0
What A Development
Posted by
bazzam
,
08 January 2009
·
172 views
As many of my fellow AussieX members will know by now, OrbX has released the final region pack for Australia - AURed. Being a developer for OrbX is interesting, there is so much landclass work to do and so little time 
As the witching hour (of release) draws near activity becomes quite hectic, devs submitting new and updated work, beta testers download updates and post reports, Matts paintbrush burns up the pixellated palettes, Holger's internet connection sizzles, Rossco's fingers creak from mouse arthritis, Koorby has his whip out a-cracking and in the background somebody has turned up the volume knob on Snow Whites dwarves' "whistling as they work".
One of the beta tester observations immediately prior to release was that "the rock" stood out a bit to harshly from the surrounding terrain. Well the model of Ayers Rock is an FSX default that resides in the base directories and is hardcoded into the holding bgl so it can't be modified by us. One of the answers appeared simply to place some trees around the base of the rock to help camouflage the seems - like all good ideas it wasn't quite that simple.
After placing some appropriate trees a quick fly showed that the landclass work was being ignored. It turns out that MS thinks the rock is bigger than what it really is. OK, so now it is a matter of working around the FSX monolith and reworking my timber polygons - a matter of only an hour or twos work. Go for another fly and the textures are there but where have the trees gone; of-course the model of the rock includes an exclude that is larger than itself. This is where the fun begins - individual annotation of hundreds of trees to match the rock, the textures and the roads.
Ayers Rock - OrbX AU_Red
Ayers Rock - OrbX AU_Red
Unfortunately, the finished work was not available when AU_Red released. Of course it will be released in a hotfix shortly, along with a lot more landclass work, taking us further along the path towards full continental coverage.
As an aside to my little developers tale, VicVroom came around about lunchtime to pick up some rudder pedals and he was so enthusiastic about flying helicopters with the VASAR organisation that I decided to give it a try. The default B206 was easy enough (although I must admit hovering and landing will take a bit more practice to finesse), but the Hovercontrol B412 has me bamboozled. There are so many systems that I am not sure what I am doing. I shall need to devote a bit of time to studying this beast before I can become proficient with it. Ahh - another challenge...
As the witching hour (of release) draws near activity becomes quite hectic, devs submitting new and updated work, beta testers download updates and post reports, Matts paintbrush burns up the pixellated palettes, Holger's internet connection sizzles, Rossco's fingers creak from mouse arthritis, Koorby has his whip out a-cracking and in the background somebody has turned up the volume knob on Snow Whites dwarves' "whistling as they work".One of the beta tester observations immediately prior to release was that "the rock" stood out a bit to harshly from the surrounding terrain. Well the model of Ayers Rock is an FSX default that resides in the base directories and is hardcoded into the holding bgl so it can't be modified by us. One of the answers appeared simply to place some trees around the base of the rock to help camouflage the seems - like all good ideas it wasn't quite that simple.
After placing some appropriate trees a quick fly showed that the landclass work was being ignored. It turns out that MS thinks the rock is bigger than what it really is. OK, so now it is a matter of working around the FSX monolith and reworking my timber polygons - a matter of only an hour or twos work. Go for another fly and the textures are there but where have the trees gone; of-course the model of the rock includes an exclude that is larger than itself. This is where the fun begins - individual annotation of hundreds of trees to match the rock, the textures and the roads.
Ayers Rock - OrbX AU_Red
Ayers Rock - OrbX AU_Red
Unfortunately, the finished work was not available when AU_Red released. Of course it will be released in a hotfix shortly, along with a lot more landclass work, taking us further along the path towards full continental coverage.
As an aside to my little developers tale, VicVroom came around about lunchtime to pick up some rudder pedals and he was so enthusiastic about flying helicopters with the VASAR organisation that I decided to give it a try. The default B206 was easy enough (although I must admit hovering and landing will take a bit more practice to finesse), but the Hovercontrol B412 has me bamboozled. There are so many systems that I am not sure what I am doing. I shall need to devote a bit of time to studying this beast before I can become proficient with it. Ahh - another challenge...
