A few Retro Repaints

[TimC340]

Tim,

It sure is ETME. I am using photoscenery by MatthiasKNU, and that may be the cause. I will need to talk to him about it, and also check out the scenery from Flyawaysimulation. I will report back on this.

And there sure is no lake there in real life. The site of the former base is right to the west of the rail line on which I go to Hamburg every couple of months, just north of the town of Schleswig (I live in Flensburg north of there). And south of Schleswig you can actually see the main gate and the Tornado gate guardian of Schleswig/Jagel AB from the train.

Oh, and I should post a link to the scenery - it's HUGE and it's FREE - from Matthias:

https://www.fsxforum.de/viewtopic.php?f=51&t=19503

It covers not only Germany, but a real lot of real estate on the planet.

Jorgen

Yes, I'm aware of Matthias's project to create the whole world! He documents it over at FSDeveloper, and it is spectacular. However, his methods use automatic detection of surface features and will occasionally be in error. The lake is almost certainly one of them. Given his style of work, it's extremely unlikely he'll make any changes for one tiny location so you'll need to overlay his ground with something higher in the scenery stack.

It's unfortunate that the airfield is currently covered in photovoltaic panels - like so many Cold War defence facilities. Otherwise I'd suggest using an SBX-created background photoreal poly. That said, you could fairly simply create a new background by editing the SBX photo with a generic but believable grass texture in Photoshop, Affinity Photo or Gimp, and create a new background bgl. You could just apply a poly in ADE, but the textures available to you are dire.

Unfortunately, there aren't any tutorials I'm aware of that describe the process of creating airfield backgrounds in enough detail that a novice could have a go with a reasonable expectation of success. There are tutorials by Bill Womack, Soarfly, Austin Sass and others on YouTube, and a huge amount of help on FSDeveloper, but they all leave the reader/viewer to join several dots in the process on their own, and the techniques must perforce be extrapolated - not always intuitively - to cover any specific scenario. I'm only really now beginning to get a handle on it after many years of playing with scenery, and of course a lot of the well-known creators have moved on to MSFS so new advice for FSX/P3D isn't easy to come by.

There are (or were) several people here at MAIW who have actually done this stuff in the past, but as Manschy will confirm, I'm sure, if you're not doing it all the time, the skills are quickly lost!

If I get time (I stress the 'if'), I'll have a look at ETME and see if I can put something together that might help. I did quite a lot of work on German airfields for John's Typhoon project a few years ago, so I do have quite a lot of research material. ETME wasn't one of the airfields relevant to that project, but I did hoover up almost anything I could find about NATO airfields in Germany!

Edit: while I think about it, and I'm in the mood, do you have any idea of the parking allocation at ETME for the period you're interested in?

Edit 2: I confess I did have a bit of a look at it last night...

[Jorgen]

So here's what I did: as mentioned earlier, got Chris' and Menno's ETME from AVSIM.

I ran it through AIG's AFCAD Converter, loaded it into ADE and compiled it with the P3D v. 5 SDK.

IMNSHO it looks far better than the one from Flyawaysimulation, but the ***** lake is still there. The are some vehicles parked around the field, and at the north end of the runway there's actually a Tornado outside one of the shelters. And note the tower, which is not there in the Flyawaysimulation version.

So this one is a keeper, and now for the lake. First I will email Matthias and see if there's something he would be willing to do (I know he's working on updating Africa ATM), and if he's not willing or have the time I'll mess around a little with ADE, where it - as you said, Tim - is all too easy to loose your skills if you don't use them all the time.

Attached is a screenshot of the above-mentioned version -

Jorgen

[Jorgen]

Odd. Matthias checked his source data, and the (expletive deleted) lake does not come from there. He speculated it could be from the solar panels now installed on the site, but looking at it from above those would have to be decidedly odd, as it looks definitely lake-shaped.

Jorgen

[TimC340]

Try switching Matthias's stuff off in xml. A least you'll know where it comes from, even if you can't fix it just yet. I don't have time just now to prepare a replacement airfield background, but I may be able to after the Christmas madness is over.

[Jorgen]

Update - I flew over the field today at a VERY low level. And seeing this very close up, I really do believe now that what I see are the solar panels. I am in contact with Matthias about this.

I will try now to turn off the Schleswig-Holstein part of his photoscenery and see what happens.

Jorgen

[Jorgen]

Update - with the Schleswig-Holstein photoscenery turned off, the panels are gone. The airfield also looks much better, but the downside is that on the west side of the runway, where there should be nothing, there now are apartment buildings.

Tim, your offer about the replacement background is much appreciated - and yes, I am also pressed for time these days.

Would you require any of the files that I use - the originals and/or my converted ones?

Jorgen

[TimC340]

Ah, at least we have an answer! No, I don't think I need any files. I began the AFD I showed above from the stock airport, and although the runway was pretty close to reality the taxyways and dispersals were quite wrong. So, as you can see, I rebuilt all that. I'll have a look at Chris & Menno's scenery and see what libraries they used and try and use the same ones but with the buildings in the right place for the adjusted hard surfaces. The photo I used for the background in ADE is from Google Earth year 2000, and I think I have it at high enough quality to form the basis of a background in the sim. Let me see how I get on.