Couple of real ship problems.

Mage · Post by **Mage** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 5:14 am

Hi Martin - Many thanks for your various sceneries and particularly for St Mart's, Barts & Saba!

I'm enjoying Twin Ottering around the new scenery and in a break I thought I'd look around at the AI ships. In so doing I spotted these problems.

1/ The ships call up for clearances on Juliana Tower - I think the AFCADs for the ships need to have tower frequencies of their own to keep their R/T clear of any bona-fide airports. Obviously you'll need to find one that isn't used within the AI zone of your scenery.

There's also the possibility that when the ships are en-route they might call the local flight centre frequency.

2/ More seriously, the AI ships' tracks not only take them across land, but on nearby islands these tracks lower the high ground to sea level. I've linked to a couple of screenies. The sailboat in question was on a 22FJ-22FJ route.

The images are clickable thumbnails. They probably say enough as they are!

One final point I'm wondering about is, can the engine type of sailboats be set to sailplane and still have them cruising around as though they're under power? It would presumably kill the engine noise they make?!

Despite those caveats, the AI ships are a good touch.

Post by **martin[flytampa]** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 1:33 pm

What islands/location were these shots taken at? if you don't know the names perhaps just point them out in a zoomed out top-down screenshot.

The paths I made for the ships were made with Afcad "in-game" and to my knowledge never touch any landmass. I was quite careful to avoid that). At the end they (must) lead to a fake runway at which the AI eventually "take-off" after a very long time taxiing our ship-lanes (more then 1 hour that takes I am sure). They then "take-off" (without lifting off) straight into the Atlantic. Following them for a week may lead to a caravan of ships in Europe somewhere but I didn't test that.

What I see in your screenshots is definitely not the normal behavior.

legacy · Post by **legacy** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 1:44 pm

And I wondered where suddenly all the ships came from here in Europe...

Mage · Post by **Mage** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 1:54 pm

The boat was approaching Saba from an easterly direction when it was passing through this island (FS9). Saba was its next stop and it very wisely circled the island (clockwise) before heading up to St Maarten.

The island looks like default scenery (certainly isn't St barts, which is roughly in the right direction(but northeast). So it'll be someplace either in Antigua (E) or Kitts & Nevis (SE), unless FS9 has put some unidentified island in the way (most often M$ leaves something out). The island was substantial enough for the boat to be cruising through it for a few minutes at 4x speed.

I was a bit hasty when I cut down the image size for clarity, because the original screenie (now gone) had the lat/long readout at top-left! D'oh!

While we're on the topic of AI ships, I was installing a few more flightplans using the MRAI installer, and the automated CFG integrity-checker pulled up some errors in your ship CFG files which definitely mean some ships are missing that would otherwise be there. The problem entries either reference ship models by slightly incorrect names (one error is bogus because an earlier reference is wrong) or have duplicated [fltsim.0] entries). I've already fixed the AI ships in my own setup, although I don't doubt you'll want to put out a couple of updated CFGs for the two or three in question.

The final observation is about ship textures. Some render extremely blurred (Nvidia 6800GT) and there might be a format issue there. Note that some look fine, and others show this extreme out-of-focus effect (eg a red-white ship is vaguely pink on top and white below).

I've had this on one other scenery in my time (Napulevola Naples). Its extremely rare in my experience.

I'm sort-of sorry to pulling up these few problems with what's undoubtedly a great scenery! Still, they're pretty trivial in the great scheme of things.

Richard

Post by **martin[flytampa]** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:13 pm

Ah, I found him... over St. Kitts . Attached file copied into /Addon Scenery/FlyTampa-Maarten/scenery/ fixes it.

About a ship going blurry. I have seen this rarely but seen it. I do not know why it happens, the texture will pop to the highest mipmap (best quality) once you slew through the ship (get real close to its' ref-point). Why this happens I don't know, but I saw it mentioned many times in forums etc. The ships themselves are FS9 makemdl compiled "aircraft" models with 3 LODs and DXT3 textures with mipmaps. Nothing out of the ordinary as far as I can tell.

M.D.Miron · Post by **M.D.Miron** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:45 pm

Martin, could this topic/ammended bgl made a "sticky" if relevant to all of us? I tend to believe that not all of us browse all threads all the time.

Post by **martin[flytampa]** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:47 pm

M.D.Miron wrote:Martin, could this topic/ammended bgl made a "sticky" if relevant to all of us? I tend to believe that not all of us browse all threads all the time.

Yes, I make them sticky but only once I am 90% certain the fix is "good" or complete.

Later on the stickies will be turned into a normal patch on the downloads page.

M.D.Miron · Post by **M.D.Miron** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 3:41 pm

Thanks Martin.

Mage · Post by **Mage** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 5:03 pm

Either that or summarise in a sticky and leave all the thrashing about of ideas we do, to drop down the priority list (maybe with a link from the sticky for people that want to fish back to the source)? At least that way, Martin, you have a one-stop shop for each issue that contains the solution and a link back to the discussion for anyone that might be interested?

Either way, thanks for the AFCAD fix, I appreciate the effort you made. I'll have to see what is involved and try to figure why my Freeflow AI ships aren't working! Once that's done I can see myself making cross-channel ferries between England, France, Holland and Belgium!

Post by **martin[flytampa]** » Mon Apr 16, 2007 9:07 pm

Mage: I identified 2 of the error messages/missing MDLs. The good news is no one is missing any ships within the scenery. Both MDL are for ships with "no_sails" (parked) which are not implemented in the flightplans.

The actual static ships with no_sails that you see in the scenery are the same models but compiled as scenery objects (not dependent on the /aircraft/ai-ships).

Mage · Post by **Mage** » Tue Apr 17, 2007 2:41 am

Yes, there were 2 misworded names for models (the models existed so I altered the entries for mine).

The top one in that list in the screenshot (motorboat_medium) is two entries with the same fltsim number, 0. Since there are only 2 entries its an easy fix. The effect on AI is that the second version of the boat won't appear, assuming it is flightplanned.