Greg's P3D World

[Greg]

While I haven't got much flightsim time these days to do anything else but administrate this fantastic website, from time to time I manage to squeeze in a few MAIW package conversions. It takes a helluva lot of time to get things converted to P3D if you want to do it properly, but the result is simply fabulous.

I'll post my progress here with some screenshots, taken directly from P3D and then cropped. Never mind the sequence of the packs as I started converting the very first ones and then decided to go in reverse chronological order to avoid double work.

If you're interested, I may do a dev blog about my conversion steps, taking the latest Misawa package as an example. It's quite simple once you have the right tools and get the hang of it, except the AFD's and scenery which are a bit of work.

I hope you'll enjoy them. If you want a larger version of the images you can right-click them and open in a new tab.

USAF Boeing E3



RNAS Culdrose



Pratica di Mare Airshow



Randolph AFB. The light and shadows in P3D are a major step-up from FS9/FSX!





Hellenic Army Helicopters





NS Norfolk Hawks



AMC Heavies: C-5A's



Carolina Hawks

[zizou]

Hi Greg,

Yes, it will be much appreciated. I'm trying to convert MAIW EBBL scenery but scenery objects are not showing up in P3D.
I'm looking forwar how you are converting the sceneries.

Regards

Xav

[Victory103]

Great shots, looking over specs for my next gaming laptop in order to run P3D now that many of my fav payware models will run on it. Not looking forward to moving all the MAIW packs over. I've got everything set in FSX, though still tweaking here and there.

[gsnde]

Most likely we would find that - combining what people have done in private so far - much of the MAIW work is converted to FSX already...

[MIKE JG]

Great idea Greg. It's nice to see so many models being able to be used in P3D! That's great for the future!

[gsnde]

Even the ones (props in front of clouds and scenery) that were bad in FSX work well.
The most irritating AI issue I have is that the B-52 has its lights floating around....

From mobile hence short

[relfel66]

Is there any guides for converting scenery to p3d/fsx?

[Greg]

No not really. Mind that for FSX, the FS9 scenery should work out of the box. All that is needed most of the time is a "background poly" that excludes autogen on and around the field as FS9 excludes don't work in FSX. For P3D however, there's the additional complication that FS9 scenery bgl's aren't recognised (LM gave up backward compatibility recently) so you need to convert them with ModelConverterX.

I'll try to finish a developer blog about my method this weekend or the next one at the latest. At the same time, we (well... Martin mostly ) are working on packages that should greatly reduce the amount of bgl's that need conversion, but more on that later.

[John Young]

Well done Greg, this is a great step forward.

John

[campbeme]

Greg, did you manage to stop the decals shimmering on JS scenery, when doing this conversion. That is the part that I always stalled on when converting?

[Greg]

Not sure mate. I haven't noticed any shimmering but maybe I just didn't pay attention. I also convert all scenery textures to dds with mips, so maybe the mips do the trick?

[MIKE JG]

So Greg, just so I'm clear, the scenery textures for P3D should be in dds format??

[Greg]

BMP files still work, but I have taken the habit of converting all textures to P3D native standards: DDS DXT5 with mipmaps. It should give a small performance boost as BMP textures need to be flipped an mirrored by the engine, but I can't say that I have noticed a real improvement. The actual reason I convert all my textures is because

1. many 3rd party scenery textures aren't mipped so I need to change them anyway,
2. LM has already given up backward compatibility on SCASM scenery files, so I try to be prepared for when they give up on BMP files and
3. my OCD can't stand the mix of BMP and DDS files.

I run a batch script for ImageTools so it only takes a few seconds.

[gsnde]

Same applies for FSX.

[MIKE JG]

Cool thanks.

[Greg]

A couple more. Some from non-MAIW packs or updates. Yes it takes a bit of effort to get things working properly in P3D, but I hope these screenshots give you an idea of what the result can look like. Bring on P3D v4!

Italian Air Force Revised



St. Pete-Clearwater



Andrews AFB with a sneaky shot of the FAIB VC-25



NAS Patuxent River



NAS Jacksonville with the old and the new



Sigonella AB

[MIKE JG]

Looking good there Greg. What is the default terrain mesh value for P3D?? Just curious.

[Greg]

Thanks Mike.

I'm quite certain the terrain mesh resolution is still exactly the same as FSX (USA 38m / Europe, Mexico, Canada, 76m /rest of world varies).

However, P3D adds tessellation to terrain which is calculated by the GPU and makes terrain smoother by adding points.

[MIKE JG]

Cool thanks.

[Christopher Barbas]

Hi Greg,

2 questions about your screenshots from the "Hellenic Army Helicopters" package,

1st - why your Apache screenshots look OK and my helis are washed out, are those textures from the package, have you edit them, are they other textures?

2nd - did you experience cockpit transparency issues with Apache at P3D?


For the 1st, I have repaint them from scratch and I am using my repaints now because the original from package was looking terrible at P3D, I dont know why!
For the 2nd, the problem was gone by using the repaints I made!


Thanks