Fill 'er up!

[AhunterG]

Looking awesome Rob!

[Splitpin]

Amazing work RC

[toprob]

Starting to make sense of NZCH....

[Splitpin]

Starting? Holy cow Corn man

[Naki]

Wow!....this has got me hungry about getting back into FS

[cowpatz]

Looking very nice Rob.

[NZ255]

Looking pretty flash !

[toprob]

Not much to report, I'm really just too busy....


(You can see why I'm so happy to see the P3Dv4.3 Herc)

[cowpatz]

Looking good Rob. That sculpture would have been an interesting modeling exercise.

[toprob]

Still some bits missing, like SODE jetways, and still exploring some options for runway textures....
In Prepar3d v4 it'll rely a lot on dynamic lights for the tarmac.

[emfrat]

[Splitpin]

Holy cow!! ....man of the corn

[toprob]

This week's goal is to get as much of the airport ground textures completed as I can. This is one of the tedious parts of development, in that it is made up of lots of repetitive steps, none of which can be easily automated.
I've also put it off while I 'live' with the aeroclub ground textures, which is a slightly different way of doing them, for me at least. (I have no idea how other developers do theirs.) I have been wondering how it would transfer to a big airport, well, I know it's the same airport, but you know what I mean.

The trouble is that I can't really gauge whether it works well until it is finished, so I may have to end up redoing it all. But so far, so good. It saves on a huge number of texture resources, while still giving a reasonably realistic appearance. Very different from the likes of Flightbeam's Wellington screenshots, but I'm not a computer artist, I'm just a photographer with a weird interest...

Still plenty of gaps in the modelling, I hope to get one more look at the airport myself, but access has been tricky. If I can get up in the air it would help, so fingers crossed. The rest of the month will hopefully be devoted to jetways, once that's done it is just a slog to get everything tidy and actually finished. We're hopefully talking two or three months, rather than another year! Don't hold me to that, though, and don't talk about a release date, it doesn't help anyone:)

[NZ255]

Looking damn good!

[Adamski]

Looks pretty encouraging to me too!! I shudder to think about what's involved in creating something with so much detail - but just think of the pleasure it will continue to give the people that use it!

Adam.

[Splitpin]

Amazing is too small Rob .... but it is

[toprob]

Another week has shot by, dunno where it all went...

Still plodding, which means that there was a lot of work done, but not much to see for it. But I did make a start on the SODE jetways, which is a big job but a lot of fun. Except for XML -- honestly, I can't write a single line of XML code without a mistake, making debugging a real drag. I can remember when coding was second-nature, but that was in the 80s, on the Commodore 64 probably.

I also redid the ADH ULDs, which might seem to be just a jumble of letters, but they are actually the cargo containers in the previous screenshot. These were added to the VLC Libraries when I did Dunedin, and I did think that they were built to scale, but when I started the AKE containers for Christchurch it became obvious that the earlier models were very over-sized. So I had to fix all those before moving onto the bigger containers.

I've finally run out of funding, which was expected (and planned for), but it has meant that I don't sleep well -- too much stress! I have arranged a loan from a family member to tide me over, so I don't need to step away from NZCH for a while while I earn some money...

Still need to get back to Christchurch for some more photos, this time of the year is good, as I should be able to shoot detail from a distance using a tele lens without the heat shimmer across the tarmac which wrecks my shots during the summer. I love winter! Trying to convince myself of that, anyway, my first Timaru winter has been a bit of a nasty intro to southern cold!!!

One quick shot, although not as 'finished' as I'd hoped -- don't look too closely:)

[Adamski]

MEGA GULP!

Keep on truckin' ... as they say!

Adam.

BTW: with respect to coding ... I use Dreamweaver (in code view) for my websites, but have found the freeware Notepad++ with a few half-decent plugins can do a lot of syntax checking for you. Works well for all the little XML files I edit for installing legacy aircraft in P3D etc.

[Splitpin]

Holy cow

[toprob]

...

BTW: with respect to coding ... I use Dreamweaver (in code view) for my websites, but have found the freeware Notepad++ with a few half-decent plugins can do a lot of syntax checking for you. Works well for all the little XML files I edit for installing legacy aircraft in P3D etc.

Cheers, guys. Adam, I do use Notepad++ a lot, and in this case it helped me sort this out -- at least I can tell when I haven't closed tags properly, etc. Most of my problem was that I sometimes refuse to copy/paste when I should, I figure that if I don't actually type stuff in, then I'll lose the ability to touch type. However this week I ended up with missing quote marks, a dash instead of equals, and a missing '-' on my latitude, so even when my XML code started working, I still didn't see the jetway, as it was somewhere lost in the north Pacific... I put it down to cold hands, and the fact that I'm not getting any younger.

Copy/paste would have made more sense, as I'm using Dunedin jetways as placeholders until I finish the new textures. That's why the jetway doesn't actually reach the door in the screenshot...

Speaking of jetways, as a developer I'm inordinately chuffed about the' new' (well, 18 months old I guess) A380/787 dual gate, small things amuse small minds... Tricky to test properly, since I don't have an A380 or a 787, though. Still, SODE now supports AI dual docking, apparently. I need to check to see how GSX gets on here.

Another thing missing is the bloody ugly hotel they are building. I haven't worried about this until now, as I was pretty sure it would be well-finished by now, but wadya know, it is has had a bunch of holdups. Still, I know what it'll look like, there's the exact same hotel at Wellington and Auckland. I dunno why they do that, people must look out the aircraft window and think 'hey, there's the Novotel, I must be home... or back in Wellington, or could be Auckland?'