Hi,
two years ago - while working on the Solomon 1943 scenario and other projects - I made a fictive, primitve little island where I freely could test new (to me) scenery design methods without penetrating existing scenery designs. The scenery evolved more and more though, and about half a year or so I decided to make it a spin off of the Solomons.
To give that scenery a sense and name I called it JFAR 1944 - Joint Forces Air Race 1944. It is assumed that this is a rear airfield, which is used as transit point between Espiritu Santo and Guadalcanal and is located at an exisiting island group half way in between, replacing an exisiting island (I did that because of real weather conditions, which are prominent over islands in the tropics).
The air race thing came into my mind because the scenery is built for low level flying with a lot of eye candy around the shores - historically I figured that it was used by all forces (hence joint forces) and, because of the boring duty, the pilots set up a race course around the airfield and challenge each other as well as those who are in transit to have some rat racing fun around the airfield.
It is a completely fictive, and everything designed manually - from the mesh to the hand painted photoreal ground textures. Many landscape objects like cliffs, rocks, hills or mountains are designed an 3dsmax. With the next big Solomon update in mind - which will incorporate the techniques I worked out for JFAR - I also designed a huge load of replacement or new scenery objects.
The scenery is maybe at 70% of development, possibly three more months to go. Careful guess of course.
Most probably it will be P3D only, because of native P3D objects as well as a terrain design that needs the hardware tesselation of P3D. I also don't think it would run well on FSX because of the massive complexitivity.
Right now I work on the sloped runways of "Boyington Field" (two runways, the fighter strip is dented in the middle, the bomber strip is bulged), a drainage system that keeps the runways from being flooded, and some horticultural stuff that I'll use for mass deployment or very large vegetation sets.
I'll post some progress screenshots now and then in this thread.
Cheers,
Mark
two years ago - while working on the Solomon 1943 scenario and other projects - I made a fictive, primitve little island where I freely could test new (to me) scenery design methods without penetrating existing scenery designs. The scenery evolved more and more though, and about half a year or so I decided to make it a spin off of the Solomons.
To give that scenery a sense and name I called it JFAR 1944 - Joint Forces Air Race 1944. It is assumed that this is a rear airfield, which is used as transit point between Espiritu Santo and Guadalcanal and is located at an exisiting island group half way in between, replacing an exisiting island (I did that because of real weather conditions, which are prominent over islands in the tropics).
The air race thing came into my mind because the scenery is built for low level flying with a lot of eye candy around the shores - historically I figured that it was used by all forces (hence joint forces) and, because of the boring duty, the pilots set up a race course around the airfield and challenge each other as well as those who are in transit to have some rat racing fun around the airfield.
It is a completely fictive, and everything designed manually - from the mesh to the hand painted photoreal ground textures. Many landscape objects like cliffs, rocks, hills or mountains are designed an 3dsmax. With the next big Solomon update in mind - which will incorporate the techniques I worked out for JFAR - I also designed a huge load of replacement or new scenery objects.
The scenery is maybe at 70% of development, possibly three more months to go. Careful guess of course.
Most probably it will be P3D only, because of native P3D objects as well as a terrain design that needs the hardware tesselation of P3D. I also don't think it would run well on FSX because of the massive complexitivity.
Right now I work on the sloped runways of "Boyington Field" (two runways, the fighter strip is dented in the middle, the bomber strip is bulged), a drainage system that keeps the runways from being flooded, and some horticultural stuff that I'll use for mass deployment or very large vegetation sets.
I'll post some progress screenshots now and then in this thread.
Cheers,
Mark
(it's much more accurate, of course):
