Kitty Hawk Class Aircraft Carriers

[DaveB]

DaveB, what is causing the ship to bounce? I only noticed jerky ships when I put my frame rate to unlimited. I tried to model the planes on the ship, but it would lock up the sim. You can edit the textures to fix the yellow anchor.

Any other advice/critisims are welcome. I also have the source files to all of my work upon request. I even left the positions text file so you know where the cable/cat zones are.

Hello Mate

Don't worry about the bumpy sea. This is a trade-off of an already dubious mesh around the UK made worse (to some degree) by Horizon and GenX. Once you get far enough away from the shore.. things flatten off My default flight starts at Culdrose and I'm not in the air long before I can load AICarriers.. too close it has to be said to avoid these mesh problems.

I'll look at the anchor and dosh a lick of paint over it

ATB
DaveB

 

[TARPSBird]

I'm thinking the "yellow" anchors might be an attempt by the ships' creator to duplicate the Navy's Golden Anchor Award, presented to ships with sustained excellence in retention of personnel in the service.

 

[WombRaider78]

I'm thinking the "yellow" anchors might be an attempt by the ships' creator to duplicate the Navy's Golden Anchor Award, presented to ships with sustained excellence in retention of personnel in the service.

Exactly

 

[DaveB]

Ah.. rgr that guys Never come across this before. We didn't have such things in the RN.. no big 'E'.. no painted medals and certainly no golden anchor. We did have a 'Golden rivet' but the least said about that the better! We had the ships battle honours listed on the ships plaque and that was our lot!

Something learned.. what could be better
ATB
DaveB

 

[Hooky722]

I Still have no idea why this is but with all these american carriers I seem to be having Major Framerate issues started with the Oriskney a while back and carried on with Midway Forestall and Kitty hawk models the no issue with Lazurus majestic class or any Flying stations carriers it just seems to be the US ones i think the problem is located somewhere near the catapult but i have no idea what it could be but that's where everything grinds to a halt. Shame because they look fantastic.

Hooky

 

[DaveB]

Are you ok with Clemenceau, Foch and CDG Hooky? I can't think of any particular reason why things should slow down by the cat.. especially on these two as the blast shield is always up so no animation to get in the way. The French carriers are particularly 'busy' but they're pretty well optimised too. I get a bigger hit off Victorious 66 though little to none off Victorious 60.

ATB
DaveB

 

[Hooky722]

nope Foch Clemanceu fine as are FS Victorious and the CDG by RFN. I can't make sense of it The only thing I can think is its got something to do with them being complied in sketch up as they all seem to have that in common, But there again so was majestic and that's fine, I can't understand it and its really grinding my gears

Hooky

 

[DaveB]

Hooky..

You might be right. Sketchup is a fine modelling tool but models made in it are generally meant for static display and not for something like flightsim. Their poly count is higher than it could be as are drawcalls.. even when optimised. I made a rather extensive Porstmouth (and Southampton) using Sketchup models (I downloaded the models then converted them to FS mdl's using MCX) and it got to the point where I couldn't fly down the Solent without going OOM in short order!! I can handle 'one' ok with deck aircraft on my old i5 but I know it's there. Still.. they're not as heavy as Javiers Nimitzv2 or SDB's Big 'E'

ATB
DaveB

 

[Bjoern]

The empty Kitty model is nearly 20 MB in filesize with about 270k triangles and 580k texture vertices, producing 25 drawcalls. The static aircraft add another 360k triangles, 573k texture vertices and 16 drawcalls.
The Clemenceau model all in all has 190k triangles, 230k texture vertices and 251 drawcalls at 8.5 MB filesize.

The sheer amount of texture vertices is probably choking FSX.


- Edit:
Tried a vertex weld operation in MCX on one of the Kitty models. The program crashed when it reached its allocated memory limit. Great, eh?

 

[expat]

with all these american carriers I seem to be having Major Framerate issues started with the Oriskney a while back and carried on with Midway Forestall and Kitty hawk models the no issue with Lazurus majestic class or any Flying stations carriers it just seems to be the US ones i think the problem is located somewhere near the catapult

As a heavy user of these boats, I have observed the same behavior. It is after trapping and moving up to the cat that an FPS dorp is most noticeable, otherwise not too bad.

Separately, I also have problems with the AS A-3D Skywarrior (not with other a/c) hitting some kind of crash box on the Oriskany, Midway and Forrestal. I trap with crash detection on (more exciting/satisfying/bloody frustrating that way) and got a good one yesterday with the Whale (rare for me on anything smaller than the Nimitz and Big E) on the Kitty Hawk, but that has a bit more acreage on the deck, and my touchdown profile was - unusually in the whale - just right and and light as possible. Suspect it is the much wider wingspan of the A-3 hitting something invisible?

 

[DaveB]

Yup.. just did a quick test to confirm this. Landing on is no problem at all but as soon as I got level with the FLOLS.. my FR dropped to a little over 17fps and stayed there all the way to the bow. The model I used was in 'Launch' config so there was nothing visible on deck to drag the FR's down. Odd.. very odd.

ATB
DaveB

 

[navy81]

Dave, Wombraider, et al,
my problem was fixed by just copying the confd file directly from the unzipped download and pasting into the ai carriers conf'd folder, rather than creating separate entries - if that makes sense. All seems to be well now.
Attached are screenshots with repainted deck statics (lightened the overall color to more consistent with a light gull gray, and for the Connie, i selected VF-92 for the F-4, VA-165 for the A-6 and VA-146 for the A-7 liveries). Still working on liveries for the Kitty Hawk and some minor tweaks to these, and testing it since i will need two separate texture files for the different carriers.

More to follow in the next few days.
Very nice work and thanks for supplying the Kitty Hawk and Connie. Now, if we could just get an America and JFK... one can hope.

Deke

 

[DaveB]

Ohhhh.. I'm likin' that Deke!!

Got a soft spot for Connie.. we met up with her group in the Indian Ocean.. '74 or '75.. can't quite remember now. She put on a fabulous air display for us including a live firing..

Don't laugh.. camera's were not like they are now. This old lady only had a 50mm lens and you can see that can't you!!
ATB
DaveB

 

[DaveB]

Here's another shot to confirm your screenshot..

The BL deck code denotes HMS Blake
ATB
DaveB

 

[sparouty]

The empty Kitty model is nearly 20 MB in filesize with about 270k triangles and 580k texture vertices, producing 25 drawcalls. The static aircraft add another 360k triangles, 573k texture vertices and 16 drawcalls.
The Clemenceau model all in all has 190k triangles, 230k texture vertices and 251 drawcalls at 8.5 MB filesize.

The sheer amount of texture vertices is probably choking FSX.


- Edit:
Tried a vertex weld operation in MCX on one of the Kitty models. The program crashed when it reached its allocated memory limit. Great, eh?

Hi,
You're probably right, the amount of textured vertices seems quite high regarding triangles. I'm carefully look at the ratio "textured vertices/triangles" which is, to my point of view a good indicator of mesh and mapping optimization.
The Drawcalls number is also interesting as it may shows how graphical resources are impacted, but... (there is always a "but") drawcalls number can be hard to be read as it can be highly increased by animations or visibility conditions.
That's why Clemenceau/Foch models have such high drawcalls without specific impacts on FPS : any animated parts (blastshield, shooters, FLOLS single light parts, etc...) generate drawcall but these extra drawcalls don't impact FPS as much as "basic" drawcalls. You have the same case with 3D cockpit model and all the switch animations that increase the number of drawcalls seen by MCX without any specific FPS hit.

When I modeled my carriers I didn't have a simple "recipe" for FPS, but I tried to follow some simple rules like:
- 1 texture per static aircraft model squadron =>meaning about 6 or 7 extra drawcalls max
- low poly modeling : 500 vertices max per crewman, 5000 vertices per airplane with exception for chopper or E-2C (which are not so many on the flight deck)
- vertices welding for each of my model object to decrease as much as possible the number of vertices
- try to optimize the mapping by reducing the number of textures used and by having simple/grouped mapping structure : having a mapping spread all over the texture map highly increases the number of textured vertices, the size of the mdl and at least, it may impact the FPS
Regarding this last point, I eared that mapping and material management aren't easy to handle with Skechtup....

Regards,
Sylvain

 

[Hooky722]

Very nice work and thanks for supplying the Kitty Hawk and Connie. Now, if we could just get an America and JFK... one can hope.

Deke

Personally Deke I'm still hoping for A Hermes of some variation or Even Eagle or one of the Centaur class carriers.
Might be waiting a while

Hooky

 

[Hooky722]

Yup.. just did a quick test to confirm this. Landing on is no problem at all but as soon as I got level with the FLOLS.. my FR dropped to a little over 17fps and stayed there all the way to the bow. The model I used was in 'Launch' config so there was nothing visible on deck to drag the FR's down. Odd.. very odd.

ATB
DaveB

Thanks Dave, Yep that's exactly what I've been getting glad I'm not going crazy or that 'Old faithful' here (meaing my rig) isn't about to give up the chase.

Hooky

 

[WombRaider78]

I have also noticed this large drop in FPS. I am trying to chase it down. I thought at first it was a reflection problem. But I have ruled that out.

When I chase it down, I will make an update.

 

[Bjoern]

Regarding this last point, I eared that mapping and material management aren't easy to handle with Skechtup....

Yep. SKU uses a different philosophy for handling materials than a "real" 3D modeling tool.



I've exported the CV63 in OBJ format from MCX (91 MB! ) and loaded it into 3ds Max. I could bring the vertex count of the entire boat below 70k by joining all the parts together and welding all vertices within 1mm radius of each other. This, however, destroyed the materials (bad!) and produced a whole lot of double polygons (very bad!).
Reworking the Kitties to be a bit more performance friendly would probably take more time than simply doing an efficient model from scratch...

 

[expat]

Ohhhh.. I'm likin' that Deke!!

Me too! Those paints look great and VF-92 is a long time favorite for the phlyable (AS) phantom.