Month: June 2017
Went out to do a little maneuvers practice and pattern work. A really lovely morning.
Had a chance to fly this yesterday …
Pass
Getting Close …
Coming Soon (Or Sometime): KVNY
After building and submitting KSBD to the X-Plane Scenery Gateway, I’m now working off and on to fill another hole in the X-Plane default SoCal scenery map: KVNY Van Nuys. As with San Bernardino, I’m using only default objects in making this scenery in hopes that it will become part of future X-Plane releases. In terms of buildings, taxiways, and clutter this is a much more complicated field that KSBD. I’m chipping away at it, but it will probably be several weeks before it’s done.
Here are some preview shots. As always, you may click them to see them in a larger size.
Good News Already Out Of FlightSimCon
I’ve been trying to track today’s activity at FlightSimCon, and one of the best resources I’ve found so far is Flightsimguy’s YouTube channel, where he’s streaming many of the presentations as they happen. Of note so far:
- PilotEdge plans to bring MANY more fields online in the Western US expansion, making it even more accommodating to GA fliers.
- X-Plane will be bringing new and improved “lego brick” scenery objects to WED for scenery designers, and even better, will be brining landmarks in places like Las Vegas, Chicago, and London that make those cities much more realistic in the sim. Both will be free upgrades, and both will happen this year.
- Ben, the chief coder at X-Plane, announced that they have the goal of making the minimum FPS in the sim for most users 60 FPS. Much of this work will depend upon continuing advances in the Vulcan GPU driver language, but over the next year they forecast continuing improvement in frame rates without loss in features.
- Perhaps best of all, it looks like Active Sky is coming to X-Plane. This is fantastic, fabulous, wonderful news.
FlightSimCon
It’s this weekend and I won’t be there due to family and work commitments. I’m bummed about that as I’ve never been, but it’s the right decision. I was flattered, though, to have been asked to participate in one panel, and the Basement Sim will be referenced in another. If you’re attending please have a great time, and consider posting a trip report in the forums. I do wish I could be there.
KSBD San Bernardino
I’ve been very busy and not able to spend a lot of time on the website or in the sim, but one of the projects I did take on was creating X-Plane scenery for KSBD, San Bernardino. KSBD was the original default airport in X-Plane in the old days, it’s a big field, and it’s also a common spot for PilotEdge users (and is in one of the CAT rating flights). Yet, for some reason I can’t quite grasp, there is no default 3D scenery for it on the X-Plane Gateway. So I decided to make some, working on it here and there over the past week or two during conference calls and when I’ve had free moments. I’ve uploaded it to the Gateway, but in the meantime I have posted it to the .Org as well. You may find it here.
I designed the scenery using only default objects in hopes that it becomes part of a future X-Plane release. Given the field’s complexity this really forced me to learn a lot of new tricks in WED, and I really like the results. For some reason X-Plane 10 users were getting an error so I’ve posted two versions. I hope you like it, and that it might prompt some readers to take on some larger fields using WED.
My next project is KVNY Van Nuys, and here are some screen shots of KSBD.