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[WIP] Solomon 1943 V.2.0

Ondonga / New Georgia

Thanks for the motivating words! :ernae:
So this is the last airfield I'll make for this release. Here's a few impressions from the early development, but the rest will come fast.
I made a few new GMAX objects objects, among them a decent radio / signal installation with a short wave wire dipole antenna and some "real" US WW2 radio eqipment.
But what do I write, here's a few shots:



1. The VF-17 Jolly Rogers scoreboard - also the "real" thing from a photo I found on the net. I need to learn to make some good humans in GMAX, but that is really sort of an art which is not easily mastered, at least by me.

1-ondonga-VF-17-scoreboard.jpg





2. The VF-17 camp area


1-ondonga-VF-17-camp.jpg



3. The radio tent mentioned above (tent is by MCDesigns, rest by me)

1-ondonga-VF-17-new-radiotent.jpg



4. The new tower made by MCDesigns, populated with crew members now (there will be a lot more objects around, looks a bit bare in the moment).

1-ondonga-VF-17-tower-radiotent.jpg


5. Ira Kepford / VF-17 starting from Ondonga early in the morning. Autogen control work has to be done, as well as populating the airfield of course. The area to the right of the airfield will be the construction site for the second runway - with road rollers, road graders, CAT D7 bulldozers and so on. I'm on that stuff in GMAX right now! That scenery needs these type of objects, since these airfields were huge constructions sites fom the beginning to the end.

1-ondonga-ira-kepford-starting.jpg





Cheers,
Mark
 
Wow! ;)

Seriously, looking great! I really love having period airfields to fly from. Thanks for all of your hard work you guys put into this.
 
Thanks for the link, Micheal! There's a nice side-view which may help. My findings on decent textures for the construction equipment were a bit meager so far.

Cheers,
Mark
 
A few WIP shots. I made new revetments in GMAX which are bump mapped and have wooden walls on the inside (I have seen that on photos). A few minor corrections on them as well as variations are still to be made. I also made custom vegetation so the airfield looks more like being cut out of the jungle. Last but not least, some fortified positions were constructed in GMAX to house AAA guns or similar things.
But it's coming close to the end. Using the bglscan and mdlscan tool - which is highly useful if you know how to use it and have a decent workflow for corrections - I'm about 80% through the correction process. There were some 600 errors in the scenery which come mainly from a hdd crash I had about a year ago that produced a mismatch between my libraries and object bgls. The nice thing about bglscan is that it gives you some total numbers of your scenery. In it's current state the Solomon scenario has 10006 (yes 10k) placed objects and 3644 effects, spread over 698 Islands (including Rabaul and the Green Island group).

Well, let's see what we have for christmas...

Cheers,
Mark

1-ondonga-new-revetments.jpg


1-ondonga-new-revetments2.jpg


1-ondonga-90mm-AAA.jpg
 
You definitely get a medal for persistence at the very least. ;) Those shots look great, but were you nuked in the second photo, or is that BOB's shadow? :)

BTW, the new vegetation does give it more of a jungle feel. Nice.
 
Looking fantastic Mark, Looks like I will be flying my F4U Corsair quite a bit. Can't wait to give'm a try.
 
Sundog said:
You definitely get a medal for persistence at the very least. ;) Those shots look great, but were you nuked in the second photo, or is that BOB's shadow? :)

BTW, the new vegetation does give it more of a jungle feel. Nice.
Click to expand...

Hehe, nuked. Yes that's ORBX Bob's shadow. Next to the Aerosoft Design tool one of the most useful little in-sim design helpers.


Thanks,
Mark
 
heh, p-61 or Sukhoi. doesnt matter to me. either way this scenery is looking fantastic and a definate must have as a home base..
Pam
 
The new improvements look awesome Mark! If you look at the first image with the new vegetation, I can see the block shadows from the new trees. In the material properties in Gmax, make sure you turn shadows off on the new vegetation, it will eliminate those.
 
This going to be one awesome add-on I just can't stop. Drooling. Imagine squadrons of axis and allied flying the SLOT looking for the enemy to get into a huge fur ball.
 
MCDesigns said:
The new improvements look awesome Mark! If you look at the first image with the new vegetation, I can see the block shadows from the new trees. In the material properties in Gmax, make sure you turn shadows off on the new vegetation, it will eliminate those.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip, Michael. I thought I took care of that.
Unfortunatly, the default autogen vegetation of FSX / P3D is shadowed, so in order to keep these unsightly effects off the visible ground scenery one has to make custom objects.
I'll have a look at them again, I wanted to put some more lush green colored vegetation in them anyways (the custom objects you see now are a bit on the bright side and stand out too much compared to the surrounding autogen tropical rainforest).

Michael, your scenery objects also look great, by the way. Without those the Solomons would only look half as good.

Cheers,
Mark
 
MudMarine said:
This going to be one awesome add-on I just can't stop. Drooling. Imagine squadrons of axis and allied flying the SLOT looking for the enemy to get into a huge fur ball.
Click to expand...

Well, technically, speaking of the sim, that might be not so far away. There is an ominous posting from one of Lockheed's staff members that says that P3D will incorporate an own weapon subsystem in the next version. My hopes are high, needless to say.
As for the Solomons, the scenery design work itself is frozen now. I'm eliminating the error output of bglscan now and have a look at all the airfields to make sure they look as intended. That's a major task, if you look at the numbers.

Cheers,
Mark
 
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