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P3D v2 X40 (KINF) Inverness, Florida

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unitedkingdom
Jim, you're making the rest of us look bad. Tone it down a bit would you. ;)
 
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unitedstates
Thanks very much for the nice comments guys, I appreciate them very much! Jose, thanks, I appreciate anything you might be able to come up with. I'm slightly sidetracked on this project at the moment trying to port Bonners Ferry over to P3D2, this may cost me a couple weeks on Inverness but I'll be back on it when 65S is done. I started building the fuel tanks for KINF and have some rudimentary untextured shapes placed in the sim, I'll hold off a while now and see what Jose can come up with while I work on 65S so no huge rush on photos right now. I did spend a few hours on autogen at KINF yesterday after reaching the total frustration stage on 65S for the day so Inverness is not entirely stagnant just yet. Thanks again folks :) .

Jim
 

euroastar350

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Wow folks I really appreciate all the nice comments! I hope this doesn't disappoint everyone when it's finally released, honestly the focus has sorta been on simplicity because I lose interest in anything that takes more than about 3 months!

Jose or eurostar350, is there a chance either of you might have, or be able to get, a photo of the north end of this building? I can see there's a sign there but the best photo I've found is in the inset of the screenshot below. I'd hate to release it with the silly sign I came up with as a placeholder :) .

x40_23.jpg




@Jon Masterson: I appreciate the nice comments but I'm afraid ADE is well beyond "half that good", I've gotten into ADE more with this airport than I ever have in the past, it's brilliant piece of highly refined work, thanks!

@adi518: The only thing this has to do with Orbx is that the guy who's developing it has built an Orbx airport. Beyond that there is no Orbx relationship whatsoever.

@n4gix: I'm stoked to see you show up here Bill, thanks for dropping by! I still remember and use all the modeling tips you gave me in my McCall thread every day, and I really enjoyed the conversations we had.

Thanks guys, I'm off to try modeling the fueling installation, wish me luck :) .


Jim


Hi Jim,

Sorry for the late response. I've never been to Inverness, hence my Miami, Orlando and Tampa comment. I'm a Delaware guy now with plans to go back to Florida maybe this year or next year...so I'm afraid I can't be much help :)
 
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us-florida
Jim,

Excellent news. This should give me enough time to get the pictures to you. I'll send you a PM as soon as I have the pics ready.

Jose
 
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finland
Thank you for making this airport for FS, i modeled earlier last year few buildings to downtown Inverness, the City Hall, courthouse, police station with helipad and Regions bank building, after this airport release the area is perfect place to fly.
 
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What material setting allows the shadows to be traced through the alpha channel (specifically for the trees)?
 
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us-northcarolina
Interesting, because for some reason I still am getting the "boxes" rather than the true alpha trace...

(This is running the most recent build of P3D v2.2)

2rRD018.png
 
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unitedstates
Dunno, IIRC I used the same material settings used on the autogen trees in vegetation.bgl for those custom trees, I have plenty of other objects that just use normal "set default transparent" though and their shadows seem to work fine so I don't think there's anything special in the material settings.

p3d2_alpha_shdws.jpg


Do autogen trees cast square shadows too?
 

ollyau

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Dang, that looks great. Wish I could run P3Dv2.2 without terrible frame rates (or without settings that make it look worse than FSX).
 
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unitedstates
I wouldn't say "terrible" but yeah, P3D2 with all the candy turned on does whack the frames a bit. I'm running an i-7 2600K @ 4.4, 8 Gb DDR3 @ 1866mHz, and a GTX 770/4Gb with everything running off SSDs, I max the sliders (with pop_free_autogen off) and probably average 22-26 fps where I'd see 27-33 given the same scenario in FSX/DX10. I'm "flying" the crosshairs plus scenery placement tool from a non-existent VC which has virtually no impact on frames, the Alabeo Cutlass RG forfeits a couple frames for the HD textures. I lock down both sims at 33 fps. Oddly I have a stutter at Inverness in FSX that isn't there in P3D2, I haven't been able to nail down the problem, maybe AI, it's there even if I disable the Inverness scenery area.

The last shot isn't Inverness BTW, it's 65S which is finally P3D2-ready (providing it passes beta). I'm back on Inverness now :) .
 

ollyau

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I realized that -- mountains like those certainly don't belong in Florida! :p

I have the same CPU (overclocked to the same frequency, coincidentally) and same amount of RAM, but a GTX 570 (1.25 GB video RAM). OS installed to an SSD, FSX and P3D on a normal hard drive. With P3D sliders maxed (presumably with pop_free_autogen off, if that's the default setting), I get around 6-12 FPS, locked at 24. With considerably lower settings, I can average around 17 FPS. I have FSX running mostly max (bloom and lens flare off, traffic at 40%), and get 17-24 FPS (depending on the location; usually 22-24 FPS), locked at 24 (both DX9 and DX10). I guess LM made P3D a lot more reliant on the graphics card.
 
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No pop_free_autogen is "1" by default, that said it wasn't really causing a performance problem since v2.2, I mostly just turned it off because I was missing some of my annotated buildings in spite of the slider being maxed and turning it off made those show up again. I did add AffinityMask=15 and I run HT off in the BIOS, that did seem to help quite a bit and I don't use HDR either BTW. MSAA=8, SSAA=0, VSYNC=0, and FXAA=1. I also use the "Bioshock" profile in Nvidia Inspector with some settings I found in a thread at Avsim months ago which are very similar to what you'd use in FSX/DX10. If I was actually flying the sim I'd turn some settings down in P3D2 a bit, I did a flight from 65S to KSZT the other evening with AS EVO weather, heavy overcast and rain in the Alabeo Cutlass, frames were dismal at best probably averaging 14-15 and dropping to 10-11 or so on final at KSZT in default Orbx NRM. Oddly I think the frames were slightly better flying around my 65S with 140+ drawcalls in the GP alone than they were at KSZT - maybe it was the weather depiction.

I had a GTX 580/ 1536 Mb originally but it caught me surfing around the P3D site last November about 2 days before release and committed suicide. I never did get to try it with P3D2, I found the 770 on a Xmas sale at Newegg for like $385 so it became my to: Jim, from: Jim Xmas present after spending a month on my old Athlon XP/GeForce 7800 machine which basically got me on the internet and that's about all. In FSX I think I picked up 4 or 5 frames around 65S with the 770, I really wish I'd had a chance to compare the two GPUs with P3D2 but I guess that wasn't in the "cards", lol.

Jim
 

n4gix

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Jim, for whatever its worth, I replaced my GTX580 1.5GB with a EVGA GTX770 Super Clocked 4GB card. Where I'd been seeing at best about 28 fps with the 580, without making any changes to the settings, and doing nothing more that deleting my shader files, I noted a nice 55 fps.

This allowed me to bump up many of the settings and enable all of the shadow options. Now I average around 30fps, with frames locked at 32fps.
 
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unitedstates
Glad to hear that Michael! You can save those material settings BTW, I opened the default scenery\global\scenery\vegetation.bgl in MCX, then with a random tree (a hemlock I think) open in the viewer I opened the material editor. Then if you click the green jigsaw puzzle icon next to the "Apply" button it opens another dialog, click the down arrow on the "New" button and you'll see VEG_CONIFER1 in the drop-down, click that, then in the middle column under name type something meaningful (veg_conifer?). That makes a "veg_conifer.mcxmat" in your ModelConverterX\templates folder. Then you can open your own model in MCX and apply the veg_conifer material settings just like you'd apply set default transparent. (Thanks Arno! :) )

Jim
 
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unitedstates
Here's a small update on Inverness.

First off I was never happy with these hurricane hangars because the texture resolution was poor and the mesh was all wrong which caused them to leak! I've rebuilt them again for the 3rd time throughout the course of this project :) . This time I started from scratch with a 40-sided sphere and a new texture sheet. Texture resolution is now somewhere around 10px/ft which is about what everything else on the field is. The higher resolution makes it a lot easier to add some dirt and weathering not to mention the fact that more pixels just looks better in the sim.

x40_26.jpg




I had fun building these more complex models around the main focal point of the airport, I enjoy these detailed models immensely but it is time consuming, I'd guess (conservatively) 20-30 hrs into this small area alone. Here's the FBO, "Whiskey Bravo Air" which appears to be a rather uninteresting double-wide mobile home converted to a pilot's lounge. To jazz it up I added a lot of details; air conditioners, porches and overhangs, antennas, satellite dish, ramp lights, some 3D grass, some cars in the parking lot, parking bumpers, a generator (I think), a sign, reflective windows, etc. Lastly I tried to smudge it all into the PR so it sorta looks like it belongs there.

x40_27.jpg


x40_28.jpg


x40_30.jpg




...and the fueling area. This was a fun model, still messing around with the textures a bit but done for the most part. There's a fuel trigger here for those that want it and it can be disabled for those that don't. Finally a shot from FSX:

x40_29.jpg




...and from P3D2

x40_31.jpg


x40_32.jpg




So far everything is on ten 1024x1024 sheets plus I have two more separate texture sheets for the vegetation and fences with some transparency. I laid my main sheets out on a 4096x4096 document as a sort of preview image because I was having a hard time remembering which sheets still had space left on them, I briefly contemplated remapping everything to the 4096 sheet to cut down some drawcalls but it seems an enormous amount of work and there's not much to gain since everything already makes extensive use of drawcall batching. Here's what my texture sheets are looking like, yellow/red striped areas still need to be used up.

x40_33.jpg




Thanks for checking in :)

Jim
 
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