Gearing Up For Flight Gear
Buoyed a bit by Simon and Gerry’s progress on the Spit and the Potez <a href="http://target4today.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=1251" divebomber biplane, I remembered that I’ve done little more with Flight Gear than to download the basic package and several planes of interest that I might be able to leverage while working up Hakko Ichiu.
Up til now, I’d had just a bear of a time with it, and so have the Target For Today guys, so I’ve kind of let it slide until they get a bit further along.
When I got set up the first problem was that there were a bunch of civilian and other aircraft that I just had no interest in whatsoever, in the stock set. Adding planes through the wizard just wasn’t working, and I’d just given up. But today I persevered and had another go at it.
First thing was to solve the plane list issue. I removed all the planes I had no use for… and still they populated the menu. Huh? Further poking around revealed that there were TWO Aircraft/ folders, one at the root, and one inside the data/ folder. I trashed the one in the root, and took all the undesirables out of the data/Aircraft/ folder and voila. My available plane list started looking more like I wanted. But, still many add-ons I wanted to see weren’t showing up. That was because, when you download the add-on planes, they come in an archive with some numeric date reference on them, and on the folder name as well. Of course the aircraft files aren’t looking for that :rolleyes: … so I had to move all the files and sub-folders out of the “Plane-Type_020304″ folder and put them in vanilla “Plane-type” folders. That fixed most of the rest.
Then, a tour through what I’ve got. I launched each one and had a look. Almost universally, I can see I’ll have to replace all but perhaps the 3D exteriors. The exterior textures are of the most basic quality imaginable, and most of the pits are terrible as well, both in 3D and 2D. I imagine for the aircraft I’ve already modeled, I’ll attempt to engineer a complete replacement.
Next up is to start the process of porting over the gauges, and getting them to appear in the FG-native aircraft. Then after that, perhaps learn Gerry’s process for multi-crew access in planes with that.
Then after that, I get to the real make-or-break point where I decide if I’m going all-in or not. I’d like to have more info on how Paul gets on with the combat aspects of the system, how the terrain fits in, and have an idea of the interface. FG’s interface is spotty: it has some nice ideas in it, but it’s all wrong for a mission-oriented combat flight sim. We’ll need to have it set up to log into a server, which would handle what terrain loads, what the whether is, the location for the action, the weather (FG seems to have a lot of weather features, including the ability to get “representative” weather that mirrors the day’s weather at the location you’re simulating! Of course, that all would need to be controllable at the server level, not at the player level as it is now).
Color me optimistic at the moment.
