by toprob » Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:54 am
I'll quickly cover the texture considerations for this type of scenery, I was meaning to do so in the other thread where you asked about ground textures.
I tend to use photo textures, as in flying overhead and taking an actual photo and sticking in on a polygon or three. That's where the texture load can get high. For these textures to work, they need to be high resolution, which for a small airfield means 20cm/pixel or higher. If you want to cover and area of one square kilometre, you'd need 5000x5000 pixels, which is about 25 extra large (1024x1024) textures. I try not to use more than 10 extra large textures for the entire project, and the buildings can account for eight of them.
But you are right, times change and especially with FSX we can assume more graphics space, and better organisation of textures. I've assumed this as well with Paraparaumu for FS2004, where I do cover the airport extents with a photographic poly, although only at half the resolution I'd like. Here I end up with 4 x 4 textures, although I've reduced the size of the less important ones, so it ends up about 12 textures.
With FSX, though, it makes sense to give up on the old ground polygons -- this is a 'hack' which works still despite MS's best efforts, and has some major limitations. Now, we can just use the very same technique which produces the large-scale ground textures, but make them higher resolution locally -- like Paraparaumu for FSX. (I'm aware that this is a simple answer, and that this technique still leaves us without a method of creating custom runways etc.)
Here's the point (finally!) -- you can, and maybe I should, use tiled textures over much of this, for instance I mentioned once before that you could have a handful of grass textures for variety, but I don't work well this way. My methods are firmly stuck in photography, and although there are a lot of times when I need to move away from this, it will always be my main focus. That's why I was trying to encourage a few folk to adopt the GMAX ground poly techniques for this very purpose. Someone else might be able to give it the work it deserves, and come up with a solution which would improve the appearance of every addon airport. But I've aware that people have an aversion to GMAX, dunno why.
I've not considered redoing Wanaka a priority (this was my only 'failure', in that sales did not cover the time it took to develop), but since Jon and friends at ARNZ did the missions for 'Across the Strait', I've been thinking that it would be great to have some warbird missions to go with a nice new FSX version. However I'd be inclined to do the ground textures using the new FSX methods, which wouldn't help FS2004.
