Military AI Works

Some of you may have seen this in another topic, but I started to look at KECG in connection with something else and got interested in the unique buildings there - which isn't ideal in a P3D/FSX context, as standardised buildings make life easy! However, it's a small airfield and it's allowed me to work on some techniques I need to refine for KNIP and others that I'm working on.

I have absolutely no idea how many people are interested in the USCG airfields, but I rather like the kind-of-backwater feel of them, and several flightplan developers over the years have given us native USCG flightplans, and many others have used these airfields to park aircraft away from homebase for a while, so they do see a fair bit of traffic. KECG even had a bit of a rescue scenario developed for FS9, with a sinking ship and all, though I don't know if a challenge was created to use it.

Anyway, here are some progress shots. Is this place of any interest to the remaining hardcore non-MSFS users?

Tim,
As you well suspect, I would be very interested in an FS9 version but I am guessing that this will not happen. Lovely work though.

Tim
I would be very interested in an FSX version KECG. Keep up the good work.

Regard Paul Day.

Would love to see it in P3Dv4

The screenshots are from P3Dv5.3. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t work in v4.5. I frankly doubt I could get it to run acceptably in FSX. I may try, but this will be a big file (probably 200mb) using 4k texture sheets as built, so it would need some significant work to make it compatible with FSX. I just don’t see any chance of it working in FS9, Steve, I’m afraid!

It’s so big because I’m trying out some techniques applicable to the Old Sarum museum project I’ve talked about, really just to see if I can make them work in P3D. It’s just another way of putting off learning Blender! I suspect I won’t be able to put it off for much longer, particularly if I want to see any of this work in MSFS (which I do).

As an example, that hangar is currently 237mb. A lot of that is down to the fact I’m using a photo ground tile to work on so that the buildings in this group will be in the right place relative to each other, and that tile won’t be in the sim (you can see I already have a photoreal background for the airfield) but the PBR textures I’m using (which don’t show in SketchUp) are big!

TimC340 wrote: ↑19 Jun 2022, 09:54 I just don’t see any chance of it working in FS9, Steve, I’m afraid!

Don't be afraid, Tim. I kinda accepted it.

That hangar group is looking like it’ll be 30mb or less; the photo ground tile I’m using for alignment is 234mb! As a comparison, the entire airfield photo background is about 60mb at LOD 18! So maybe it won’t work out quite as huge as I thought.

Looks really nice Tim. Would love to have a FSX version if that's possible.

Having a go at the airship sheds at Weeksville, which is just a couple of miles from KECG and they somewhat dominate the skyline to the southeast. Sadly, the wooden one (the largest wooden structure in the world at the time) was lost to fire in 1995, along with the Airship Industries aircraft stored inside. Only the concrete door supports remain, and they can be seen in the overall untextured image from within Sketchup.





The main hangar at ECG has gained some internal structure (may not be very visible after Imgur and the forum has compressed the image!)...





Yes, I know I'm working on too many projects at once! However, I get bored if I stick to one project at a time, so I do like to drop them and pick them up as my interest waxes and wanes. One day I'll get some of this stuff out!

Weeksville airship hangar in place.