Wellington support issues

[toprob]

I'll quickly cover some of the reported issues with Wellington here.
First, it is very important that your System Registry points to the correct installation path for your flightsim installation. If it doesn't, the installer won't work properly. The main reason why this would be incorrect is if you manually moved the whole flightsim installation at any time.
Tomorrow I'll post some details here and on the Wellington FAQ page showing how to fix the registry.

Runway numbers:
You might not see them. This is a bug, caused by faulty layering which came about due to last minute changes to the runway. I'm sorry about that. Again, I'll post a fix for this. It won't apply to every installation, but certainly all subscribers will need to update.

Raised southern runway tunnel:
This was placed based on my understanding of how various meshes react with and without the topo scenery. However with some combinations it may rise up too high. A slight rise is no problem, just fly over it:), but if the base sits level with the runway, then there will be a fix available tomorrow. This will also tidy the approaches for those who don't have the Topo scenery. If you have the Topo scenery and a higher resolution mesh installed the fix will not be necessary, or desirable.

The scenery should come with a disclaimer: 'Works best with the Red Baron/Geographx 20 metre mesh and topo scenery' but I've tried to make it work without having to spend any more money on these addons. There will be some display issues without these, though.

Dimples:
These are holes around the runway, and are an interesting issue. These are normally caused by having the TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL entry in the FS9.cfg set too low. If you have installed the Red Baron Entertainment 20 metre mesh then you would have been advised to increase this value for proper mesh display. It shouldn't be necessary to increase the value for a 75 metre mesh, but it seems that it is necessary here. This may be a by-product of the way the scenery is flattened.
If you see dimples:
Open the FS9.cfg file. The manual will show how to find this file in the 'Wreckless Tweaks' section.
Find the line which starts:TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=
and change the value to 21.

[ronindanbo]

If you see dimples:
Open the FS9.cfg file. The manual will show how to find this file in the 'Wreckless Tweaks' section.
Find the line which starts:TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=
and change the value to 21.

but Robin dosent this have to be set to 19 for Wanaka?

[ZK-LGD]

Howdy,

See: Here (second post down) for a helpful hint on how to create a .bat file switch without having to edit your FS.cfg file all the time.

[toprob]

but Robin dosent this have to be set to 19 for Wanaka?

I may have over-reacted, I think the value you want here is actually 20.

From memory, this setting should be:
75 metre - 19
40 metre - 20
20 metre - 21
However I don't think you'd have any problems setting it too high, only too low. In reality you may have differing meshes within one flight, so it shouldn't cause any problems flying from a high-resolution mesh area to a low-res area.
From my experiments, with a 75 metre mesh and setting this value to 19 causes problems along the western fenceline, but a value of 20 fixes it. I wonder whether the flatten I've used requires this higher setting -- it only appears to be a problem at the border of two flattens.

I've just read this on the Avsim forum:

What I'd like to know, but am unsure of, is whether TMVL affects the quality of things that flatten that landscape. Will the airport flattens and streams trenches look better with higher-res TMVL settings? I suspect so...and would explain some of the detail anomalies you describe.

Obviously someone else has picked this up, but I've never seen it discussed in detail.

[toprob]

Ok, here's the runway numbers fix. This will apply to all local subscribers, plus a handful of pre-orders. First up I have to say I'm sorry about this, it is normally something which would be picked up in beta testing, but it was missed.

How do you know if you need to fix? When you run the installer there's a version number shown on the title page -- version 1.0 needs to be updated, version 1.01 doesn't.

You can download the fix here:
Wgtn101.zip

There's a text file included to explain what to do with the files.
There's also a small fix to make the southern tunnel elevation independent of the mesh. This should overcome any different elevations with different meshes.

[Snowman]

Wonderfull job Robin. Beyond all expectations
Install went perfectly. Have one query though (so far).
At the southern end of NZWN , there are 3 large fuel tanks partially buried in a hill.
Are they meant to be partially buried, or is this a glitch in my install. Seems to be the only thing i can see wrong anywhere.

Lawrie.

[toprob]

This is my pathetic attempt at the waterworks. Yes, they are meant to be buried. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get good enough photos of them to do them justice.
Luckily they disappear at night...

[Snowman]

Well, in that case, they dont look too bad at all. Just like the real thing.....

Lawrie.

[Snowman]

Hi Robin.
Just a couple of small things i noticed at Welly. The grass textures in the middle of the Caketin are shimmering and fading in and out, and i must be going blind, because im damned if i can see the beehive in there anywhere.
Also at NZPP, i have an airport beacon tower in the middle of runway 11 (at the rwy-16 end) and beside the tower, a fueling point in the middle of the taxiway.


Lawrie.

[toprob]

Hi Robin.
Just a couple of small things i noticed at Welly.  The grass textures in the middle of the Caketin are shimmering and fading in and out, and i must be going blind, because im damned if i can see the beehive in there anywhere.
Also at NZPP, i have an airport beacon tower in the middle of runway 11 (at the rwy-16 end) and beside the tower, a fueling point in the middle of the taxiway.


Lawrie.

The caketin grass has been raised up a little to stop the shimmering (and hardened because I know someone would want to land in there) but it does seem to suffer from low-res mesh dropout from a distance.
The beehive misses out because it doesn't reach the size/prominence ratio. It may be big in the hearts of NZers, but really it's an ugly little mole-shaped blemish.
Paraparaumu will be released as a freeware model later this year. This is because I was unable to do an aerial photoshoot in the time I was there -- it was raining.

EDIT: On second-thoughts, I should point out that I was kidding about the mole bit -- although it's the funniest bit of the Austin Powers movie, it is a bit offensive:)
The scenery is open to development, if a Wellingtonian would like to potter away at a few additions. The things you can add are limitless, but unfortunately development time for Wellington was limited to 3 months.

[Snowman]

I can live without the Beehive, it was just an observation. All the IMPORTANT things are there. The caketin shimmer i can live with, it too was merely an observation ithought i'd mention, after all, i dont have tp look down into it do i.
Look forward very much to the freeware NZPP later this year. Thanks Robin.

Lawrie.

[toprob]

The wish-list of objects which I start with is normally pruned because of time constraints. That's the main reality of trying to make a living from this.
As an example of this, one of the things on the Wellington for FSX list is an AI Crusaders stomping all over some little AI Hurricanes in the caketin... It'll be interesting to see if it makes it into the final scenery.

[Snowman]

Now that little "stomping" animation WOULD be interesting..........

[ardypilot]

The grass textures in the middle of the Caketin are shimmering and fading in and out, and i must be going blind, because im damned if i can see the beehive in there anywhere.
Also at NZPP, i have an airport beacon tower in the middle of runway 11 (at the rwy-16 end) and beside the tower, a fueling point in the middle of the taxiway.

Just to confirm I also see the same thing in my sim.

An addtional thing to add (not sure if this is just for me though), I cannot see any marina piers next to Te Papa, only the boats:

I remember seeing jettys there in one of the preview screenshots, I'm sure.

On the whole though, excellent job! (I hope I am not being a downer)

[toprob]

That's interesting, these are default objects, from the same library as the boats. Do you have a marina at Tauranga?

[Snowman]

Marina and buildings by Te Papa all ok in mine Rob..........

Lawrie.

[ardypilot]

That's interesting, these are default objects, from the same library as the boats. Do you have a marina at Tauranga?

I'm guessing it should appear here:

If so, then no I don't have the marina. Would it be possible to send me the missing files?

Another thought- would it have anything to do with my display settings?

[Snowman]

Yep, thats where the marina should be Trolly (i live in TGA). I dont see the ships or the cranes etc at the port to the right of your screenie either that are in the scenery, or a lot of other buildings that show in my sim.. Guess this is one for Rob to sort.
Do you have your autogen settings all the way up on dense, or very dense ??
I have mine ALL the way up.

Lawrie.

[Zenith]

So I remember back a ways when Someone by the name of Trolly suggested removing Marina objects in Auckland to save Frame Rates Guess if you removed the default bgls then they still apply in the newer sceneries as well?

[toprob]

Another thought- would it have anything to do with my display settings?

Yes, try Dense.
Some of the less airportant stuff (that's a new word...) has a variety of Complexity settings, I don't remember how it worked at Tauranga, but with Wellington you will get more objects at every setting all the way up to Very Dense.
Try setting it to Very Sparse -- you can land, but there isn't much point...