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  • Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

    Post 16 Update

    Post 17 Warning

SBuilderX Question

One of the reasons that I keep tripping over it is that I'll look back to the tutorials on how to create islands and they're all designed for cutting islands out of seas and oceans rather than lakes. As a direct result, the island hole polys are at AMSL so the step simply isn't required.

I still forget quite regularly, unfortunately.

Regarding Hay River specifically, I haven't been there in the sim apart from flying a Buffalo liveried C-46 out of it a month or so back when testing the Commando. I did look at it in Google Earth to get some rough altitude information and can see that you may well need some sloped polys to get around limitations in the FSX default scenery. Is it far enough North that it's in FSX's "problem" zone as well, or is that further up? I know above a certain latitude, because of the way the FS world is built, it all goes a little squiffy.

Ian P.
 
Hi Falcon,

Don't know anything about SBuilderX but Sidney Schwartz did the Hay River scenery for 2004 , I believe it also works in FSX.

Pete.
 
Hi guys,

by the way, if you get stuck with poly work like that you can always use the Make Line function before erasing any poly, that way you still have all the outlines (which can be turned into polys again) and don't have to start tracing from scratch. In fact, all complex polys I always trace as lines first because it's easier to deal with vectors. For example, you can trace several shorter sections and then merge the lines later, which allows you to save your work in between.

Cheers, Holger
 
PeteHam said:
Hi Falcon,
Don't know anything about SBuilderX but Sidney Schwartz did the Hay River scenery for 2004 , I believe it also works in FSX.
Pete.
Click to expand...
Gee, who would have thought anyone else would have seen it necessary to do Hay River also, lol, figures after all this work. Sidney does excellent custom object work too, so my guess is, his will be way beyond anything I had planned to do. Thanks for that, at least I don't have to go any further with this now.:salute:

NOTE: After loading Sidney's scenery. . .I'm going to continue with mine. There were a lot of problems with that scenery in FSX.
 
Holger's advice is very good and is one of the first things to master. Just keep in mind that when you create a line from poly the line will have a missing segment between the first and last point of the poly. Practice first and for lines make poly and convert to poly are very different things!

For some reason when making holes I will create the poly and set it to hydro at correct alt and then set as hole. I have had problems with holes overlapping QMID 11 borders. I've also had problems where I have ended up with duplicate polys stacked up, and it can be hard to see that happened unless you drag the one you see and the one underneath then is visible.

When in doubt export the sbx format of your project and look at it in a text editor. You can also use "find and replace" many times to fix common, repetitive problems or mistakes in your project this way.

scott s.
.
 
scott967b said:
[...]
When in doubt export the sbx format of your project and look at it in a text editor. You can also use "find and replace" many times to fix common, repetitive problems or mistakes in your project this way.

scott s.
.
Click to expand...

That's a very good advice, exactly what I did a couple of times to solve problems. By analyzing the easy to read and straightforward code one also clearly sees the logic behind "holes" and "water polygons" etc. One also can see problems arising from missing or lost information in the polygon or line headers, a common problem in large setups, which cause SBX to behave erratically.
I wish SBX would offer a editable table of the scenery's components (without the vertices), which would enable the developer to have a clear overview of the structure of a scenery and major changes don't mean a huge click-fest (e.g. setting a new width for 100 coastlines).

Cheers,
Mark
 
Hello what have we here. I know I smelled a NWT Scenery conversation:icon_lol: What you cooking up in Hay River land of Buffalo Airways. Falcon, The LC around Hay river could use a fixin in FSX. There is also a missing Water Aerodome there and a Helo Port. Sid's Hay River 2010 works nice in FSX SP2 just the LC is wacky in FSX. Are you making a Photo-real back-round scenery?
 
CG_1976 said:
Hello what have we here. I know I smelled a NWT Scenery conversation:icon_lol: What you cooking up in Hay River land of Buffalo Airways. Falcon, The LC around Hay river could use a fixin in FSX. There is also a missing Water Aerodome there and a Helo Port. Sid's Hay River 2010 works nice in FSX SP2 just the LC is wacky in FSX. Are you making a Photo-real back-round scenery?
Click to expand...
I tried it in FSX/Accel (GEX and UTX also) and it had major elevation problems and wasn't even usable for me. This won't be photoreal and no custom buildings. I don't do any photoreal scenery anymore.:salute:
 
I took this on as a test to see if I could enjoy scenery design without the use of high res satellite imagery. . .I do not and so I have dropped this and any future scenery work. I enjoyed it for quite awhile but photoreal scenery is really the only way to go when creating for FSX, anything short of that leaves quite a bit to be desired (at least for me) and I don't have the expertise it takes to produce that type of work outside of SBuilderX and it's built in tile servers which I have found has it's own pitfalls.

There is a reason we can count the top quality scenery design gurus on one hand. . .it takes skills in many different disciplines to be able to create the works we see from Holger and Bill and MCDesigns and a few others. I can do what I was attempting at Hay River all day, but when it's done, it's just a fancier version of the default and really not even worth starting.

This will just leave me more time to fly, tweak some panels from time to time and do some repaints when the inspiration hits me.:salute:
 
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