Military AI Works

John Dutton has come up with an interesting idea located here:

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_p ... ?TID=22390

It is an easy way to place excludes for those familier with Instant Scenery, and I suppose EZ-Scenery. If you regularly read this thread, then I suspect this means you!

Ron

These are not actually "exclude rectangles".

They are, in fact, physical objects as evidenced by his warning that if you make them too tall, they will cast shadows. What's being done is you are placing an "invisible box" over some object in the scenery to hide it from view rather than prevent the object from being rendered at all.

Just ensuring that things are clear.


Ford

---------
Personally, and since I work only in FSX, I find AFX and SBuilderX make exclusion rectangles quite easily. Unfortunately, AFX's exclude feature will not work with FS9 but there is an SBuilder version for FS9 that is pretty easy to use also.

Good to have clarification, as this is way outside my comfort zone.

Ron

Sorry to disagree but AFX exclusions work for me in fs9.


Paul

I ALSO HAVE TO SAY AFX WORKS FINE FOR MY FS9 TOO.

I have had mixed success with AFX and excludes. It would not work in my latest scenery so I had to do it manually. I know gf has worked for me in the past, though.

excludes work in afx for me as well but it seems that if you open the file with afcad you lose the excludes. and i cannot find where afx saves them.

djnocturnal wrote:excludes work in afx for me as well but it seems that if you open the file with afcad you lose the excludes. and i cannot find where afx saves them.

Good point. I stand corrected..... To be safe, I think that once an afcad/airport is made or modified using AFX, you should to stay with it(AFX) or you might/can lose things AFX made if you open it again with AFCAD. (I know I had trouble with fences, excludes and a few other things when trying AFX & FS9 together a while back... memory problems I guess.)

Sorry about that.

As far as my experience goes with FSX afcad/airport designs, if you make or modify an afcad/airport in ADE, AFX or with FSX Planner, designers should stick with that design program for that afcad/airport as each program writes the file header differently. So, for example, if you create and save an afcad/airport in ADE and then re-open it in AFX, you could lose things you included or they simply don't work correctly.

this has happend to me, i used AFX to modernise an airport all was fine, then i used afcad221 to change parking space size's (its faster in 221) and when i went back to the airfield all the default trees n bushes were all back ?. it seems 221 puts all the auto gen stuff back in the afcad's ?. hope this helps someone

Sorry Ford did'ntmean to start something there

Paul

paul64 wrote:Sorry Ford did'ntmean to start something there
Paul

No, you have no need to apologize.

It's my fault for not limiting the scope of my comment.

Can I just stick my beak in here?
Being the author of the Exclusion Boxes, my idea was to have the facility to hide the odd tree or house that is showing up in FS9 without having to resort to making an Exclusion Rectangle, which as everyone knows is always orientated North to South and East to West. My exclusion boxes don't have to be orientated at all.
Personally I do not like placing either one large Exclusion Rectangle or lots of small ones unless they just cover the airfield. They usually delete something of the area surrounding the airfield.
I would appreciate any comments regarding the use of the Exclusion Boxes in FSX since at the moment it is not installed on my computer and won't be until I get fed up with FS9.

I do not use the invisible exclusion boxes any more (see below) for two reasons.

1. They are physical objects, if I remember correctly. As such, unless you turn off crash detection, you could crash without apparent reason if you don't remember where you stuck every one of these. Ex., hide a tree on a taxiway with one of these, don't visit for a while and forget that you hid the tree, run into it. The ensuing crash would be "without reason" until you remember what you did. I want to be able to find/see any object in my scenery design or any scenery I use.

2. It's my experience that rendering invisible textures takes more processing power than rendering "normal" textures. Consequently, with FSX being the hog that it is, I try not to add anything to its processing burden. This is less of an issue with more powerful harware.

That said, reason #1 is my primary reason for not using these any longer though I did use them when I learned of them.


I used this "design tool" for about six weeks, until I became fairly comfortable with SBuilderX and AFX's exclusion rectangles and reading/modifying/compiling xml files. Until then, I believe this did accomplish the desgner's goal - an easy to use solution.

I finally decided that, to be consistent, I had to go back and remove/redo the bgls I'd used or created with these invisible objects in various sceneries and replace them with "proper" exclusion rectangles.

I agree that using exclusion rectangles can appear to be both a bit graphically messy and something of a royal pain. (In FSX, for instance, identifying whether an object is autogen or a library object is key.) However, the processing for exclusion rectangles is seemingly only paid once, when the scenery first loads, rather than repeatedly as invisible boxes/objects come into view. Balance this against the lack of "neatness" in an afcad/airport design (in AFX,afcad, ADE, etc.) and, for me, the benefit of the exclusion rectangle seems to outweigh that of the exclusion box - at least for right now.

I will say that I think the invisible box solution is effective and innovative.
It's just not my cup of tea any more.
---
OOOPS. I do still use the boxes to hide the occasional (usually autogen) tree that is in the middle of a non-airport/afcad road near the airport. For this type of thing, this is quicker and easier than making a rectangle. The price is the "odd" bgl collection that isn't really associated with anything else - it's not a part of an airport or other location. It's being used to "correct" mismatches between my landclasses and roadway scenery(ies).