FS2004 Update

[RollerBall]

Just passing on what I've found so far for those who are interested in designing for 2004.

FSSC still works fine BUT I've found that 2004 is much more sensitive to heights (scenery height ASL, polygon heights etc). AFCAD2 can't yet change the airport ref point in the AFD file so if your scenery is at a different height than the default you're replacing, you'll find that you lose things like the progressive taxi line which can disappear below the surface.

A16-N flattens work fine but again you have to get the height right. I found that sometimes my flatten bgl didn't automatically export from FSSC and I manually had to compile (using SCASM) the flatten sca file and copy across the resulting bgl. Don't know why yet my copy of FSSC should be doing that.

I cannot get scenery changes to show in the sim unless I fully deactivate and delete the scenery from the scenery library and sometimes even the corresponding bgl files plus the scenery.dat file from the addon scenery sub-folder. It seems to me that 2004 hangs onto the data harder than 2002.

In any case, you can't make ANY change to scenery without stopping and restarting the sim whereas with 2002 you could just click world..scenery library..OK to get a 'warm' restart. Not now though.

You may know that AFCAD2 creates lovely taxi lines and taxiway lighting for you. True, but NOT if you have put down your own apron/taxiway polygons ie the lines etc ONLY show up on top of original ground textures. Don't do what I did and delete all your lines and stuff (luckily I had a backup )

I've got quite a few excludes in my scenery to remove unwanted original items but I don't yet know if they're all necessary because in a weird way, the replacement scenery seems to be working as its own exclude (ie bits of original have gone that I haven't actively excluded).

I've used LWM and CoastLineMaker and just copied over my files from 2002. Both still work OK in 2004.

Having problems with my AFCAD2 file. As well as the height problem mentioned above there also seems to me to be a parking radius problem. In AFCAD 1, ga_small only included planes like the 152, 172,182, Cherokee and Baron plus birds like the Mustang. It DIDN'T include the Caravan.

In AFCAD2 parking slots that I've designated ga_small are being filled by Caravans, ousting the smaller types. Also I've got Dash 8s going into Medium Gates whereas before they were in ga_large. It's more serious than it sounds - making it very difficult to get an AFD file doing what I want it to.

That's it for now. If anyone else is working in 2004 and has found other stuff that I've not mentioned I'd really like to hear about it.

You know ..... Fore-warned is Fore-armed

Roger

Edit added

Re AFCAD parking slots. It pays to read the manual! Radius has been downgraded a bit since 2002. Now there are other ways of designating spots which are far more powerful - plus you can specifically link aircraft to spots by parking types and codes in the aircraft.cfg file.

[TJ_Gumby]

I cannot get scenery changes to show in the sim unless I fully deactivate and delete the scenery from the scenery library and sometimes even the corresponding bgl files plus the scenery.dat file from the addon scenery sub-folder.

I did'nt have this problem when i tried it with FSSC, but im using Airport 3.0 which has been recently updated for FS2004.

In AFCAD2 parking slots that I've designated ga_small are being filled by Caravans, ousting the smaller types. Also I've got Dash 8s going into Medium Gates whereas before they were in ga_large. It's more serious than it sounds - making it very difficult to get an AFD file doing what I want it to.

I have my traffic well sorted out now. Check my recent post:
http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb/ ... 1068902484

[RollerBall]

Hiya TJ,

Yeah, I've got AFCAD2 parking sorted now - had to because of my KT scenery. Had to add another code to the ParkingSpecs.txt file to do what I wanted. All will be revealed soon

Roger

BTW the need to deactivate, delete and stuff was when I made major changes - like height and changes to the flatten or excludes. If I didn't, nothing changed even though the scenery had been updated! Don't know if it is/was an FSSC problem or what, but it definitely caused me a lot of problems (see the Avsim scenery design forum, my post on missing progressive taxi line - big thankyou to Arno!)

[TJ_Gumby]

Good stuff Roger, keep the info coming, we're all learning here.
I've discovered something about transparencies in FS2004. It seems that 04 doesn't like any other colour than 0,0,0 (pure black) to be transparent. I had heard before that 04 has problems with 8 bit extended bmp's. BMP2000 makes this type of texture file for transparencies and i had to do some colour changes and transparency re-assignments to get my FS2002 macros to show transparencies properly. I think this reflects the move to gmax as gmax doesn't require transparent textures to make realistic windows.

[RollerBall]

TJ, I rarely use pure black for transparency in sceneries because it's an 'old' standard and the bmps are bigger. I prefer ext-bmps with alpha.

I recently uploaded a set of single tree macros based on Gerrish's original textures (much easier to use than Gerrish's superb tree library). I used 444-4 bmps for those which I favour. Gerrish recommended DXT (which are smaller) but I did loads of experiments because I found with most bmp formats, when tree textures visibly overlapped with other (ground) textures, the bit of the tree texture that overlapped that should have been transparent wasn't. Only 444-4 didn't have the problem.

Sorry if that's a bit unclear!

Something else of interest. I'm using some very nice little static semi-trucks. I found that suddenly I lost my WHOLE 2004 scenery - the AFD file still worked but my scenery just disappeared. This was just after increasing the number of trucks. I took them out one at a time thinking one macro was bad. Right enough, my scenery came back - but after I'd removed a truck I was already using elsewhere in the scenery, so I knew the macro was OK.

Was it something to do with the number of times I'd used the macro? I just do not know - weird.

Funnily enough, when I dropped the same scenery into 2002, that disappeared as well - so it's not just to do with 2004.

Roger

BTW

Mentioned elsewhere but not here that I included a few dynamic objects in my FS2002 version of KT that I did with DOD v3. These didn't work in 2004. Also, some (old) scenery objects I used OK in 2002 (yachts and boats but inc some good airport vehicles) went 10x bigger in 2004 than 2002. Is correctable but it means I'm now having to run 2 versions (bu**er!)