OrbX Airfields and photoscenery

[Kevin Firth 114]

For the further benefit of anyone on the fence about trying to make the OrbX airfields work with photoscenery it appears to be possible to use airfields with GenX.

 

I have used a couple of freely available tools to get EGTR Elstree to work tonight.

 

Firstly, you can use MergES by Earth Simulations, to integrate the FTX-England autogen into your existing autogen files.  This allows you to use the custom FTX-England autogen should you wish to. (IMHO if you buy a product with annotated photoreal in it you should be able to see and use that even without purchasing the FTX region.  Perhaps JV will allow GenX purchasers access to the autogen files only to achieve this(?), otherwise you will require a copy of FTX-England to do this.)  Note to achieve this I used only the 3 autogen files, nothing else from the FTX region.

 

Secondly, I used Agnmerge (freeware available from FSdeveloper) to integrate the vegetation from Treescapes into the autogen included with the OrbX fields.  The photoreal background does knock out a large amount of Treescapes autogen for me to begin with, but when integrated it all appears perfectly.  This is a welcome discovery for me because I thought I may have to individually place large numbers of trees to fill in blank spots. 

 

So, it doesn't appear to be difficult to get at least EGTR Elstree to function pretty well.  The only slight niggle as has been said before is the colour variation in photoreal elements but I have not attempted to change this at all yet.  It shouldn't be impossible to mod this either, (would be even easier if OrbX would allow someone access to the source image, as a quick colour change and resample would fix that problem!)  Note I have only attempted to integrate EGTR so far, but this has been quite successful so I may try with other products over the course of the week.  If you're willing to tweak things a little it can be done - at £15 I think it's definitely worth doing.

 

 

Happy to help guide anyone else to achieve the same if you purchase Elstree - feel free to PM me.

 

Hope that helps other photoscenery users to decide whether or not to buy...

 

Cheers

k

[ddavid 149]

One or, possibly two, small step(s) for man - one giant leap for mankind...

Nice work, Kevin - Thanks!

[mutley 4,487]

Thanks for sharing Kevin, interesting stuff 

[Misha Cajic 4]

Good work, but just to inform you, it is impossible to modify the photo real base colour once it's been resampled. You will have to have access to the source files, however I know most developers would never give their source files away. I wouldn't

 

Good job getting done what you have!

[Kevin Firth 114]

In the past where source files have been unavailingly I have recreated them from scratch. It's more time consuming but still possible. I 'd be happy to do the necessary legal stuff if OrbX were happy to co-operate - the greater market for more compatible scenaries would be in their economic interests after all, but perhaps they just don't want to go down that route....