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Aircraft shade/shelters

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delta_lima
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Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by delta_lima »

Hello,

Wondering where the white sun shade/shelters seen at some bases such as Yuma, etc. are located.

Looking to do some tweaking for a more retro scenario, and if they were located in one bgl I could remove/add back as required, that'd be great.

I experimented by removing the 4 aircraft shelter bgls I could find in both NA and Global libraries, but they're still there. Hoping they're not baked in permanently to their respective air bases, though I could understand why if the focus is current period only.

If so, and for future versions if those shelters could be their own bgl, you'd enable the creation of more retro scenarios. Plus I'm guessing, make a slight FPS-saving opportunity for some.

Not a complaint - just a questions/suggestion. I love the sceneries I've seen so far - outstanding work.

thanks,

DL
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Firebird
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by Firebird »

I think that you haven't quite grasped the way the lib system works.
Objects are combined into a lib with objects of a similar subject.

Once an object bgl is loaded into an active folder then any scenery that is loaded AFTER the object bgl on FS startup can call an object from that lib.

The objects are not reliant upon any scenery. You can add them objects to any scenery with any number of scenery modification proggies, like ADE, and the position and the location of the object are hard coded in the scenery bgl.

So in answer to your question, the objects are not baked into the scenery BUT their positioning and location are because the scenery builder wanted them there.
You can remove any object you like from a scenery, or add any, by modifying the relevant scenery bgl using a tool that is designed for adding or removing objects.

HOWEVER, some designers prefer to add objects into a separate bgl for a particular scenery. In this case they do not call the global libs. There are many reasons why they might do this but the primary one is frame rate. If you have one object placed 60 times then it will have 60 draw calls to texture the objects slowing things down. If however, you build a lib which places all 60 objects in one go you can make it do only one draw call and therefore having better frame rates. I am reliably informed.
The common examples of this are HAS's, Woods, and flight line shelters.

I hope that I have explained this simply enough.
Steve
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by delta_lima »

Thanks,

Sounds like I’d need to remove them from the afcad of each airfield manually in ADE then.

My hope was that by removing them out of a central location, then it wouldn't matter that there was a call to them from a few hundred placement instances.

Thanks all the same. The packs are superb.
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by Greg »

Be advised that if you modify an airfield from Matrix, it is best to put that modification in a scenery folder separate from your Matrix setup and then disable the original airfield in Matrix on the "Settings" tab.

This way, you don't risk your modification being overwritten with a region update.
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by delta_lima »

Hi,

Am really thankful for the recent batch of "older/retro" models (F-4, A-4, T-34, P-2, Atlantique, etc.) that Henk et al have converted and released - my deepest thanks to the MAIW crew for attention to this period of aircraft.

So as part of the intent to create a number of "retro-adjusted" airfields based on the basic existing "modern" airfields, I loaded up my first project - KNPA NAS Pensacola - into ADE v1.76. The intent was to do a simple exercise - delete the modern shade-style shelters.

My problem is that in ADE, I couldn't "see" the shelters. Only the parking spots. So where are these shelters specified and placed, so I can delete them? It's my first attempt editing an AFCAD for P3Dv4.5, but I've done similiar small edits (adding parking, removing structures) for FS9 and FSX in the past.

thanks in advance, and sorry for the elementary question - I admit I'm still not great at this.

dl
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by Firebird »

I haven't checked but what I am about to describe is what is most likely but you will need to check.

If you load a scenery up into ADE, and you have not added all the libs that are used into the \library Object Manager, then instead of little pics of the objects appearing all you get is a black square.

If you make any change whatsoever to the afcad the all the scenery objects that are black squares will be automatically removed.

So what scenery makers that use ADE do is split the afcad from the scenery. So what you end up with is two files, for example for Linton you get a 'AF2_EGXU.bgl' and a 'AF2_EGXU_OBJ.BGL'

The advantage here is that any user can make changes to the make up of parking spots can be made by the users WITHOUT losing any objects as they are not loaded when changes are made.

OK that is the layout. The answer to your question is this. IF a scenery is split as described then after you load the afcad into ADE and then select 'File' > 'Import Bgl' and select the OBJ bgl.
This has the effect of overlaying the objects on top of the afcad.

You can then make whatever changes you want and save the files in split mode again.

*WARNING*
It may be obvious but I will state it any way.
If you follow this procedure and you get any black squares because of unknown objects you must stop and add the required libs to the LOM, or you will lose those objects as well as the ones you want to lose when you save the OBJ file.

Hopefully this makes sense, and explains why we do what we do.
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by delta_lima »

Hi - thanks. Am at work now, but can mostly visualize what you're asking. No, I didn't load the obj bgl, so that looks like my issue. So load the AFCAD, then the OBJ bgl. And for KNPA, I recall indeed there being those two files.

I'm glad you posted the last paragraph, because while I get the gist of it, I'm not sure what you mean by LOM.

I'll bear that warning in mind, though, although I'm looking to only remove certain object placements, not actually kill the object itself in any of the libraries.

Although as I initially asked at the start of the thread, if there was an easy way to edit the master object library, or even a particular scenery's object library and remove the shade object altogether and "upstream" of the AFCAD, I'd consider that ideal, as it'd simply not be present in the AFCAD nor require editting of the AFCAD to delete them. Because in an ideal world, I'd want to remove them from any field that has them.

Unless I've misunderstood - which is likely ... :)

Anyway, for now, if I have to do this one field at a time, and I think loading the AFCAD and that associated obj .bgl should get me going.

Thx!

dl
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by Firebird »

As I mentioned at the top of the post, the LOM is the Library Object Manager in ADE.

I would never, ever remove an object from a master library. You never know what other scenery you will affect in the future.
The master libs are one of the first things to load in the sim and are available to all sceneries.

You can remove objects from libs but to do that, safely, you must start keeping local copies and if you fail to keep track of what you have removed from where then you can get yourself in a right mess with duplicate libs.
So because of that I won't go into it Far better to just remove the objects from the scenery so they are not called. It is cleaner tidier and far less can go wrong later on.

I say this purely because you are going down the route of altering scenery objects, so as you are making changes somewhere, I think it is better to learn the safer, cleaner option. It also has the added attraction of making you add libs to your own LOM so that eventually you will hopefully never see a black square in ADE.

Of course another way to get rid of the covers is to create one or more excludes to remove the objects but you may end up removing things like fire extinguishers, and ground markings.

I would say that the thing to do, as this is your first one is to try the procedure I suggested.
One, you will learn more about the procedure and become confident in it and two, the chances are that if you are going that retro then you would probably have to make other object changes, e.g buildings, as well.
in rare cases, you may even decide to take the raw afcad and add objects to that to create a new OBJ file. In which case, making sure your LOM is up to speed will be a very useful exercise.
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by delta_lima »

Thanks FB.

Yeah, the main "period" I like to fly in 60s-70s, so at a simplistic level, deleting from a master object file sounds ideal, as even when I fly in a later period, I'd be happy if I never saw the shades ever again.

But if the bigger point is potentially screwing up something else, than best not to go that route. So fair comment - I'll try one airfield at a time. I'd likely only be 7-8 US airfields total anyway, if that, that I frequent enough to warrant the effort, so I'll proceed down that route accordingly. "Retro-ing" UK airfields by just substituting the newly released Hawk and Provost jets is about all I'd need to take those airfields back in time 30 or so years, so no I'm not planning any edits for those aerodromes.

Will advise if I have issues.

thanks,

dl
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Re: Aircraft shade/shelters

Post by delta_lima »

Hi - I want to take another stab at this. Started picking them out of one or two airfields only to discover them in a bunch more.

I want to remove these shelters for good - on a global objects level. Meaning yes, I am aware that deleting these from the MAIW global libraries will remove them from any scenery that calls for them. And that's fine, because that's precisely what I want.

So I've gone into the global objects folders/scenery - and found 3 bgls and 3 xmls that referred to shelters. Deleting those did nothing - so please advise where the temporary white shades (and their supporting frames, if they're different files) are located.

Many thanks in advance.

dl

EDIT - sorted. Found all the stray files - looks like they're gone all 'round. Hooray - classic/retro AI, here we (sort of) come ... :)
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