Aérodrome Figeac-Livernon

[Deleted]

While I've been grounded for the past few months I've been keeping my hand in with flight simulator and especially playing around with X-Plane 11 because FSX is useless for the area in which I live in SW France. But when I've checked out the sceneries of the local airfields that I've flown into in X-Plane I've found that most of them don't bear any relationship to what's actually there.

In July last year I did a flight from Chateau Malbec, my home airfield, to Égletons in the Corrèze (Limousin), Aurillac in the Cantal (Auvergne) and Figeac in the Lot, before returning to Malbec. There are reasonable X-Air sceneries for Égletons and Aurillac but the representation of Figeac is pretty poor, so I decided to rectify this by making my own. I've nearly got it ready to upload to the X-Plane portal and as a 'taster' I've made a little video of the state of the game so far.

See what you think.



Roger

[beana51]

Well done...what's not to Like.??.we See you have the talent to do this..I also see you Have all Of France to go..Nice Presentation...thnx Roger

[sgtmajor]

Very....VERY NICELY Done!!! You should be extremely proud Roger!! That is marvelous work indeed.

Obviously you had to make some "Custom" buildings & items. What do you use? GMax?....3DMax??

Keep up the great work!!!!!

Cheers!

[Deleted]

Thanks guys.

X-Plane has really come on in leaps and bounds and will IMO become the system of choice if only commercial and independent 3rd party developers, like me if you like, get behind it.

There are several reasons, not the least being that because its 'engine' uses current 64 bit technology compared to the obsolete 32 bit system that FSX still relies on, you don't need a Kray supercomputer to run it. This has many advantages the main one being that the software isn't crippled as you increase the level of detail.

As I've found in the X-Plane sceneries that I've done, including this one, you can add eye candy with little or no performance penalty which is good for the user. But more importantly, you can add huge volumes of things like 3D trees, which is critical for the surrounding environment.

And that's what I've been concentrating on, as well as all the little 'easter eggs' that I've built in for people to explore and discover by roaming around the scenery, as I've done in the video, once they've landed there.

This means funnily enough that I haven't done lots of general 'flying' in X-Plane, although in Version 11 its highly suited for it, as the terrain is covered in accurate roads that you can follow with moving vehicles, joining villages and communes in this part of the world that are in the right places (but admittedly don't look too much like the real things) and lots of 3D detail, the trees in particular, that is much more effective than the flat photo textures that FSX employs.

Instead I've been concentrating on getting the approach environment right, which includes buildings, trees, water areas, roads etc, because those are the things that concern real pilots. It's very time consuming, but time is what I've got a lot of at the moment and in any case, I've been using fs scenery design as a distraction mechanism which I can pick up and put down as the mood takes me while I've been unable to fly in reality and to take my mind off other things. And its been very effective.

What it also means is that I've been doing lots of approaches and landings as I've made changes to the scenery that I want to assess, and as we all know, you can teach monkeys to fly, but you can't teach them to do greasers every time

Steve, yup, I've had to make lots of custom objects. The ones that have given me the most pleasure have been the main ULM/aeroclub building and, funnily enough, the airfield's AVGAS point, which I've done in very great detail including the pump itself, the electric grounding cable, the associated electrical supply box and even the tank filler (in blue) and signs and labels that have been attached to the real thing.

You can't use Gmax (thankfully) for X-Plane which I've already learnt and re-learnt 3 or 4 times due to time gaps when I've not used it and forgotten how. It's a stiff learning curve IMO. Instead the two design tools of choice for X-Plane are Blender and Sketchup, both of which are free to download.

Blender seemed to me to be more complicated (but very powerful) but essential if you want to create complex objects, like aircraft, which I don't. Sketchup, on the other hand, I found met my scenery design needs and was also very easy to get into, with lots of tutorial material on the internet and Youtube in particular. So that's the way I went and so far I've not been disappointed. Plus it's been a lot of fun and kept me amused.

It's said that 'All things must end' and hopefully, for me that'll be in the Spring when I hope above all else that I'll be back flying for real. Just have to be patient and wait and see.

[Roger]

Wow, excellent scenery Roger!

[sgtmajor]

Nov 19, 2017 6:03:25 GMT -5 rollerball said:

.... Instead the two design tools of choice for X-Plane are Blender and Sketchup, both of which are free to download.

That's amazing Roger!!! I've never tried Blender....might have to check it out. However, I've used Sketchup before....a very nice program and not hard to learn. I tried to build a simple hanger for FSX which I had no problem building...but could never quite figure out how to get it into FSX. Of course...this was quite a few years ago and I must admit....I only watched a few tutorials which never quite seemed to work for me. (smile....probably operator error....Smile)

Hmmm....seeing your beautiful work, I might have to re-visit that idea.

Again.....Lovely stuff Roger!!!

Cheers!

[Deleted]

Steve, there's a Sketchup plugin and all you do is export your finished object as an X-Plane object and drop it with its texture file into your scenery folder. Couldn't be easier. But remember that unlike Gmax, each X-plane object can only have 1 texture file, but as it can be up to 4096x4096 pixels, that's hardly a problem. Almost everything in my Figeac scenery is in a single texture file.

I'm off to buy an electric bike now to help me in my recovery but if you're interested I'll be happy to give more info. I know how a simple word of advice can save hours of fumbling! Been there, done that

Roger

[sgtmajor]

Roger....I will keep that in mind. I need to get myself re-familiar with Sketchup first!

Hmm...electric bike, huh? Tell me more. (smile) I've actually been reading/looking at a couple myself and have been watching several videos on YouTube about them. I will be interested to hear your opinion. (smile)

Cheers,

[Deleted]

Steve, I actually missed the one I went after yesterday - the seller had been dropping the price almost daily until it got to the point when it was just too good a bargain to miss. Evidently someone else came to the same conclusion and in between agreeing a time for me to come and see it with the intention of buying it the evening before and the next morning, the lady sold it. Luckily we hadn't driven too far before I phoned her and she told me, but never mind, something else will come up, they always do.

The idea is the bike is electrically assisted, so until you start pedalling, no power is delivered. Then you have normally from 5 to 9 levels of assistance that you can choose depending on how hard the going is, plus a normal set of gears, either in-hub or derailleur type, usually numbering from 7 up to 21. The usual 'autonomie' ie how far you can ride before the battery runs out, varies from 25 to 60 kilometres depending on the speed you ride at and the nature of the terrain but some appear to get you up to 100 kms if you believe the reports that some buyers have posted.

The types of bike vary from 'grand-ma's sit-up-and-beg' type to sporty roadsters and off-roaders. In the middle are the city bikes that usually come with smaller wheels with narrower tyres and which often have collapsible frames so you can pop them in the back of your car. The one I went after was the latter type but I must confess that I'm torn between that type and the usual straight handlebar semi-off road type with big wheels.

My pal has both, small wheel type here and large back in Belgium. He says that he prefers the small wheel which he thinks has more torque through its smaller wheels, as nearly all electrical bikes have the same 36V Li battery. I have only ridden his small wheel type so I can't give you my own comparison, but surprisingly despite what people have told me about how they take the effort out of riding up hills, I didn't find that. Even a fairly modest slope not far from his house needed me to go to low gear number 1 and max power and it still needed quite a bit of effort from me to climb it, so there's no way that I'd be looking to ride long distances on hilly terrain, just as with my normal bike that spends most of its time with flat tyres in my garden shed.

What's my thinking? After months of inactivity I've got to look to how to kick-start my recovery in the spring and an electrically assisted bike seems to me to be a good tool to help in that as I'll be getting the right kind of cardiac and muscular exercise without over-stressing myself as I likely would be on my normal bike. Anyway, time will tell whether I'm right or not, but in any case I'll be taking the advice of the experts. However, so far I've received nothing but encouragement from the latter.