 min to see the approach/landing. Check out his channel if that sort of thing interests you, he does a lot of flying in and out of Colorado airports. Jim

I found one of these transparent beacon attachpoints I made in 2007, lol. If you need it, it's here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-w_ZufPckbhs3nfRjBtLOL_jROUHlzXb Jim

I'm happy to help! :) Look around in FSDS' help files about attaching things, I'll bet you'll find it.

I think KarlB737 just got lucky in that the tower object he replaced by changing the GUID must have had a beacon attachpoint. You'll notice in his code there's no placement information for the beacon itself, only the tower that the beacon is attached to, the beacon sticks itself to the attachpoint wherever it happens to be located on the model. If there's no beacon attachpoint the beacon won't show up from my experience. I don't know if adding a beacon attachpoint is something FSDS is capable of, I've never used it, but I assume it would be. You're on your own there I'm afraid. I've done it in gmax and there isn't much to it, you use the attach tool just as if you were attaching a light or smoke effect, or a platform to harden a bridge for example. If you can't do it in FSDS I believe ModelConverterX may be able to do it also. The name of the attachpoint is critical IIRC, it must be "attachpt_beacon". If all else fails I can make you an invisible beacon attachpoint in gmax that you could simply place at the proper coords and elevation near the top of your tower. It's always that ugly default beacon though, you can't do anything about that, lol. Jim

There's a "Browse" button on the flight plan save dialog, try creating/saving another flight plan and then look near the bottom, it should show you the path it wants to save the file to. If it's not Documents\Prepar3D v4 Files use the browse button to locate that folder. The flight planner saves a .pln file and that file is referenced in the saved flight file (.fsxml) so if the flight can't find the plan you get the error you posted. It must be that your default flight is missing it's .pln somehow and that's why you're getting the error on every startup. You could save another flight (preferably without an associated .pln) and setting it as default to eliminate the error warning. Jim

Mine came from Avsim but apparently it was one of the files lost in the infamous library meltdown of of 2009. It's in the library here too, same filename, same dates on all the files: http://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?do=search&fname=ezlc2.zip Is that different than what you were using? Hi Roger, the .raw file is made up of different colored pixels and each color represents an LC value, for example LC value 22 is RGB 22,22,22. When you type "22" into 30 cells in EZ Landclass it fills 30 correctly positioned pixels with that color and resample reads those and compiles the correct LC value into the .bgl. (the .raw file is keyed to a longitude and latitude in the .inf) When you said EZ Landclass "is a lot quicker to use for just changing land class of a complete LOD" I thought you meant a complete LOD5 cell which is made up of 66049 cells in the EZ Landclass spreadsheet, 257 cells horizontally and 257 cells vertically. The .raw file is 257px x 257px so you can see how each pixel corresponds to a cell in the worksheet. If you opened the .raw file in photoshop and filled the whole thing with 22,22,22 and recompiled, it would be the equivalent of typing "22" into each one of those 66049 cells in the EZ Landclass spreadsheet. I thought that's what you meant by "changing a complete LOD", in practice I can't think of a reason you'd ever want to fill an entire LOD5 cell with a single LC value, it'd be the most boring thing in the world to fly over and it would cover something like 300 km horizontally and 300 km vertically, lol. Somehow I didn't think that's really what you were trying to do. :) Sometimes I've done LC and maybe I didn't like one value I put in, say I clicked in a few hundred cells of "22" Cool Conifer Forest and later decided they should have been "23" Cool Mixed Forest. I've opened the .raw file in photoshop and selected all the "22" pixels with the magic wand tool and filled them all with 23,23,23. Then just run resample on it again and it's a done deal. Saves a lot of clicking (in Sbuilder, or typing in EZ Landclass). It's also possible to turn a landclass or a waterclass into a seasons adjustment .bgl (and more) by manipulating colors on the .raw file and modifying the .inf. They're all made the same way where those pixel colors are read by resample and it knows what to do with them. Jim

Are you sure that wasn't a function of FSUIPC? On the Misc tab, Mousewheel: Mouse look?

I was a relative latecomer with that one, I didn't get FSX until 3 days after release. :) Installed it on my old PC, got 7 fps, and went right back to FS9 until 2010 when I finally built a new PC. That kinda turned things around, lol. Biggest improvement between FS9 and FSX is one most users don't see and that's in the SDK.

Nope, 17 yr old antiquated sim. :) No struggle involved. I never stopped being an FS9er incidentally, I owned the damn thing since release day in Sept 2003. I just "added other sims to my repertoire" is all. :)

I totally get your logic here, bandwidth is expensive and it seems impossible they could do this without charging us, but I'm thinking there's some other way they're planning to make $$ off this. Flight simmers are a relatively small group, and we're a bunch of tight-a$$es so most of us will probably use the cache method and only need to download it once, I think it's a calculated risk they've taken into consideration and I think they're sacrificing the bandwidth cost for us simmers basically to use the sim as a demo of what azure is (or will be) capable of. They're gonna get their $$ out of it in the end, but it'll come from commercial entities that need to use azure for something that likely has nothing to do with flight simulation. Truth is we'll probably never know how that all plays out.

Do you mean assigning a single LC value to a complete LOD5 cell? Or are you talking about mixed LC values, ie forests, towns, fields, etc all throughout that LOD5 cell? If you're just assigning a single value to an entire LOD5 cell you can open the .raw file in Photoshop and fill the whole thing with the correct color and recompile. Can't get much quicker than that, lol. Intermixed values are a different story though. I found an old download of EZLandclass 2.0 from 2005 and I'm playing with it. My fsconnect apparently works OK, it found the cell on the spreadsheet anyway (also on Win7). Haven't figured out what I'm supposed to do from there yet. :)

I don't understand why there's a need to connect to the sim to make landclass in the first place? Admittedly I've never used EZ Landclass but I've done it with SBuilder9 and SBuilderX and you just go to the location you want to change and start clicking in landclass tiles. You can add a background of aerial imagery to act as a guide if you want giving yourself an idea which LC type to place at a given location. Have you considered SBuilder9 at all? http://www.ptsim.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1616

That looks better but you seem to be missing some buildings. Did you add all 3 of the scenery library entries? Should be: 9Dragons V2 9Dragons V2 - Landclass 9Dragons V2 - Autogen ...layered like that from top to bottom. More details in "9Dragons KAI TAK ACTIVATION.pdf" located in the "Addon Scenery\9Dragons V2\9Dragons - Goodies" folder Don't forget to listen to the "Tales from Kai Tak.mp3" too, it's in the Addon Scenery\9Dragons V2\9Dragons - Goodies\Tales from Kai Tak folder. Some neat interviews with actual pilots that flew the approach back in the day.

That doesn't look like 9 Dragons to me, I don't have it installed anymore so I can't easily grab a comparison screenshot but 9D is immensely more detailed than that, even including photoreal on the surrounding mountains. Let me see if I can install it and grab a screenshot, it may take a while. :)

You should be able to tune the ISG and follow it down to the checkerboards just like an ILS, when you get there disconnect the AP and make a perfectly timed right turn to roll out on the runway heading and plunk it down gracefully on the numbers - that's the hard part, haven't yet been completely satisfied with my own performance doing that so far in spite of many attempts. :)

I'm assuming you have FTX Global and with that you can't revert to default without reinstalling the sim, it's not something you can turn off in the scenery library. The FTXG ground textures overwrite the defaults and they also overwrite any autogen annotations. The autogen is linked to the texture by filename, and each texture has it's own .agn file (except maybe in the case of desert or water textures where there are no buildings or vegetation). This is done to ensure trees end up on treed areas, buildings end up on building footprints, etc. Assuming you and Andy are using the same landclass you would both be seeing for example 037b2su1.bmp off the end of rwy 26 (no idea, random filename just for the sake of example). His being default however would be showing a default texture with default autogen annotations where yours would be a completely different texture visually (FTXG) with a different set of autogen annotations. That would explain why he's seeing the building and you're not. Just an FYI. Sweet flight and shots BTW. :)

I think you're expecting something a lot bigger and more pronounced, it's just a small hill off the end of the runway nestled in amongst the city buildings. Here are a couple images I posted in this thread which are now missing from that post: