1) Don't forget to do a TYPE BINARY before PUTting .zip and other
binary files.
2) Please send an e-mail to owner-flight-sim@grove.iup.edu announcing
your upload(s).
3) Permission to redistribute must be obtained from file authors if
not explicitly granted in the accompanying documentation. This
may delay cataloging.
If you don't do this, your wonderful creation will never make it into the
FST directory - which will be a real shame!
Yet there is hope! I found there is a couple of ways around this. Firstly, if you fractilize the whole 50 X 50km block this bug won't occur - obviously. But, if you are fractilizing a smaller area, I realized two things:
One trick I used, is to set the distant sea colour (#39) to the second from furthest sky colour (#41) - this creates a narrower horizon stip, and looks much better IMHO. Also, see my comments on terrain colours.
I figured out the uses of a few extra colours that where maked "unknown" in the README file:
Also, the DOS Shape viewer, HVIEW.EXE is really nice for quickly browsing through you shapes. Though I recomend renaming (REN) HVIEW.EXE to H.EXE - less typing.
Furthermore, you can zoom in and out by holding down one of the mouse buttons - this is great for checking out how your parent/child levels look at a distance (to see if they don't jump too much.)
Hmmm, there's lots of stuff that can be said about color... hell I spent a whole semester on the subject once. Aside from going to an art supply store and picking up a book on color theory, here's a couple of things to remember. Look closely at some aerial photos, block out all parts of the image except the color your interested in (ie; if you're looking for a good color for water, block out the land, etc., it affects the way you see the color). When looking at the photos, you'll see how wrong most sims can get simple ground and water colors.What really bothers me is the limited visibility in FST, it always seems as though you are flying in a fog! Here are a few things I found that help "cheat" the visibilty distance. First, choose if you are going to have a sim set over the ocean, land, or desert. Don't mix ocean and land, as these tricks won't work. Although, having islands in the ocean, or lakes on the land is okay. In desert we assume there is no water.Using pure black is a real no-no (the only exception I can think of is a shadow from direct over-head intense sunlight). Try to be extrememly subtle in the palette colors, the main problem with computers is that you can ramp up the colors to 255 or down to 0, in real life, the colors are never this saturated--very small changes in palette hue, saturation and value are much more realistic. So that means no pure greens, reds, yellows, etc. That said, you can also go for some real contrast for sunny weather colors, try over doing the contrast a bit and see how it looks... again, keep the saturation subtle but values can be radical.
When I said "optimize it for visibility.", I meant for seeing the planes and on-screen icon information clearly, ie; a 20% difference in value assures that the item can be seen over a backround. Red hues will stand out excellently over green backrounds, etc. (so in this example, I would make the icon range information on CK's glowing green landscape a slightly darker red, it would stand out great--of course I would want to change the landscape though;). Using color complements like this, and their values can really help viewing things quickly. Also, to reduce eyestrain, I would make sure no pure whites were used for cockpit instruments and the like.
As you can see, there's a lot to think about when doing a good palette. The best bet is to go with what you think looks nice though :)
Dave
Careful manipulation of FST's modeling algorithms will replicate the effect of canard layouts.Great eh?
When modeling the Swedish Viggen, I did a little reading on canards. Apperently what they do is not provide lift, but act as giant votex generators, causing turbulent air for the wings to fly through. This causes two things:
I also add wing tip lights to my aircraft Gear Down shapes, so it looks like the aircraft turn their landing lights when they lower their gear!
Forest Pearson (fsfkp@ludd.luth.se) wrote:
: Yes, I am interested in this too - how much effect does the badly formed
: polygons have on the shape? I find that if you twist a polygon you get
: this message. Also, if you create a shape out of only triangles, your
: polygon count goes way up- yet these are simpler polygons - any idea how
: this effects frame rate? I had been trying to use complex polygons (8
: siders) to keep my polygon count low. Ideas, comments?
Well, there are basically two types of badly formed polygons. One is the
kind you just described - twisting polygons (i.e. a square with corners
on three different grid planes). If it's twisted, it will sometimes
disappear from sight when viewed from certain angles. The likelihood of
this depends on how big and complex the polygon is, as well as how badly
it is twisted. If it's just a slight twist, it may not cause too much of
a problem. Triangles are impossible to twist as far the software is
concerned so you may do whatever you want with them.
The other kind of badly formed polygon is one that is too complex or "busy".
Here are some examples of some bad eight-sided polygons:
____ _______ /\
/ __ \ / \ _____/ \_____
/ / \ \ / \ \ /
/___/ \__\ \ /\ \ \ /\ /
\______/ \__\ \/ \/
Basically, any polygon that has an abrupt extension (the two on the left)
or comes back in on itself (all three of them) is a badly formed polygon.
The more gradual and natural looking the polygon, the less likely it will
turn out "bad". These kinds of bad polys will "leak" when you run the
sim. It will show up as a thin streak of color that runs from the top to
the bottom of the screen. They won't show up in the mini-viewer found
in the shape editor, so you'll only see it when running FLY.EXE. If you
have to create a shape like this, you should always piece them together
with triangles and squares.
Don't worry about having to use all triangles when making your shape. If
you keep your polygons simple and get into the habit of -building- the
more complex polygons out of simpler shapes, you can keep the polygon
count down without sacrificing too much detail.
Also, to keep the frame rate managable, make sure to give your shape
file the appropriate parent/child shapes. I usually give my shapes two
parents and make the child (the most detailed) visible at about 200-300
meters, depending on the size of the shape. I've seen a lot of user
created shapes out there that have no parent shapes whatsoever. Too many
of these on the screen will really clog up the frame rate.
Jon
The problem I always found was that you are limited to 15 colours. You may have beautiful cockpit pictures, but reducing them down to 16 colours is very hard. Also, the first colour has to be black, and anything that is the first colour will show up transparent so you will see the world beyond the cockpit. Actually, the first colour does not need to be black, but if you use another colour, there is a boarder around the whole screen of that colour - which, perhaps, could be used creatively.
But before I go into colour reduction...let me start with the beginning of the process.
Anyway, start Screen Thief with the /O:PCX switch (to save as a .PCX) before you start the program you want to capture from. And when you are ready, just hit CONTROL + ALT + T to capture the screen with your!
The other way would be to scan a photo of a real cockpit, but real cockpits are pretty hard to work with - yet if you are ambitious - go for it!
Then clear out everything that you want to be transparent - the window. I usually use the Fill tool, and fill in all the visible terrain with black. Also, I remove all the instrument readings, since you will overlay your own instruments later. Now, the should be ready for colour reduction.
When I have reduced the palette to 16-colours, I then go and save the palette (usually to a .PAL file.) Edit the palette so the first colour is pure black (this first colour will be the "transparent" colour) Also, sometimes a critical colour that you may want (a red or yellow or green) on you cockpit may not be chosen in the colour reduction (because it only appears in a few selected spots) - so change a insignificant colour in the 16-colour palette to this colour that you want. Again, save your palette.
Hope that helps, (hope you understood me! - if not, email me.)
Good Luck!
I have a some examples of Cockpit PCX's that I have made using the above process on the FST Cockpit PCX's page.
Anyway, here is an article by Ivan from rec.aviation.simulators
While dabbling in writing my own flight simulator, one big problem has been getting some elevation data to fly over. The standard place to get this stuff is from USGS, but if you call them, all they can send you is 9-track tape (and it's not exactly free). There are some outfits which can get you the data on floppy or CD-ROM, but I never really followed up on that. But, I finally found an online repository of all of this stuff: http://sun1.cr.usgs.gov/doc/edchome/ndcdb/ndcdb.html You can get USGS 1-degree DEM datasets for all of the U.S. from there, with minimum of hassle. The Web site also houses good docs explaining these datasets, as well as record formats and all that stuff. Happy terrain building ...
Never lay you objects in World Editor across the lines between terrain squares. The objects get cut off if you do this, they look really wierd and funky when you are flying around - so just don't cross the lines! I had a look at Confirmed Kill, and it seems that they can get away with this, but we can't so we have to live with this rule.
So, to keep the game running soothly, remember to always use parent/child levels - and to keep things simple. I usually use the three levels that FST defaults to: 5000m, 1000m and 200m. For a building, I usually use 5-10, 10-20 and 20-30 polygons for each level respectively, and I think that is still a little high. If you look at the screen shots from Confirmed Kill, an upcomming on-line flight sim based on the FST engine, you will see that their ground objects are quite simple, thereby ensuring high frame rates. Specifically, if you look at the houses you will notice that they are only made of 11 polygons!
I believe that many of the shapes that come with FST are actually too complicated - I always trim them down before I use them. Many people when starting to use FST make wonderful shapes - but they are far too complicated. For example I have seen some in excess of 200 polygons - a Pentium choaker I call this! Usually, for the nearest shape of the aircraft, I try to stay around 100 polygons.
Also, when making shapes, make sure you look them over them closely, and search for polygons that won't be seen. These just take up CPU time and screw up you shapes. Just use the Select Polygon tool in Shape Editor and select the polygon, then hit Del key! Again, I have found some of Domark's shapes guilty of this!
Also, the fuel consumption does not change depending on how many engines you have. For example, if you can fly 10 min with a given amount of fuel and one engine, you can still fly 10 min with that amount of fuel and four engines.
First, add some NDB objects to your world at the points where you want to have a waypoint (set the Object's Class as NDB) Set a frequency for the beacon and note what it is. Now you have established your waypoint. Since each beacon has a unique frequency, you can have lots of waypoints for many different missions. Just make sure you note what frequency corresponds to which waypoint beacon.
Then, in Cockpit Editor, add a gauge with the ADF (Automatic Direction Finder) attribute.
Now, when you are flying, tune your ADF for the given frequency of the the waypoint you want to fly to (with the / and ? keys.) The ADF will display the bearing of the beacon relative to the nose of the aircraft. If the beacon is straight ahead, the needle in the ADF will point straight up, if the beacon is 90 degrees to the left, the needle will point straight left. For more explanation, see section 4.1.3 (pg 60) in the FST manual.
This system works pretty much the same as the carot system used in most flight sims, but I think it is a little more realistic and fun since you manually have to tune the ADF!
Displaying a SVGA intro picture as you're loading an FST scenario is
easy. Simply select the 640x480x256 color PCX of your choice, and name it
SFST.PCX. Put this file into your scenario's directory and VIOLA! ;)
Bryan Walker
Simulations Producer
Domark Software
Though, this does not seem to work with the original, un-upgraded version
of FST.
If you have any ideas, suggestions, comments, or input, please don't
hesitate to contact me:
Forest
Pearson, fsfkp@aurora.alaska.edu
Last modified: Oct. 7, 1995