1st attempt at a afcad properly

[james]

hey guys gonna think about doing a proper afcad for i dunno yet and was wondering any hints or tips using afcad221. Also iv decided to pass it on to someone else to do the scenery for it if its any good or tweak it if they like. Whats the easiest airport to start off with for a beginner

[DaleRFU]

Hi James

I use AFCAD221 aswell, I started by trying to do a transports or large aircraft bases e.g waddington and brize because they dont have has sites and are less complex well i found them to be less complex to say some where like marham or coningsby.

Or you could just make you own base to get used to how things work i also did that and i still doand i have been making AFCAD's for a few years now.

Also i use the aircraft nodes as guides when i am make circular pans. As you can set the diameter of the parking spot and creat a serface around it and you can get a nice circular area. that is what i use, dont know if there is another way to get a perfectly circular area.

Using google earth or wikimaps is good to see layouts of bases and then you can try and replecate it as good as you can. Wikimaps has a distance calcuator so you can measure the width of the taxiways etc....

Serach the airfeild on google to find out the runway lenghts and that helps a lot when buiding places. other wise if the runway is too big or to small it can affect the rest of the airfeild. that is what i found out fo me personally.

Hope that helps

Regards

Dale

[maddog65]

Once you get the hang of AFCAD give ADE9x a try. You can do so much more with it.

[f4nutter]

i use ADE9x every time, i find it easier than AFCAD221 now.

[LEBTowerGuy]

I have to agree with Ray, I use ADE9 more than I ever used AFCAD, mostly since I can import a background image and add objects all in one place. Takes a lot of the guess work out of building airport backgrounds. Also it seems that the interface is very similar.

[MIKE JG]

ADE9 is so slow though.......drives me insane. I usually start with ADE9 and go back to AFCAD to do the detailing work.

[campbeme]

I'm a big fan of ADE9, but I agree with Mike mine gets slower the longer I'm on it. I use it to tell when to stop playing and go to bed.... Lol. Best AFD proggy out there though.

Mark

[BadPvtDan]

ADE rocks. It never gets slow on my machine. I find the detail work much easier due to the helper shapes! Need a 30 by 30 square? Easy to do!

[james]

iv herd with ADE9 you can import a reasonable quality google earth view of the airport and then trace over the taxiways and hard standing and stuff with the image in the background

[LEBTowerGuy]

iv herd with ADE9 you can import a reasonable quality google earth view of the airport and then trace over the taxiways and hard standing and stuff with the image in the background

That's what I do. It helps a lot when trying to place parking, taxiways, and other little details about the airport. As far as speeding up ADE, I have found that if you start to draw a taxiway, then hit escape before releasing the mouse, it will speed up a bit. It does leave a large amount of nodes laying around, but those are easy to clean up with the fault finder, or in AFCAD.

[Blank Fang]

I'm a big fan of ADE9, but I agree with Mike mine gets slower the longer I'm on it. I use it to tell when to stop playing and go to bed.... Lol. Best AFD proggy out there though.
Mark

Noted that when i decide not to show the background image ADE9 becomes fast again! Seems to be a issue of background image consuming memory. Its easy to switch the image on and off.
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Willy

[EHAM]

Noted that when i decide not to show the background image ADE9 becomes fast again! Seems to be a issue of background image consuming memory. Its easy to switch the image on and off.

That's right, the background image is the only thing that slows down ADE. I therefore recommend to keep the file size of the background image as low as possible (using GIF for example). If you're using Google Maps as a background, you can always watch the details in your internet browser and then match them with the low quality background image in ADE.

[james]

Is ADE9 free and where do i download it

[f4nutter]

right here james http://www.interkultur.de/gossmann/fsx/ade.php

[james]

how do i add a background image like a google maps image

[campbeme]

how do i add a background image like a google maps image

James,

ADE is complicated at first you will be much better off reading the very easy to follow operating instructions, and tutorials it supplies.

Mark

[james]

iv decided to update Aalborg airport's afcad as a request from a friend. Iv got it up on the screen and google maps whats the next step to get the google maps image to ade9 as iv read the turtorial and found it confusing

[james]

if its any good id allow someone to do scenery and then incluse it in a MAIW package