Classic British Flight Sim

Huge thanks this weeks to Colin and Rob. Colin has been cycling round Thurleigh like a mad man on my behalf, and Rob has supplied this beautiful little tinker. She's siting outside hanger 2 for now....
I'm not entirely sure if the dimensions are right for H2. Its been a lot of guess work and approximations without anything concrete to go on. Sometimes it looks OK, others it looks completely wrong. It depends on which photo / video you look at. I'll get a better feel when I get some of the other buildings up. With many of these I'm having to use the dimensions of a car or door on the building to try and scale it, but because of the position of H2, this is proving harder than for H1 and H3.

well chaps, I mage some progress with H3 last night and was pretty happy with it...
H2 still didn't look right, looked too tall, but when I placed them side my side in Sketchup, they like about right. What do you think fellas?

H1 now done. The textures are a bit clean at the moment so will need toning down.

Hi Chaps,

I touched on this before, how to add a light or beacon to a model in MCX. I found a video that Arno had done on how to add an effect to a model in MCX and it looked pretty straight forward. I had created a little model of a red light in Sketchup as part of the hanger and made the dome of it translucent. as shown in fig 1.

In MCX I've added a light effect inside the translucent part as shown in Fig. 2
When you add the light, you choose an RGB colour rather than an effect. I've two questions. a. Should I be adding the effect inside my translucent model, i.e. will the light penetrate? b. should I use a red light or a white light? i.e. will a white light inside the red translucent object show as being red? The other thing I should mention is that I haven't managed to get any of these lights to display, so I must still be doing something wrong. What was curious was that after I had opened the compiled BGL to edit the light, the options had changed from an RGB colour value to an Effect Name, fx_light8B0000. Anyone able to shed any light (excuse the pun).

We have light!

A couple of pointers. Firstly, MCX does generate an FX file if you use the Attached Objects Editor and select "Lights". It puts this fx file in the same location as the exported BGL file, so you need to copy the FX files it creates into your FSX effects folder. Alternatively, you can add an existing effect rather than a light, simply by selecting "Effect" and browsing your effects folder to find the one you want to use.

I'm not particularly keen on the ground tiles that I have created at night, great during the day, but too bright for the middle of the night, so that's something else that will need looked at...

No progress to report this weekend as the computer hasn't been on. I've a few iron in the fire for more info, so we'll see how they progress. I need to start reading the SDK to see if I can do the working Cats, but I'm not sure if this will be possible as I've been using Sketchup rather than MAX. The arrestors I think will be ok, as I don't think they animate in the same way. Anyway, we'll see what time I get this week.

Hi Ben,
You probably already know this, but as you were querying dimensions of hangars, Google Earth lets you run a tape measure (yellow line) along anything on the satellite pic. The results show in the info. box. Note that, check another etc until you have your data.



EDIT
Unfortunately, the historical shots are blanked out, so there are only 2 of your hangars to see.

Hi Mike,

Yes, that's what I've been using where I didn't have close up photographs, but it can be significantly out. I think this is due to the photos on Google (and the other satellite services too) being taken at an angle. If you take the Kinetheodelite towers, they measure at approximately 6m x 6m but they are actually about 4.5 x 4.5. It doesn't sound like much, but when you model them, the wrong one looks very wrong. Its less of an issue with the larger hangers, as a metre here or there is more difficult to notice. The best way (I've found) is if you can find something on the building that has a known size. A door is a good one, or maybe a van that is parked immediately in front. With the towers I used the photos that Colin took to count the bricks and used the standard British brick measurements, plus a few mil for the motar to work out the size. That worked out about the right size for the door too, so I knew it was there or there about.

Some good news, one of the chaps I'd got in touch with has sent me through a DVD with scans of photos he took in November '96. Obviously it had been empty for a few years, but I've got so useful photos to go from of buildings that have long since gone on the northern side. It also raises some questions too. The plans he has sent through are from '98, so still trying to source some info from earlier, particularly the Oscillating platform, Cats and traps on the Northern side, but lots to do.

Don't know if this has been posted before, but came across this little clip of a Sea Vixen on the raised deck at Bedford...

http://www.seavixen.org/video-library/r ... -procedure