• 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:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

utorials for Beginners and Advanced designers

K

klem

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Hi 'community',

I have been battling through my first couple of object designs for FSX and have been amazed at the support offered by highly knowledgable individuals and pathetically grateful to them for their patience.

At the same time it seems clear that I am staring into a 'black box' world which does not have any form of structured guide for the novice. I know that modelling etc is not a simple art but I believe it can be achieved by most reasonably intelligent people.

I have found many tutorials in various places, some simply buried in threads, all of which take some finding and then understanding their relationship and hierarchical order in the process of scenery and aircraft design.

I seem to have learned, piece by piece, that I need: Gmax to create a model; Paint, digital camera or other method to create the texture .bmp; Imagetool to create the actual textures; the FSX gamepack to Export a .mdl file; Library Creator to create the .bgl library; for items like the PAPI light box, the FS2004 gamepack to create the .mdl file in order to get the XML and asm files for editing for special features; BGLC-9 to re-compile the latter .asm file; BGLComp to recompile the BGLC-9 output to a .mdl (I think I've got that right).

It took me a long time and a great deal of help to get just that far. And I haven't finished yet :eek:

To save a lot of frustration and to pool knowledge and expertise I was thinking that a new sub-forum under Development would be a good place or focus to keep moderator controlled 'stickies' for various sections of the community, e.g. "Design Guides for the beginner", "Design Guides for Advanced modellers" etc. These would each address the different families of design tools, their design process hierarchy and use and go to different depths depending on the target audience. A bit like my Gmax to FSX list for beginners but with expert explanation and guidance.

What does he community think?

klem
 
Last edited:
You have had a look at the Wiki? Under Wiki Article Discussions - at the bottom of the main index.

Seems to be exactly what you are suggesting......:D

But it takes a long time to put it all together and requires a lot of effort by a lot of people.
 
The Wiki!

Unfortunately I had no idea that was what it was for. I assumed "Wiki Article Discussions" was just a kind of chat area.

I see how it is perhaps doing what I suggested. I thought it strange that there was no structured guidance.

However, unless I misunderstand, it looks as though all the articles are being renamed under a set of rules but then moved out to the other areas. Won't that make them just as hard to find for someone who has no idea where to start?

klem
 
The Wiki is all in one place, but as I said, time and manpower. Writing tutorials is a very time consuming business, this side of the hobby tends to develop very slowly.
 
GrahamS said:
The Wiki is all in one place, but as I said, time and manpower. Writing tutorials is a very time consuming business, this side of the hobby tends to develop very slowly.
Click to expand...

It would be interesting to see how things went if each person were to prepare a small article on a subject area of interest. Whether this is in the wiki or not I do no know. The example I give is called The Code Project: www.codeproject.com. This is for developers but it has a massive collection of samples and small articles contributed by a wide range of people. The dilemma for a lot of us with some knowledge is whether to concentrate on answering on-line queries on forums or write tutorials - not enough time in the day for both I think :)
 
Hi,

The best entrance for the Wiki is its main page:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

From there you find different categories (tasks), that hopefully make it easier to find the information. The forum mentioned is only the discussion part of the Wiki articles, that is not the best place to start looking.

Feel free to contribute to the Wiki if you want to improve or add new articles. That is what the Wiki is for. To make it grow we need more people contributing, as mentioned before already. One or two persons can never write all the tutorials needed.
 
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