Platnum Wings Instructions (Beta - VERY, VERY, Beta)

[Jorge]

Okay,

I finally managed to sit down today and put together what I had as far as getting instructions to "create" the Platinum Wings world.

I have a PDF file which needs to be edited and worked on for things like grammar, spelling, etc, but I think it's well enough to get the idea across:

View attachment pw_readme.pdf

Once everything is edited and worked out, I'll include it with the "SDK" (for lack of a better term) that will allow creation of generic airfields to repopulate FS9 after Platinum Wings is set up.

Main credit for the video goes to Huub for finding it in the first place!

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Regards,

Jorge
Miami, FL

PS: With the exception of Golden Wings and a few other, obvious things, the procedures can easily be modified for use in FSX. It's just a matter of annotating the differences once the final "manual" is made. The "SDK" files would also have to be "updated" since the xml is slightly different for bglcomp, but not by much. I'll leave that until later when we have the FS9 one ready, though.

 

[ian elliot]

Thanks for the info, i can use elements in my install, esp removing stock airports. The only issue is you mention ORBX V.5. to my knowledge, Orbx is a payware company and develop for FSX and above, ive never seen or heard of any Orbx addons for FS9

 

[Jorge]

Ian,

Thanks for the feedback. That's why I put the caveat in the PDF at one point regarding the files. I didn't think Youtube (or this website) would link to something not "kosher" when it came to files. I figured since it was a sticky on here, then it would be okay to refer to the video and its files.

I already found some grammar issues and some references that need updating. I forgot to mention the NAME object files. Keep OBNAME0.bgl and OBNAME1.bgl active, but you can move the others. When you read the PDF you'll know what I mean.

I'll work on an update to the PDF before the weekend is over. Not sure whether to mention the video now, so just keep the recommendations coming. I can always just refer to where to get files and not worry about the ground environment. I think EnvTex may improve some of that on its own anyway, but I'm not sure.

Going to fly and get some more screenies now.

Jorge
Miami, FL

 

[ian elliot]

I had a spare 5 minutes this morning and thought i'd give your pdf a test, I didnt do the whole world, just a test area of where im flying at the moment, EURE and EURW. Removed the file's and all my stock fields are gone, only my own scenery's and a few other addon airfields appear in the go-to menu and on the in flight map. Decided to keep named and OB bgl's, can always remove them later if i wish. Ive always wanted a stock airfield free install and now ive got one. Im not really into GW, but i can cherry pick your pdf for other ideas about enhancing my install, so thanks for your hard work and effort.
The only thing to try is changing the paths of Airport Design Editor 9, which i use a lot, to look for the afd file's in my back up folder's, its sometimes more convenient to retro a stock airfield rather the build ground up.
thanks again

 

[ian elliot]

Ive been playing with ADE9, trying to open up stock afd file's. I have the saved EURE and EURW in a dummy folder on desktop and ive directed ADE to there, but the scenery cfg is required, so i did a copy from my FS9 install and pasted into the dummy, but ADE still cant open up airfields from those area's. Unless there's a work around i dont know about, this may be a problem for anyone designing their own scenery.

Its just occurred to me that i can create a pure FS9 install, renaming the exe, i can work on stocker's till the cows come home and transfer them over

 

[Jorge]

Yes,

The only thing about this is that you would need to have two (2) installs IF you want to work with the stock airports at all.

Otherwise you could just create a backup with all the default airports and use the FS Scenery Manager to activate and deactivate the default airports in order to work on them. Probably like this:

C:\FS9_PW\Addon Scenery\Default\scenery

... then place all the AB, AP, AT, FL, etc into that folder. Make sure it's at the lowest priority possible so your work is always at a higher one. That way you can just activate, work on what you need, then deactivate to enjoy. You could make as many "default" folders with scenery sub-folders as you would need, but for what you're working on one should be fine.

I haven't tried this approach, so it may or may not work.

On my rig I have two (2) installs: one for Platinum Wings work and the other is my CalClassic one which is default with Silver Wings and pretty much all the scenery I can think of from their site. I just use the Manager to activate or deactivate what I need for a flight when it comes to addon scenery. I pointed ADE to get the default files from the CalClassic install since that's the one with all the default stuff still intact, but you could always just do a "vanilla" if you would like instead. It just depends how much space you have.

Since I'm stripping or heavily modifying things, I just load the default from the CalClassic setup, strip out what I don't need, then save and export to a project folder. I then use xml to get the header to what I want as far as the four-letter ID, lat/lon, name, country, etc, then import the xml to ADE for work.

Many of the airports I've made for my testing are just cookie-cutter fields. Once I'm done with the PDF editing based on feedback I'll go ahead and start posting the base files to create airports as well as the ones I've done. They were all just "base" work to get something in the sim for my own use, but since there have been so many people interested I'm going to post the ones I've made. Those that are mods of others' work (La Guardia, Schipol, etc) will only be available if the authors say it's okay. Pretty much every "custom" airport has a cookie-cutter equivalent just to get the thing in the sim active again, so don't worry. It may just not "look" like it's supposed to, but it's functional.

Oh, and because I have BOTH the exe files as "fs9.exe" for simplicity on my part, I use the registry utility when I want to go back and forth as far as the actual "flying" goes. For design, I just keep everything with the PW version since ADE doesn't seem to mind. Well, so far, anyway. If I want to do something with design on the Classic version, I just switch the registry that way and I'm fine for that one.

Keep the tips coming!

Regards,

Jorge
Miami, FL

 

[leuen]

Hi Jorge,

In the meantime I have started to change my GW3 according to your advices in your ample readme. First and most important in my opinion is the installation of the ORBX textures. What I feared, did happened. ORBX generates trees where they shouldn't be or then the wrong ones. For example, I get furs in Central Africa. But the worst is this one:

Trees, like on a southern island.

Far from it, it's on Bear Island near Arctic Circle!

Too bad, because at least with ORBX the multi-storey buildings would disappear.

Bernard

 

[Jorge]

Bernard,

Thanks for checking that out. I plan on doing some serious land-class editing at some point, so it's good to know what needs to be changed. Most of this is mere cosmetic since it's just a matter of finding the area and doing the land-class.

I've been changing some wide areas in Europe (or trying to, anyway) so that the cities are more in line with what they were as far as concentration. It makes you wonder why there are so many large roads left over once done, but that's a different matter. That can be changed by messing with the terrain.cfg file and changing the definition of major highways and other large roads to the definition of something else in the list. Again, something in the pipeline at some point.

One source I'm using for Germany is a Luftwaffe map from 1938-39 time frame. It's in a "merkatur" projection, so the areas may not be necessarily lining up as they should with the sim, but it's not too critical. For something that's a wide area as is a country, it's probably not that big of a deal if a city's "footprint" is off by a few miles/kilometers.

The main thing is to see what the area is supposed to have. That's why some of the older maps are nice since they generally tell you what to expect in an area. For the area you just pointed out, it would probably be just a matter of dropping in rocky snow with some cold area forests or something similar.

If I can find a 1:500,000 or 1:1,000,000 over at PCL's online library for the area/island, I'll see about adding it to the list. I can make a land-class map with SBuilder9 and include the eventual bgl with the eventual other bgl files.

Keep the info coming, folks!

Jorge
Miami, FL

PS: Just found the map for Bear Island over at PCL. I'll try to do a quick change. I'll write down the procedure as I do it so that you can try yourself with other areas. Just give me a few days to post something.

 

[leuen]

Hi Jorge,

Thanks for your very detailed information. In fact converted ORBX isn't bad per se. I made the comparison at one of my usual test locations. It's Bangui in the Central African Republic, where I lived fifty years ago.

Here as it actually looks like:

And this is the same place with ORBX:

The buildings are smaller and therefore more appropriate for vintage environment. On the other hand, the trees are alle uniform and not a single palm tree. I deleted some agn files in the texture folder but it has no effect.

Regarding Bear Island, I can do an exclude file and eliminate the trees. But that's not a solution for the rest of the world!

Bernard

PS: BTW, Bangui Airfield is part of Alexander Belov's "Ligne Tanezrourft" scenery package.