FSCareer - WIP

[DocMoriarty]

During the past days i worked for the most part on a GUI for my addon. Slowly it gets alive. The "model" for the GUI is modelled and rendered in Blender 3D. Some smoothing probs left.

The attached thumbnail shows whats currently behind the "Help" button. Far away from some final state, though. Just to show off the basic GUI concept itself.

All written in Visual Basic 2005.

[DocMoriarty]

Making slow progress due to RL workload, but making progress!!

Nothing eye candy like yet, but i reached an important milestone today:

I finished work on my BGL parser that parses all airport data based on scenery.cfg and apx*.bgl files and saves the whole stuff into a database. It's all built in into FSCareer. Scenery will be parsed automatically if the file or directory timestamps for the scenery change or manually if the user uses the tool function for it.

Speed seems ok, it takes 35 secs on my system to parse and save all 24.5K airports (all VB8 code, database=Access).

[DocMoriarty]

Finally i can add the start and end ICAO to my flight log entries with pretty good accuracy (compared to FS flight logs) after implementing some clever and fast search logic and the whole geo coordinate calculation stuff that lets me find any objects in the players vicinity in the database which i completed last week.

So basically the flight log stuff is done and needs perhaps just some more testing and tweaking of some parameters.

Now need to do some dialog functions for displaying the logs, statistics and an alternative airport finder / selection window.

[salvapatuel]

All written in Visual Basic 2005.

Screenshots looks great!

As you are using VB, have you been able to render your screens on Full screen mode? I have a form and when I try to call it in that mode it swaps everything to windowed mode!

Cheers

[DocMoriarty]

No haven't been able to display my form in full screen mode, also the VB part is a standalone exe, not a dll within FS. I fooled around trying this and that though, for example using the FS main screen window as parent for my form which actually works in terms of being application modal to the FSX window but DirectX still minimizes in full screen mode.
I postponed work on this problem for the moment until a later time and will see what changes in SimConnect/FSX with the next service pack before i continue with this. Although i don't believe in Santa anymore i have hopes that they might provide some better support for GUI related stuff.

[DocMoriarty]

A little update for this week, finished work on my airports list. Details with a couple useful charts (i hope) will be next. Too bad that my time budget for FSCareer this week is already used up again. Found some interesting airports ...

The screenshot shows the FSCareer screen in it's current full size, ~200KB

http://www.fscareer.de/screens/TN_AirportsList01.gif (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/AirportsList01.gif)

Thats also a test for my new dynamic server, let me know if link doesn't work.

[Red Falcon]

have you a demo or source?

[DocMoriarty]

have you a demo or source?

No sorry, net yet. I'm still a couple weeks away from the version that i will publish first due to heavy RL workload.

[Vitus]

Moin Doc,

I am very interested in your project. What kind of programming environment do you use? Is it Blender 3D (I dont know it yet), what you mentioned in the first post? What can it be used for?

[DocMoriarty]

Moin Vitus :)

Blender 3D is an open source 3D modelling program with quite some depth. Perhaps not as rich (or different to) gmax but it has the advantage that i can use blender models for whatever i want (unlike gmax, which i can only use in MSFS). Look here for details: http://www.blender.org/

So far i've made good experiences with Blender 3D (not very intuitive but if you get the hang of it by doing some tutorials it's great).

I use Blender 3D for every model that i don't use within FS, such as the rendered model for the background image of my application and most likely a lot of other stuff that i have in mind in the role-playing department.

I might go as far as to writing my own exporter for Blender 3D -> X-File/MS FSX though i still hope that someone else does that or even ACES write an official exporter. I just don't like and don't trust in gmax's future and 3D Studio Max is a tad too expensive for just a hobby.

Coding is done almost pure in Visual Studio 8 (Prof. Ed.) / Visual Basic 8 + managed SimConnect with the exception of one DLL in plain vanilla C(without ++) that resides within FSX.

[Jorge Antunes]

So far i've made good experiences with Blender 3D (not very intuitive but if you get the hang of it by doing some tutorials it's great).

I use Blender 3D for every model that i don't use within FS, such as the rendered model for the background image of my application and most likely a lot of other stuff that i have in mind in the role-playing department.

I might go as far as to writing my own exporter for Blender 3D -> X-File/MS FSX though i still hope that someone else does that or even ACES write an official exporter. I just don't like and don't trust in gmax's future and 3D Studio Max is a tad too expensive for just a hobby.

Coding is done almost pure in Visual Studio 8 (Prof. Ed.) / Visual Basic 8 + managed SimConnect with the exception of one DLL in plain vanilla C(without ++) that resides within FSX.

Looking forward to that plugin, since i'm learning blender these days

[DocMoriarty]

Slowly making progress with the airport details page. The intention is to provide a bit more detailed information on airports and maps that really show the airport and not just (best case) a few lines.

Starts to look somehow cool. I will also add an airport detail map that will finally enable you to taxi to blah blah via blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah without them yellow arrows on ground hehe. And maybe an approach map that shows approach paths and the vicinity of the airport.

First example is my usual homebase - Munich: EDDM
http://www.fscareer.de/screens/TN_AirportsDetails01_120.gif (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/AirportsDetails01.gif)

Second example is one of the most complex airports - Dallas/Ft Worth: KDFW
http://www.fscareer.de/screens/TN_AirportsDetails02_120.gif (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/AirportsDetails02.gif)

Actually KDFW is the reason why i had the idea to paint the maps. KDFW has 6 nearly parallel runways and with the airport map/printout from FSX it's impossible to find the correct runway when getting there first time. And taxiing has always been a problem. I mean it's nice to get an order to taxi to fuel via A,B,C,D,E,F,G,... but if you have no clue where these taxiways are it's no real fun and thats what my airport details page will take care of.

[theisomizer]

Post Edit: Unnecessary information removed.

[DocMoriarty]

Ok, now to get to my point. I'll be happy to upload my KDFW airport diagrams (or any other US airport you need) if you would like. I'm sure they are much better resolution than the FSX ones.

Thats a very nice offer :) ... but the problem is in FSX you need to use whatever is in the sim data for the respective airport if you want to handle it right there. For example usually the gate numbers don't really match the real gate numbers and i'm certain the taxiway numbers don't match either, so real world maps wouldn't be too much of a help when flying in FSX.

I'm not painting the maps myself, its a function in my addon that reads and parses the airport bgl of the selected airport and draws the image and that works for all 25000 airports in FSX.

The idea is just to have maps that really provide the information you need to do it right (in terms of FSX), because FSX doesn't really show very detailed maps or airport info.

A few more examples or airport overview maps, now in their more or less final state:

06A - Example for a smaller airport
http://www.fscareer.de/screens/06A_APO.png

KSFO - San Francisco
http://www.fscareer.de/screens/KSFO_APO.png

KDEN - Denver
http://www.fscareer.de/screens/KDEN_APO.png

[DocMoriarty]

The times of blind taxiing (or yellow arrows on ground) are finally gone ... soon :)

Here are a few examples of airport detail maps that show gate/parking numbers and taxiway names:

No direct links due to size of images, detail images are around 500kb+ for complex airports.

KJFK - John F. Kennedy - New York (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/KJFK_APD.png)

EDDF - Frankfurt - Germany (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/EDDF_APD.png)

LFPG - Charles de Gaulle - Paris - France (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/LFPG_APD.png)

[theisomizer]

Thats a very nice offer :) ... but the problem is in FSX you need to use whatever is in the sim data for the respective airport if you want to handle it right there. For example usually the gate numbers don't really match the real gate numbers and i'm certain the taxiway numbers don't match either, so real world maps wouldn't be too much of a help when flying in FSX.

I'm not painting the maps myself, its a function in my addon that reads and parses the airport bgl of the selected airport and draws the image and that works for all 25000 airports in FSX.

The idea is just to have maps that really provide the information you need to do it right (in terms of FSX), because FSX doesn't really show very detailed maps or airport info.


Cool, I totally understand.

I should have figured you wrote a tool to paint them; you'd go nuts trying to hand paint that many yourself. :D

And yes, you are certainly correct about FSX's rendition of the airports not matching up to the real thing. Although the runways and most taxiways are correct, the gate placement is laughable.

Best of luck on your project,
Sean

[DocMoriarty]

I actually think this might get also a good tool for airport designers to view their work and find some bugs in the airport design like gate and taxiway placement. I will add some more details like which gate actually has a jetway and boundaries.

In the EDDF map you can see that two runways are overlapping and thats i guess because the original runway (8R/26L) got extended and became the 7R/25L but designers forgot to take the old one out.

[Vitus]

Hi Doc,

just a sidenote to the EDDF issue:
In fact, there ARE four runways in Frankfurt! You may have noticed, that Runway 25L has got two touchdown zones and even two PAPIs/VASIs (not sure which system is installed..). That is, because Runway 26L and Runway 25L are identical except that 26 begins a few meters later. The idea was to line up aircraft on 25L even if another airplane lands on the same runway. With the different touchdown zones that could be possible. Even though, its not performed nowadays.

Until now, I have not found any taxiway that is wrong signed in Germay. But the gate and parking positions are cataqstrophic!

Best regards
Vitus

[DocMoriarty]

Thanks for the explanation for RWY 8/26 at EDDF. And i agree about the gates. At least that gives Airport Scenery Add On developers a good chance to make it better :)

Two more airports (click on map for details), today including boundary fences.

EDDW - Bremen - Germany
http://www.fscareer.de/screens/EDDW_APO.png (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/EDDW_APD.png)

EDDM - Munich - Germany
http://www.fscareer.de/screens/EDDM_APO.png (http://www.fscareer.de/screens/EDDM_APD.png)