Those watching John's development of the JP4 and 5 for FSX/P3D may have seen that I'm trying to put together Finningley in a config appropriate for the 1980s/90s, when 6FTS ran JPs in the low-level navigator training role.

In P3Dv4.5 I had the airfield working well as EGCN, overlaying the stock airport, but I couldn't get it to work as well in FSX, so I decided to rename the airfield to its original EGXI, and delete the stock airport. That worked brilliantly for FSX, but the P3Dv4 version kind of fell apart at that point! I'm using Orbx England (not True Earth), and the removal of the stock airport has allowed some strange things to happen with the terrain elevation and penetration by autogen trees (see the picture). Yes, there is a proper Airport Background (Flatten, Mask Classmap, Exclude Autogen). On top of that are exclusion rectangles set to exclude all (see the ADE 1.76 screenshot). Yet the trees are all over the place and the airfield is anything but flat!

I've Googled the problem, and scoured FSDeveloper and the Orbx support forums. I've made sure there are no other versions of EGCN or EGXI interfering (Just Flight Global Traffic is a little tinker for injecting its own AFCADs!). If anyone has encountered and cured this problem, I'd be grateful to know how you did it!

Tim

Hi Tim,

You can have a look at the terrain.cfg and see if your entries look like this. I know that every time FTX/ORBX central runs it changes the ExcludeAutogen=Yes to a No. I'm not sure about the FlattenMode though.

Sorry, it's all I got.

Cheers,

Darren



// Airport Backgrounds (FSX) - ExcludeAutoGen
[Texture.264]
Name=Airport_Backgrounds_ExcludeAutoGen
Color=FFFFFF00
guid={6C0C6528-5CF1-483A-A586-2C905CF2757E}
FlattenMode=none
LandClassRemapType=none
ExcludeAutogen=Yes
RenderToTexture=No
RenderPriority=200000
Water=No

// Airport Backgrounds (FSX) - Flatten + MaskClassMap
[Texture.265]
Name=Airport_Backgrounds_Flatten_MaskClassMap
Color=FFFFFF00
guid={5A7F944C-3D79-4E0C-82F5-04844E5DC653}
FlattenMode=flat
FlattenPriority=51000
LandClassRemapType=airport
ExcludeAutogen=Yes
RenderToTexture=No
RenderPriority=50000
Water=No

// Airport Backgrounds (FSX) - Flatten
[Texture.266]
Name=Airport_Backgrounds_Flatten
Color=FFFFFF00
guid={47D48287-3ADE-4FC5-8BEC-B6B36901E612}
FlattenMode=flat
FlattenPriority=51000
LandClassRemapType=none
ExcludeAutogen=Yes
RenderToTexture=No
RenderPriority=200000
Water=No

// Airport Backgrounds (FSX) - MaskClassMap
[Texture.267]
Name=Airport_Backgrounds_MaskClassMap
Color=FFFFFF00
guid={1F2BAAB1-4132-416E-8F6F-28ABE79CD60B}
FlattenMode=none
LandClassRemapType=airport
ExcludeAutogen=Yes
RenderToTexture=No
RenderPriority=50000
Water=No

Thanks Darren. Yes, I came across a reference to terrain.cfg in this context after I wrote that post, but the reference didn’t explain what was going wrong. I’ll have a look at that a bit later, and see whether it might be at least part of the issue.

OK Darren, I've looked at it. In fact the Texture 265 entry - Flatten+MaskClassMap should NOT have the entry ExcludeAutogen=Yes. It should (and does) read NO; that's how it's written in the vanilla FSX Terrain.cfg, and that makes sense to me - that's why ExcludeAutogen is a separate instruction in Texture 264, and that correctly is annotated YES. There is no entry for Flatten+MaskClassMap+ExcludeAutogen. Why not, I've no idea, but that's how MS wrote it in FSX. Somewhere there must be an instruction that allows both 264 and 265 to operate at the same time.

While I think the answer may well lie in the terrain.cfg file, I don't think there's anything wrong with these entries in my installation.

To put this to bed after I pulled an all-nighter to try and sort this out, it would seem there was some corruption somewhere in the CVX file of the airfield - and one that persisted even after deleting the CVX and creating a new one! The practical answer was to start from scratch for a version of the airfield that fits in with Orbx England. That's a bigger task than I'd hoped! Especially as Orbx England isn't that accurate, so some liberties have to be taken with the layout, particularly in the domestic site.

So it looks like there will be three versions of Finningley: FSX, P3Dv4, and P3Dv4/Orbx.

Well done, that's brilliant. Again, let me know if you need any models.

John

Cheers John. I should be able to let you have a look at these tomorrow for comment as and when you get round to it, although there are still a few small issues I know about. I’ll put them on my Dropbox so you can download them at your leisure. Once you’ve had a look, if you think any of your models would be useful, please let me know. I’ve also put together a couple of traffic files so that there’s more going on than just the Dominies (there’s an existing traffic file for them). I converted the JBS Jetstream to P3D and added the CFS Scampton colour scheme to the converted MAIW MGAI Tucanos to flesh it out a bit, but I accept that, without specific permission, they’re for my use only!

Thanks for that Tim. I have 17 T.5's operating out of Linton-on-Ouse at the moment and I'm just about to paint up 23 T.3A's to go with them. Once I've done that I'll switch to the 17 Finningley T.5B's and let you have a preliminary pack of those aircraft to play with once they are done.

Ok John. I’ll PM you with a link when I’ve got something for you.

Images of the Orbx-compatible P3Dv4 version:

Some latest P3D pics with John's hangars and JPs. The ugly Orbx semi-photoreal background can be seen in some of the pics (goodness knows why it's red-brown in the centre of the field!) and I'm trying to work out how to obscure it.









and the tower in progress:

The result of working till 5am today!

Latest pictures of Finningley in FSX. This installation has Orbx Global Base (which contributes the somewhat ugly airfield background) and Rex Worldwide Airports (which adds the airfield hard surface textures). I know Finningley isn't the sexiest of subjects, but in the late 80s/early 90s it was the second-busiest airfield in UK after London Heathrow, and with 6 resident types there was always something interesting to watch. Obviously, it fits in with John's lovely JPs, but all the other types are available as AI (though you may need to convert some of them). I hope to have a basic version fit to release within a couple of weeks, but I will continue to develop it as time goes on.

Tower/Fire section:



Looking across the airfield looking to the south:



JPs and Dominies on the main pan.



Jetstreams, Bulldog and Chipmunk inside one of John's hangars. Yes, I know about the Jetstream's tail going through the wall!



Overview of the northern half of the airfield.



Final approach to 20.



Overview from the east.

Looking really good Tim. I can't wait to add this and Johns JPs to my retro set up.

Cool project!

Thanks guys!

Just a post to let you know it's still on the way! I'm incredibly busy at work, and also trying to complete something called the Tour of Sufferlandria (cyclists will know what this is) this week.

I thought I'd better post to say that this project is not abandoned, but a lot of work was lost in two(!) separate SSD failures in the last 6 months. Despite no dedicated ground poly, and because of my over-ambitious use of SketchUp to create buildings that ended up too complex and memory-heavy (a couple of buildings, once textured, ended up over 100mb each!), the project as built was crashing P3D after a few minutes. The work involved and the demoralising effect of having created work that was in effect useless - and then lost - meant that I was reluctant to jump back on that bandwagon. However, I'm aware that people have been looking for a 80s/90s Finningley for P3D to go with John's JPs, and I'm acutely aware that I've made promises I haven't been able to keep. I will resurrect it shortly and present something usable while I work out how to achieve the standards I'd like to reach!

Wow - what a pity! I empathize with you...
Hope you can get all sorted out to your full satisfaction.

I've decided to pay for extra storage on OneDrive to avoid the problems of computer crashes in future! I had though that with two main desktops running my stuff I'd be safe, but I didn't do a good enough job of duplicating my projects after recovering from the first failure. The result of that was that I didn't appreciate what I lost in the first crash until the second (in the other computer) revealed that my housekeeping was not up to scratch. Funnily enough, someone asked about Iwakuni recently which reminded me that I had lost my original work on that. That was just before the second crash a couple of weeks ago. That one not only lost a lot of FS work, but (more important to me) a lot of my music work which I'd only recently transferred from iDrive as I wean myself off Macs!

Bloody hate computers, me.