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Improvement suggestions

MatthewS

Resource contributor
Messages
333
Country
australia
Yes, but really I meant using the mouse to drag and move vertices on the screen, such as in the shape viewer subwindow.

Yes should be possible with the component i'm using... certainly would be useful feature.
 

hcornea

Resource contributor
Messages
2,388
Country
australia
Would it be possible to add a translation tag, for when GE doesn't line up properly with the existing FSX scenery (But you don't want to rebuild from scratch)

Say you could adjust all the vertices in a given file by a given amount of Long / lat (and possibly rotation)

I guess this would be done by noting two co-ordinates in FSX and the corresponding ones in GE, and applying the translation (it would be great if FSX_KML could calculate the translation for you - perhaps by placing two placemarks on GE, and applying a Tag to them which related to their positions in the existing FSX scenery)

eg Reference1 tag: Nxx.xxx Exx.xxxx
Reference2 tag: Nxx.xxx Exx.xxxx (where the xx.xxx is the position in existing FSX scenery)

When the build process took place, the vertices could all be translated.

The N_S E-W translation would be fairly simple - perhaps not so for any degree of rotation

... just a thought.
 
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Mac

Messages
90
Country
ca-britishcolumbia
Shorelines

The west coast of Vancouver Island is mainly rocky coastline, however there are some very wide sandy beaches in some bays.

In FS9 there seemed to be a bigger selection of coastlines and the width could be changed.

I can make a beach that looks like a wide sandy beach, however, it would be a lot simpler if the poly line could be widened. This would also be helpful with the other types of beaches as they do not show very well.

Mac
 
Messages
51
Country
us-pennsylvania
I can make a beach that looks like a wide sandy beach, however, it would be a lot simpler if the poly line could be widened. This would also be helpful with the other types of beaches as they do not show very well.

Really, you're probably better off just making polygons for your beaches instead of lines. Especially since beaches, particularly wide beaches, are rarely a fixed width their whole length. Thats what I did in my beach-centric project.
 

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29
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australia
Matthew
I think some form of airport building capability via google earth would be fantastic. It seems AFCAD isn't being upgraded (I could be wrong on this), but a way of doing airport scenery via Google Earth would be immensly valuable.
Another thing would be a way of doing elevations (I am using build 1.07 - so maybe you can already do that) that don't include water. I am battling with the elevations in the SDK, and feel that alot of terrain elevations could be done much simpler, by drawing in contour lines from a map (which can be superimposed in Google earth).
Just a suggestion.
 

hcornea

Resource contributor
Messages
2,388
Country
australia
Have you looked at Scruffy Duck BGL decompiler (Jon Masterson) in combination with FSX Planner.

These tools enable you to disassemble / assemble Airports in an AFCAD like manner for FSX - including modifying existing FSX airports.
 
Messages
32
Country
us-texas
Hi Matthew,

(I originally posted this in a separate thread but then realized that it is probably better to post it here)

Would it be possible in a future release to add the ability to specify vertex elevations in fractional meters? Most polygons are fine specified in whole meters. However, for airport flattens it is often necessary to be more exact in order to match the elevation in the FSX base airport apx file. Otherwise you can wind up with situations where aircraft wheels "float above" or "sink into" the ground.

The one difficulty I see is that it appears that Google Earth only allows whole meters to be entered into it's GUI. It might mean that any fractional meters entered into the kml file by FSX_KML would be rounded back to whole meters if the kml file were loaded into GE and then saved again.

P.S. I realize that there are tricky ways to override the default airport elevation but it involves placing a stub airport header bgl file in the scenery\world\scenery or scenery\base\scenery folders. For small projects where the default airport elevation is correct and we are just wanting to change the shape of the airport background it would be easier if we could simply make the flatten polygon elevation match the default elevation.
 
Messages
378
Country
unitedstates
Any chance we can get FSX KML to connect to FSX and give us a screen to draw on using cursor position? I have to replace quite a bit of shoreline that was removed so I could put a costal base in. The shoreline to be replaced is FSX shoreline and not GE shoreline. Bummer.

JimD
 
Messages
997
Country
us-missouri
Would it be possible in a future release to add the ability to specify vertex elevations in fractional meters?

Don you can already do this one of two ways. Either
1) manually edit your kml file with fractional meter elevations, or
2) FSX_KML does not display the fractional meters, but they are there. So you can enter a fractional meter elev, such as 41.4, and it will display 41.

I made Tocumen Intl and it's ARP elevation was fractional, and I used FSX_KML to re-make it's underlying polygon, complete with fractional metering.
 
Messages
24
Country
germany
Initially I ran into the problem that fsx_kml could not store its ini into the windows directory, because I'm used to be logged in as an restricted user, rathe than as an admin. This required me to the kill the program with taskmanager.

I would like to propose moving the inifile e.g. either to ..\user\applicationdata\fsx_kml, or ...\local settings\applicationdata\fsx_kml, or (not really preferred) in the program directory itself, which would result in a better OS conformity.

Otherwise: very nice tool.

best regards,
Peter
 
Messages
639
Country
panama
1. an option to "snap to QMID grid boundary".

2. In the Vertices editor, make it easier to select the lat/lon. Currently it takes several clicks double clicks for the LAT/LON value to be selected. This seems to be a textbox focus problem.

3. Show QMID boundaries/grid

4. Option to select a different text editor other than Notepad
 
Messages
639
Country
panama
Traffic integration and Primitive Object Placement

Here two great additions that would make FSX_KML an even better tool than it already is. Like I said I tried a LOT of scenery tools out there that just did not deliver what they claimed or were written by a programmer for a programmer with serious usability issues. FSXKML was a great discovery. So here some extra suggestions now that I have more experience with it.

  1. FSXKML already has the scenery objects tags in the selection list but there is no tutorial as to HOW to use that to place individual scenery objects. Would be nice if one could mark a spot (single coordinate placemark) and define the heading, pitch, bank and scale parameters in some way (can be stored in the description in some format) and then be able to tag it with a scenery object.
  2. Add capability to create/compile traffic, in particular boat traffic. A traffic is just a path and that can be added with google earth. Since the path is defined then one has to then define the type of object (waypoints already known) and other few parameters. Then FSXKML would compile that to a separate traffic BGL together with the scenery.
 
Messages
51
Country
us-pennsylvania
I don't know how to articulate what I want, but here goes. Is there any chance we could get some sort of feature that read the terrain.cfg so we could figure out if a landclass will display on top of another, without resorting to trial and error or making polyholes? I've had situations where putting a hole in, say, sand made the island disappear because the mire bog can't display over sand, so I had to go through and try to figure out what will display over the sand. I resorted, stupidly after half a dozen attempts, to just looking at the terrain.cfg itself to figure it out.

Maybe like a tab that reads terrain.cfg and orders them from highest to lowest display order?
 
Messages
79
Country
unitedkingdom
Non notepad editor...

Hi Matthew,

I recon I would REALLY like a non notepad editor. Notepad breaks with big files :D

Cheers,

B
 
Messages
79
Country
unitedkingdom
Ooooh - I nearly forgot...

It would be 'peachy' if the 'closing coordinate' of a polygon was indicated with a 'heavy' spot - maybe in red or something...

I am re-re-re-building my coastlines with significantly higher levels of detail - I'm tracing at around 500 feet altitude (since that is how high I fly :D ).

The method at the mo is to make a 'basic polygon shape', and then add in to it the shedloads of coords from a section of coast. I trace a length until GE becomes unresponsive, save that 'bit' and then copy and paste it on to the 'end' of my polygon. Occasionally the bits don't work and criss-cross each other - and I'm sure its either due to the direction of draw - I did have success adding one piece to the other only after I had reversed one of the segments... OR it may be that the 'join' point is not quite where I left it :rolleyes: ...

Did I say I love this proggie ? Yes, I believe I did...

Cheers,

B
 
Messages
25
Sorting function?

A function for sorting the landclass list according to their names in alphabetical order would be very handy. I use KMLeditor_en 0.0.0.4 for this purpose now but it feels like a long, unnecessary detour. If this could be achieved just by clicking "name" in the table, it would save my day!

cheers,
Infolf
 

Mac

Messages
90
Country
ca-britishcolumbia
Tags

As the number of tags increase it is getting extremely difficult to find individual tags.

I was wondering if it might be possible to have some kind of search added to make it easier and quicker to find a tag.

Might not be possible, but thought I would ask.
 

MatthewS

Resource contributor
Messages
333
Country
australia
As the number of tags increase it is getting extremely difficult to find individual tags.

I was wondering if it might be possible to have some kind of search added to make it easier and quicker to find a tag.

Might not be possible, but thought I would ask.

I've been working on a new build which has filtering but I haven't had time to finish yet (snowed under with work) hopefully I will have a build ready over the next few weeks
 
Messages
57
Country
israel
suggestion about the bridges (if it is possible at all). today when you make a bridge each part will be at AGL level, make an option for the all of the parts to be at the same alt of the base, this way the bridges could be used over high canyons, and will look better in general
 
Messages
52
Country
australia
I have only dabbled in FSX KML a little and had no hassle getting roads to show in FSX. Seeing how you are using Google Earth to get things positioned correctly, is there some way of not just getting polygons drawn in GE into FSX but also Sketch up models? Using Sketch up makes modeling buildings quite easy. But when you then have to export them as 3DS files into Gmax, re texture them and do all that other crap to get them into FSX makes it a rather tedious work flow.

If this is a dumb question then it shows my level of skill and understanding in scenery building :D
 
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