3rd Party Sceneries?

I'd love to be able to surf USGS and DEM data and just clip an arbitrary area of the map and churn it through a SDK and begin dropping Google warehouse building models on it and defining land class areas with a pen tool. Also properly import Openstreetmap vector data to help populate the map. That would be my ideal scenery SDK.

:thumbup:

That is the future surely, just a matter of when...

It would be every flight sim enthusiast wet dream to use a fully functional aircraft carrier for the upcoming 3rd partaay modules. I mean a working elevator, a catapult operator, a towing caddy, a payload stack draggable with animated WSO's wrestling the munitions on as you watch, a fire extinguisher, hell even meatballs control. But that is just me. I guess in the year of our Lord, 2025, this might be possible, with nVidia hitching a 21 Gb GPU, Intel springs a 48 GHz CPU, a motherboard with 256 GB ram slots, and a 100Terrabyte drive. A PSU with 15000 watt power, or nuclear/hydrogen actuated (sorry ED) PSU.. and on top a BD ray reader/write with games as much as 8 dual layered BD-discs requiring massive HDD space.

 

 

Oh, I forgot to reset the time to 2012. Shit, I'm stuck!!

Unless you had some friends over at Team SuperHornet. Would be cool to just pull the carrier ops portion out of Janes FA-18 and integrate that into DCS. You would NOT have all the animated deck crewmen or working elevators, but you would have the meatballs and LSO and case III recoveries and the marshall stack, etc.

Certainly you'd need an improved/updated 3-d model.

What is WSO? Thought those guys are in the USAF. Won't see any of those on the deck of a carrier, and they damn sure won't be wrestling munitions. You are thinking maybe of red shirts -- aviation ordnancemen. You'd also have your grapes (fuel guys) and plane captains in brown shirts, and aircraft handlers in yellow shirts. Can't remember the green shirts, but I think those guys handle the catapults and arresting cables. Man that would be a crap-load of work to model all those.

Unless you had some friends over at Team SuperHornet. Would be cool to just pull the carrier ops portion out of Janes FA-18 and integrate that into DCS. You would have all the animated deck crewman or working elevators, but you would have the meatballs and LSO and case III recoveries and the marshall stack, etc.

 

Certainly you'd need an improved/updated 3-d model.

 

What is WSO? Thought those guys are in the USAF. Won't see any of those on the deck of a carrier, and they damn sure won't be wrestling munitions. You are thinking maybe of red shirts -- aviation ordnancemen. You'd also have your grapes (fuel guys) and plane captains in brown shirts, and aircraft handlers in yellow shirts. Can't remember the green shirts, but I think those guys handle the catapults and arresting cables. Man that would be a crap-load of work to model all those.

Green shirts are cats/traps.

Yellow shirts are marshallers.

Red shirts are ordnance.

Purple Shirts are fuel.

White shirts are crew chiefs/plane captains.

WSO=RIO in the navy.

Green shirts are cats/traps.

Yellow shirts are marshallers.

Red shirts are ordnance.

Purple Shirts are fuel.

White shirts are crew chiefs/plane captains.

WSO=RIO in the navy.

Hmmmm.... pretty sure there are some brown shirts in there. I think the White shirts are safety-related. I always thought the brown shirts where the crew chief/plane captains -- always seem them walking around on deck with their tie-down chains. Never was a carrier deck sailor, so I could be worng.

I'd love to be able to surf USGS and DEM data and just clip an arbitrary area of the map and churn it through a SDK and begin dropping Google warehouse building models on it and defining land class areas with a pen tool. Also properly import Openstreetmap vector data to help populate the map. That would be my ideal scenery SDK.

How awesome would that be? It would be one helluva an SDK tool, though, to allow a user to clip an area of terrain like this.

Hmmmm.... pretty sure there are some brown shirts in there. I think the White shirts are safety-related. I always thought the brown shirts where the crew chief/plane captains -- always seem them walking around on deck with their tie-down chains. Never was a carrier deck sailor, so I could be worng.

Yep, here's the list from a youtube video.

Yellow Shirts: Flight Deck Officers and Plane Directors. Green Shirts: Catapult and Arresting Gear people. Red Shirts: Aviation ordnance crews. Purple shirts: Aviation fuels people. Referred to as "Grapes".White shirts: Mail and people handlers for carrier on board delivery. White shirts: White shirts with a Red Cross: Medical corpsmen. brown shirts are plane captains (chief mechanics)

http://en.wiki.eagle.ru/wiki/Editing_and_modding

 

There's already a comprehensive guide into map creation and terrain modelling available. AFAIK, this is also valid for DCS:World.

 

While I actually don't know it, I understand the SDK to focus on aircraft and object creation/modelling, but not Terrain (as there's already everything available). I might be wrong, though.

Sorry, I guess we got a little OT there, with the naval/carrier ops thing.

I have looked at this wiki, but today I revisited it and there does seem to be some pretty good instructions here. I wouldn't think that the process would differ much, at least the initial part of the process, for setting up the terrain, DEM, etc. As several have pointed it, it is not clear how (or even if) a new terrain could be put into the game at this stage.

And there was a couple groups that were working on other terrains for FC2 at one point -- one guy I remember had gotten pretty far with his afghanistan terrain. Another group was working on the Russian Far East - they called it Manchuria. Both had videos up at one point showing them flying around over their theater terrain. Maybe I can dig up some links

Remember this "road map" annoucement from Wags (from Nov 2011):

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=81589&referrerid=65507

Certainly everything is subject to change, as Wags never fails to point out..... but it is interesting note here that the Nevada terrain will be compatible with A-10C and FC3.

I'm kinda wondering if the Nevada terrain is pretty close to being ready to go now, and maybe they are in a holding pattern while they get FC3 up and going -- just to ensure that it is all compatible.

I'm kinda wondering if the Nevada terrain is pretty close to being ready to go now, and maybe they are in a holding pattern while they get FC3 up and going -- just to ensure that it is all compatible.

In case you missed this one from Wags back in May.

Due to some internal changes, the Nevada map was on hiatus the past few months. However, work has now resumed. Attached are some progress images that show off more varied ground clutter and 3D tree forests.

http://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=1463806&postcount=26

OK found a couple of those old links -- would like to know whatever became of those projects.

Afghanistan

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=45658&highlight=afghanistan

Manchuria

http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=50244&highlight=manchuria

Someone needs to take the original Russian version of the Wiki editing guide and translate it properly. Seems it was just run through google translate.

I believe that after Nevada is released, they start on a new one!

Really hope its a European cold war front :pilotfly:

Hawaiian islands !!!

Really hope its a European cold war front

The Fulda region would be sweet. Bitburg, Spangdahlem, Ramstein, Hohn, Oldenburg, Brüggen, Gütersloh, Rhein-Main to name a few. Might start on base development and key features such as German landmarks, castles, and bridges? To include Aircraft shelters, bunkers, and Nike Hercules sites? Would be a very grand effort but well worth it.

Would be nice to split it up between teams.

Is this going to turn into another "this is what I want next" thread? ;)

Hopefully it turns into "lets get off our butts and do something about it" thread. :)

Well from the previous Afghanistan project it sure looks as making a new map is not a one man project.

i dont believe anyone deliberatly designs a hard to make ethos without a reason. simply put there is somthing that cant be done unless it by ED. given there ownership. lets look at nevada. and reasons for why why why... it can be interesting. but leads me to suggest that the system was never designed to have strictly 3rd party additions. on the contrary in fact. possibly. just my opinion. and another is that various aspects of all this 3rd party malarky are going to bite us in the ass regards general expectations at varying 3rd party levels. i cant see this wonderfull new scenery engine being used by lets say "me". it will be be saved for those worthy of whatever is deemed worthy.(BTW iam worthy :)) just like SFM and AFM. with all this chatter here and there ,its not going to be a rosey as we want it to be or are expecting it to be. so i expect many restriction regards 3rd party sceneries just as we will see with SFM /AFM.

May well be that way. I've got a scenery project waiting to be done (all the data saved locally) but we'll have to sit on our thumbs and wait. Nothing to be gained by speculation.

Really hope its a European cold war front :pilotfly:

The Fulda region would be sweet. Bitburg, Spangdahlem, Ramstein, Hohn, Oldenburg, Brüggen, Gütersloh, Rhein-Main to name a few. Might start on base development and key features such as German landmarks, castles, and bridges? To include Aircraft shelters, bunkers, and Nike Hercules sites? Would be a very grand effort but well worth it.

 

Would be nice to split it up between teams.

 

We will be messing with some of the worst nightmares of a lot of people in Central Europe. Nothing that we aren't doing already with the present Caucasus theater. Probably the pain can be minimized if the aproache will be an historically one.

As I finished the work I had in hands I was keeping away as possible from the PC for weeks, to the point I resumed serious freshwater fishing since almost ten years and trekking since I destroyed one knee while climbing three years ago. It's about time to install an Nvidia 570 I arranged for half the price and take the feel of Combined Arms :D

I would like to mess with scenery building as I'm used with terrain 3D modeling. But a detailed terrain model will only be a part of the atmosphere integration; it will be needed to populate with infrastructures and correct the roads, bridges and some other buildings positions and orientations, according to the used textures. This is an herculean work and it isn't an one man's work. Probably, dividing the working area in parts (quadricules or other adapted division) will help divide and coordinating a team work.

It will be needed first an inventory of the available digital cartography, by scale and model (raster or vector): terrain models, occupation and soil use (to delineate forests, agriculture lands, urban occupation, by type), communications infrastructures, hidrography (preferentially already classified), imagery (aerial or high resolution vertical satellite imagery).

It will be needed to know first the EDGE capabilities and how it handles the data.

Personally, I prefer that this work will be done by a professional team. It is a comprehensive work (and it will be, at least for me, a pain in the ass to repeat part of my professional work), and if done by a payable and dedicated team the cost will be divided by the community and the finished work will be guaranteed. If there is, after all, an urge to do an Cold War Central Europe scenario, it's better to know if there isn't already started work: it is awful and odious to have repeated work.

Hey, Gecko6, nice avatar :)

You have read my mind. I was thinking of setting up key focus areas and then adding in the populated areas as they are finished. The first phase could be one that caters to CA and all aircraft mods. For example:

The British occupied area could be done by a British focused team and objects and infrastructure could become a global library for all teams. There are allot of Cold War era aircraft in the pipeline and it would be a shame to not have a place where they fit in.

My avatar was from my team’s development of the A-7D Corsair before Ron went to market with his. I have all of the models and it was imported to X-plane and FSX but Real Life stepped in and we stopped development.

Someone needs to take the original Russian version of the Wiki editing guide and translate it properly. Seems it was just run through google translate.

I could probably manage that, if there is indeed any point in doing so.

Although I would prefer to have a contact in ED in order to ask questions about technical specifics -- sometimes hard to translate when you don't fully grasp the idea yourself.

What is the official specification for custom map area?

From what I can tell the current map covers a total area of approx 310,460 mi sq.

North 430 miles

West 722 miles

Is this the upper limit?

In this pic I have broken down the same size map area as we have in Georgia. The most efficient way to do this would be to have 5 teams working in support of a master terrain mesh.

Team 1 and 2 are working on an area about 322 km X 322 km the other are close to the same area. Team 4 can expand into England as much as they like. This is a result of me sitting down for an hour and just brainstorming.

Updates would consist of each team submitting their work to the master map on a regular bases and each release would focus on airfields, cities, roads, and vegetation.

Any and all feedback is welcome.

Great idea Gecko. And the only way to do it I think but I guess it is nessesary to wait for the new terrain angine from ED. But it's a great idea and teams should gather sharing experience on a smaller project first. Maby just an small island in the middle of the sea. Make Wake Island for instance and divide the island in to the same type of sections/teams and make the sharing and combining prosess working.

(HJ)

Oh yeah! Gimme that for my Ka-50! :pilotfly:

Well we use this; mostly during night operations 80% of them are conducted at night; I don’t think that the ka-50 is up to that type of operations :(