Simviation Forums

While I'm on the subject of Mt. St. Helens, can anyone out there who can create scenery special effects create the effect of the 1980 explosion?  Or can one create a pre-1980 summit cone in GMAX or some other modeling tool?  I'd like to be able to someday simulate flying around Mt. St Helens pre-1980 and to simulate flying around it during an eruptive cycle

I did a simple "steam" effects file a while back when it was blowing off steam recently.  I just took the M$ volcano effects file from the Hawaii one and modified the crap out of it and reset the location.  Mine is located using the FSGenesis terrain mesh though.

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board=paywareshots;action=display;num=1097445315

best,

................john

Could you mind explaining how you did it? I'd love to learn how.  Since I cannot afford the US Terrain Mesh from FSGenesis I'd like to utilize it on the default MS terrain mesh for FS9.

I live about an hour and a half away from the mountain, my hometown is  a mile away from KSHN (Sanderson Field, Shelton, WA) in the Airport ID list in FS2004.

I had a chance to fly in a helicopter (The Hoffstadt Bluffs Helicopter Tours one - see screenshots section) around the mountain in early October when it was releasing steam. What an experience - especially being five miles north of the crater at 5800 feet!

Ever since then I've been wanting to recreate the experience in FS.

Get the Microsoft Effects SDK from their site.

I am not having any luck at all with this. I've compiled the XML sheet per the directions of the SDK, but when it comes down to compiling it as a *.BGL file, the BGL compiler won't do it.

It gives me errors saying "Unrecoverable error parsing XML." and similar errors.