• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

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Scenery conversion status

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ca-britishcolumbia
I spent some time for the past week revamping the scenery conversion functionality in ContentConverter to be able to batch convert all scenery in FSX in one step, and implement Orion's suggestion to automatically discover which bgls contained the needed models so it is easier to run.

I ran the initial implementation and it finished after more than 2 hours last night. It didn't seem to hit any significant hiccups, but took way too long. I was able to further improve the usability and performance and I think it runs in about 15-30 minutes now. It could be faster with more optimizations and multi-threading, but I think that it is fast enough for now. With the new method you basically just pass in the path to the FSX scenery.cfg, and an output path and it will convert all scenery referenced by the scenery.cfg. I'll still have the option to convert individual BGLs manually to support 3rd party development.

I still need to add logic to convert the scenery.cfg, and test that the converted scenery is actually loading properly in Flight. I have friends in town this weekend, so I won't have time to work on it more, but I should be able to finish in the next week or two.
 

ollyau

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Wow, that sounds really impressive! No rush, of course -- enjoy the time with your friends. :)
 
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ca-britishcolumbia
Managed to test out the scenery stuff tonight. Only one problem I ran into... apparently the zip file processing in Flight only reads the first 65k entries from the zip, so I will have to take that into account as well as the 2GB limit when separating everything out into paks.

Here is a shot of Seattle, although I haven't converted any lclookup or textures in this shot so you see a lot of red.
FSXScenery.jpg


FSXScenery2.jpg
 

scruffyduck

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unitedkingdom
Great Stuff Steve - many thanks :)
 

rhumbaflappy

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Hi Steve.

I see even some of the Flight content is divided into folders such as 0000, 0001, etc... This follows the FSX standard. I wonder if we should also follow this in the conversion, as this would make the splitting of the content (under 65k limit, and less than 2GB) much more logical.

Dick
 
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unitedkingdom
I agree with Dick,

When I did my quick test with Wisconsin, I split up the scenery into the folder "0302." If you do make a batch converter, following the FSX standards may help troubleshooting as well as rapid identification of scenery and their corresponding directories.
 

ollyau

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It would still be a good idea to check for the size limitations. While the default scenery might not exceed the limits, some users may have more than those amounts in one single addon scenery.
 
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ca-britishcolumbia
The batch converter is already putting bgl, agn and terrain texture files in the same relative path as they were in FSX (so maintaining the 0001, etc naming scheme). Scenery objects and textures are going to be in different folders than they were in FSX to make it easier for the tool to find them. I just ran the first pass at batch converting all of FSX, including logic to split content into multiple pak files and put them into a proper .flightAddon file. All that works and I can install the .flightAddon file (which is over 6.5GB) without any problems. I did run into problems loading the large pak files in Flight, but it should be easy to fix (just need to lower the max limit for pak file size). There are still a few different types of convent to convert, need to the conversion more robust, remap some autogen to Flight types, and I need to add special logic to handle merging the Flight content with FSX gracefully (overrides, lclookup modifications, use of higher detail Flight models).
 
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unitedkingdom
Steve, have you got the Map Layer working in the UI as illustrated on the first image of Dicks post on the "Flight Docs: Terrain System" thread... I can't seem to find the solution to this.
 
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unitedkingdom
Does Dick have this unreleased version? I thought that he was referring to the .bgl file!
Its spooky how he knew that I needed the map.:yikes:
 
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unitedkingdom
I've been trying to convert the OBX*.bgl files.. but I still cannot get it to work. I get an "Unhandled Exception" Error (Failure to convert Object of type 'System.String' to 'System.String[]') and I have no idea what I'm doing wrong.

Has anyone got this working?

I found that the "bgl's containing the referenced models" are here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Scenery\Global\scenery

...and the textures for those models are here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Scenery\Global\Texture

Also some odd .bgl's regarding the models here:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Setup\XPackCache

Land Textures:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Scenery\World\Texture


If it's possible, an input command line example for the conversion would be extremely useful.
Any help is appreciated.:)
 

rhumbaflappy

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I would wait for Steve to finish his conversion program. I think he also is waiting for the GFWL to end so he can release a version of the toolkit that doesn't rely on that portion of Flight. That would be in October, I believe. I'm sure Steve will let us know when it's all set for converting FSX content to Flight. My screenshots were using some experimental code Steve shared with me. As with his screenshots, it's to encourage Flight users to wait a bit longer, as progress is being made.

Dick
 
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81
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unitedkingdom
I'm not sure that GFWL will be shut down, but the Flight servers will be. GFWL will remain for games that need it so I'm not sure how Steve will remove the dependency between the two programs.
I did not know that the images were the result of an experimental test... but its back into the waiting game! :coffee:

Of course, its not doing the community a massive favour if we rush Steve. :tapedshut
 
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412
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ca-britishcolumbia
The scenery conversion will probably be out before October. The stuff that is there right now was something I did a year or more ago, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was broken. Some alpha\beta version of the conversion should be out in less than a month.
 
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412
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ca-britishcolumbia
Update: I've got almost all of the scenery converting now. I've fixed several issues, but there is still a lot more to go. There are discussions as how to organize the converted content so it is easiest for developers to use, and so we can take advantage of the improved content from Flight and it's DLCs. There is obviously also going to be a lot of testing and bugs to fix as well :)
 
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