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FS2004 Airway Beacons

P

pumbaa

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10
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us-washington
Good day everyone. This is my first post on here. I did some searching for some info regarding the addition of airway beacons into FS9 or FSX. I know some FSX things work in FS9. So here is my dilemma, or should I say, my 2 year project. HAHA I have created a 3D object in GMAX of an Airway Beacon tower. It only took me 2 days of hard work to get everything right and how I wanted. BUT I'm stumped on how to get the Beacon to rotate. Everything I've tried is just NOT working. I got bored an then just created a box and tried to get IT to rotate in FS9. But whenever I got back to my tower I have something wrong. Here is some pics of the progress:
168739_1812430839518_1502446735_1943185_8208637_n.jpg


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168603_1814274765615_1502446735_1947420_5958045_n.jpg


180809_1814299926244_1502446735_1947446_1504853_n.jpg


So I have the FS2004 SDK for GMAX and have gone over and over the How to on animating an object and its just nerve racking. :mad: Its pretty simple really, but somehow I've made this super hard. I tested object in FS9 to try and get them to rotate in their. I was able to make a spinning box and it worked. But when I take that same info and add it to my Tower, the rotating beacon top is not working.

I currently have the model set with 360 degrees of rotation and 360 frames. I'm thinking I have too many degrees of rotation. But according to the tutorial you can have more than that. So I have named the beacon top with the appropriate tick18_(name) When I animate in GMAX it works fine. I originally assumed it was due to improper linking. But it linked correctly in Hierarchy. When I export to compile it works fine. Its just that when I get it into FS9 there is no animation. I've been playing with it for weeks LOL. The thing is I stop messing with it for a few months and completely forget how to use GMAX and have to relearn it again. If you see in the last picture I have 3 dummy's in the project. I'm beginning to think that may just be the issue. The top dummy above the beacon is the rotational dummy. There is one more Dummy for the buildings. I'm thinking I have the hierarchy all wrong. So here is what I did. I unlinked everything in my project. I need some guidance.

311923_2450700795868_1502446735_2672125_2140794899_n.jpg


I guess I need to link everything to Dummy01 but link the tick18's to dummy03 since its the rotating object. Anyone have any suggestions?

History of my project. I got a 1939 Sectional of Seattle. I've been slowly dismantling the stock FS9 scenery and turning western Washington in the way it was in 1939. My process is to create a visualization of Seattle at that period. The key to it will be the two main airway systems that go east and south from Seattle. I've been slowly doing this process for the last 2 years randomly. I have all the landclass redone and have created 75% of the airfields in the region. After getting this lighted airway system done I plan to focus on doing some aerodrome flood lighting and other forms of navigation and airport facilitation during the period. But this GMAX things got me all confused. LOL So any suggestions would be great. Everytime I read the animation tutorial I just get confused because he's using a different form of animation.

Thanks in advance....
 
Hi,

The total number of keyframes determines the rotation speed of the object - something with 360 keyframes will rotate once every 20 seconds (18 keyframes/second).

I'm not sure you can animate a Dummy object? Try naming the beacon itself using aTick18 name and animating it instead.

Hope this helps,
 
Auh, I see. I'll try and get to that when I get a chance and see what happens. Maybe that's what my mistake is... I animated a box earlier and it worked and I didn't have the dummy animated, so that's probably exactly the case.
 
Spent the last few hours playing with linking and just keep getting stumped. I unlinked it all, deleted the dummies and reloaded and it loads. Just no animation. So I started a new project. A spinning box set at 8 frames at the 45 degree marks and loaded it with the dummy linked and it worked fine. Unlinked the dummy and it worked fine. Added another box that doesn't move and it worked fine. I'm stumped. So then I went back to my project and set the frames to 32 and tried that and it still didn't work. Then I erased the whole tower and just left the beacon light and tried it. Still couldn't get it working. I'm just confused at what I did to make it not work.
 
Hi,

Sometimes it's a corrupted part. Try Merging the file into an empty scene and see if that changes things. If not, and you can get a spinning box on top of your tower to work, you might just have to remake the beacon part.

Hope this helps,
 
You know what, I was actually just thinking that. I'll just see about doing that. Now my next question. Is there a way to make the spinning, only work during night hours? Also is there an effect for red and light flashing lights? I know I can just use the green and white airport light to use for airport beacons.
 
There are choices when placing the airport beacon other than green and white (civilian airport); there are choices for military and helicopter airports that might be closer to what you want.

There are effects for red flashing lights (the typical FS tower object has one), but they aren't visible very far away. The beacon has special LOD code that allows it to be seen far away.

The beacon operates only at night. I think what you would need to do for a custom object is create two objects, one for daytime and one for night. Then modify the MDL file using MDL Tweaker II to make them visible only during the correct times. You might need one for Dusk/Dawn too...

Hope this helps,
 
Well yesterday I finally got to redesigning a separate light model. Got it rotating and looks good. Made three options of lights, one white and red and the other white and green. Now researching how to link an effect into the file. Looks pretty simple. My next step is trying to figure out a way to modify the fs9 rotating beacon light to make it red and white. Or else I need to make my own effect for the light and make it rotate. Should be another years worth of work. Hahah
 
Well I went ahead an modified the gen beacon texture and changed the yellow to red. Then I went into the beacony FX and changed it to red. Sadly this was only a temporary fix but I was able to attach the civilian seabase beacon to my tower. It looked great. Only got to test it 3 times and then my computer crashed. Big time. So all my hard work is down the drain until I buy a new computer and salvage the files off the old hard drive. I guess that's a good excuse to buy FSX. I always say, no picture means it didn't happen. I was totally going to take a screen shot too.
 
Whoohoo for me! I got FSX so it was installed on the new computer. I pulled the old hard drive out of the old computer and was able to salvage all my FS files. So I got the GMAX file and the XML and MDL files installed. Ran BGLComp and got the new BGL file and installed it into FSX. Looks pretty good!

405041_2924999693044_1502446735_2908479_1606968807_n.jpg


But something is missing... :( The Rotating Beacon!

Here is my XML data:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<FSData version="9.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd">
<SceneryObject lat="n48 31.28" lon="w123 1.06" alt="0" pitch="0" bank="0" heading="0" altitudeIsAgl="TRUE" imageComplexity="NORMAL">
<LibraryObject name="D214A6984C7D1ADC7A09BAA7346360C0" scale="1.0" />
<AttachedObject attachpointName="attachpt_beacon" pitch="0" bank="0" heading="0">
<Beacon type="CIVILIAN" baseType="AIRPORT" />
</AttachedObject>
</SceneryObject>
<ModelData name="D214A6984C7D1ADC7A09BAA7346360C0" sourceFile="beacon.mdl" />
</FSData>

Any ideas why the beacon isn't working in FSX yet it worked in FS9?
 
Yup, thats the mdl for the tower and generator house. The rotating beacon is used via the attach point in gmax. So it should work with that coding. Kind of thinking I will need to download a new SDK for gmax for FSX since the model was converted using the FS9 SDK.
 
The FS9 compiled scenery should work in FSX without having to recompile. What is critical though is that the "rotating beacon" object be present in FSX.
 
Well I'm using the coding for the stock FS Rotating Beacon.... I'm beginning to wonder if it has a different name in FSX?
 
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