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Freeware object libraries?

6

64kts

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norway
I am returning to some scenery design after pausing my flight simulator hobby for some years. Moving, changing jobs and being busy with other hobbies forced me to take a pause. Trying to wrap my head around FSX has been a challenge, but there are some good tools being made. EZ Landclass, FSX KML, ADE and Instant Scenery makes things a whole lot easier. Thanks a lot to the folks developing these pieces of software!

What I miss is some freeware, or royalty free payware for that matter, with objects that can be used in freeware scenery design. Seems like we are wasting a lot of time making general/generic objects in GMax and keeping them to ourselves. A few simple house models in various colour combinations can take a scenery from dull to exiting. By sharing these objects we can include a whole lot more people in freeware design with easy to use software like ADE and Instant Scenery and get more of the world covered in greater detail.

I am currently working on two projects, my home island in the Arcitc, and adding more landscape detail, eyecandy and building most of the airstrips around the Falklands on top of Brian Jamieson Falklands 2007 mesh and landclass.

Any ideas of how we can start to collect som libraries and make them available for freeware developers? The idea being to share the workload a bit in the FS community to allow more scenery to be created. Most of us do this in our spare time and can't be experts in all phases of scenery design. How about it folks?
 
Doesn't get much use though and there are very few FSX objects... Getting together larger collections in one zip-file would be much better and more practical.

The problem of course is copyright and crediting everyone involved, but I don't have much of an ego, so I really don't care who or where anything I make is being used as long as it remains freeware and isn't used for something criminal.

The greater goal must be to make available more detailed scenery wherever you fly in the world so we all can contribute to making FS "as real as it gets".
 
Thanks Lance, I have been hesitant to use FS2004 textures. I've heard of so many problems, and the new Gmax stuff is supposed to be good for FS 11 also, so I rather stick to something that will last a couple of years, but I will do a search on AVSIM and see what i find.
 
Also there are over 8,000 objects available in FSX itself that can be used in your own scenery. This is a massive increase over FS9 and I think it is one reason why we are not seeing many FSX object libraries being created
 
Yeah, I know John, but they get pretty boring after a while :) If there only were more variations in terms of colour in the stock objects they would be fine.
 
The problem with all those avsim libraries are that they are too many :). Having one library of quality objects would make it so much easier for everyone to download. If you make a scenery using 20 or 30 libraries nobody's gonna go to avsim and download them all. It should be possible for a community such as this to put a new united library together. It would make it easier for us designers to use the objects and easier for anyone using the finnished sceneries to install evereything.

I see most of the new FSX libraries are using dds-textures instead of the bmp-textures used in FS2004 (which I fear will be incompatible with FS11).
 
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The point would be to download a pretty large file, or several, but if that collection is used by many devlopers it would be a one time download - for both designers and users of many sceneries.

It would take some effort, but if I get the support of some of the designers I will give it a go. The texture naming is a problem. In a perfect world all designers would name their textures with a name related to the bgl files, but I guess that is too much to ask for :)

If anyone here has some objects to donate send me a PM with you e-mail and I'll be in touch. I'm just trying to create som community spirit here and we'll se how it goes.

We could maby call it the FS Developer Library?

Anyone have som thoughts on this, please share. I'm willing to put in some time to make things easier for us all.
 
The biggest problem isn't the fact that you would be generating a large file which everyone would need to download.

What happens when further additions are made, or objects already in the large file are updated? Everyone has to download an even larger file all over again.
 
The thought would be that such a library would act as an expansion of the stock objects in FSX. The point isn't to include every object avaiable, but make a nice collection of objects that isn't covered (or designed well) in FSX.

From what I've seen over at AVSIM there aren't many updates, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. You could divide the libraries into volumes and release a new library when sufficient new objects have been made, just like you can update and make new versions or expansion of/to any pice of software. (Sorta' in the spirit of the RWY12 object libraries - but taking things a bit further).

The fact of the matter is that 90% of the FS-users I know have never dowloaded or installed any piece of freeware. You could call them lazy, but most of them get a headache from reading the install instructions and all the additional files they sometimes need to download.

I also think (and know) that a lot of designers just stick to the stock objects and a few customs ones (few, because creating them in gmax is very time consuming) because there are too many small libraries and keeping track of which objects you've used and which you haven't is a nightmare for larger sceneries like creating whole cities and towns.

A few larger libraries in a collection would make things a bit easier. If a designer need to use updated or custom objects he (are there any females here? :)) can include them in his own scenery anyway.
 
64kts said:
The fact of the matter is that 90% of the FS-users I know have never dowloaded or installed any piece of freeware. You could call them lazy, but most of them get a headache from reading the install instructions and all the additional files they sometimes need to download.
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If that is true, what makes you think releasing your library files will change the situation?

If you are correct that they are lazy then they don't deserve the time that would be required to put your idea into fruition.
 
How about runway12 object libraries? I don't know exactly if it works in FSX, but it is in .bgl format so it would probably work.
 
GrahamS said:
If that is true, what makes you think releasing your library files will change the situation?

If you are correct that they are lazy then they don't deserve the time that would be required to put your idea into fruition.
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Matt,
My understanding is that making things more user friendly is the responsibility of those with knowledge of how to do so. I live by the golden rule: Do to others what you want others to do for you.

I think flight simming and scenery design is a fun hobby and I see nothing wrong in trying to "sell" our hobby to a bigger audience. The more the merrier. To me it is not about who deserves to use my scenery, but keeping a positive spirit and believe in the idea that user friendliness is a good way to recruit new simmers and designers.



Adon,
The rw12 libraries work in FSX, but I'd like to see them somewhat edited and updated, and possible put into a larger collection.



I know I'm repeating myself, but my vision is a freeware library that acts as a sort of "must have" addon to Flight Simulator in that it unlocks the door to a great number of detailed sceneries. Having a large group of freeware developers go together on this would mean a simpler world for us all, simmer and designer. After all, lets spend our time designing, not organizing libraries. Let's do it once (with an update or two over the years) as a collective effort and be done with it.

The RWY12 people had started a good thing, but the library is getting old and RWY12 has stopped developing since the tragic passing of Seev Kahan. I would like to pick up where he/they left off and create a new series of updated libraries for FSX.
 
Who is Matt?

I totally disagree with your logic, but good luck.

To my mind the disorganised system which has been running for years is more than satisfactory and all attempts to organise freeware, and freeware designers has failed miserably.

For information, the hobby currently has far more participants than it has ever seen before, so something is running in the right direction.

Organisation will put off more than it is ever likely to recruit.
 
Matt, eh... sorry Graham :) - I get dyslectic at the end of a
long day in the office... I was just reading a post by MatthewS in the FSX KML forum!

FS design has probably grown because people are better with computers today than 10 years ago, the Internet and not to forget the superb software that has been coded to make things so much easier. I don't think object libraries have much to do with that.

I'm just feeling the temperature of this thing offering my time to organize a few libraries and some thumbnails. If nobody cares then no sweat. I see your point, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I just don't understand why making things a bit more user friendly is a bad thing. It's not like I'm proposing a new world order ;)
 
No problem... :)

Making things user friendly is a good thing to try, but in this case to do so you have to recruit the various designers and get their agreement. That is likely to be the stumbling block - designers are a very nice bunch of indivduals and I count many of them as friends.

However, they are, in my view, unlikely to come to a concensus about organising their joint works into a common library.

Almost by definition, designers are like inventors, they work best alone and not as part of a team.
 
Hi,

If you can get some objects together I would be happy to host them here on the site and help in other ways. I might have a few objects that I can contribute as well.

But I would not try to make the library too big, as a designer I would never use a huge library because it contains one object I might like. In that case I would prefer to use an alternative object.

So maybe they can be grouped in themes. Like cars, airport objects, city objects, etc.

Also you have to be careful that other people don't mess up. I released some tree libraries for Rwy12 and I have seen people decompile them and upload again with a new name to make them compatible with EZ-Scenery. That is complete nonsense of course, by somebody not knowing what he is doing, but it results in people having the same objects, which the same GUIDs in different libraries. This can lead to huge problems when one of the libraries is updated later or something similar.
 
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