Afternoon all
About two months ago I saw a post on here regarding Swedish sceneries and the total amount of airports available being remarkably high which is always a good thing for FS9. There was however mention made on the thread that no scenery exist for Hemavan (ESUT) for FlightSim. Only a link to an X-Plane scenery was given by Dedl.
Having some knowledge of conversions from FSX to FS9, I thought this would be a great opportunity to see if conversions between X-Plane and FS9 was a possibility so I took on the challenge for myself to see if it can be done with relative ease. Imagine the possibilities if that was possible and what new sceneries could then become "available" to use in our beloved old sim.
I had an idea in my head on how I was going to go about but that idea quickly led me into a dead-end street (see here ).
Thus, I had to go about it the old fashioned long way of doing model for model and then placing them myself afterwards. For now this is just a quick notice of the fact that the models convert with a fair amount of easy but the textures and modelparts do present a slight headache as it is sometimes split into 2 or 3 seperate models making up a single one (the large hangar and terminal being examples of this). None the less, the models are converted and display quite well in FS9.
The airport file (apt.dat) which is the "AFCAD" of the X-Plane world is a plain text file but for now I could not see any similarities with the FS9-AFCAD style (XML-file) types. This means that the AFCADS will most probably have to be done from scratch for every airport being converted except if some clever programmer could write a script which would automate this task.
The biggest problem I see so far (with this particular scenery and possibly many X-Plane sceneries) is the fact that most X-Plane developers make use of a large amount of library objects to "fill" the airports. So short of converting all the libraries available (which is an almost impossible task) the "filler objects" would have to be added from FS9 libraries to make the sceneries complete and more alive.
See the extract below of a portion of the .dsf-file (file placement in X-Plane) making mention of the fact that libraries are extensively used.
15.069657 / 65.800824 / 15.078397 / 65.814650 sim / exclude_net 15.069657 / 65.800824 / 15.078397 / 65.814650 sim / require_agpoint 1/0 sim / require_object 1/0 sim / require_facade 1/36 sim / require_facade 6/0 NFED4? KICK? TJBO ‡? lib / street / waste_management / TrashCan_random.obj lib / street / waste_management / Dumpster_m10_full.obj lib / street / waste_management / Dumpster_30Y_full_2.obj lib / street / waste_management / Dumpster_30Y_full.obj lib / street / waste_management / Dumpster_30Y_empty /Dumpster_30Y_empty_3.obj lib / street / various / porta_potty.obj lib / street / furniture / Park_bench_01.obj lib / street / furniture / Rubbish_bin_06.obj lib / industrial_area / goods / barrels_8x_03.obj lib / industrial_area / goods / pall_stack_ets_us /damage_and_grunge/Oil_spill.obj assets / puddles / puddle1_small.obj assets / puddles / puddle4_medium. obj assets / Shaders / Hangar1_shader.obj assets / runway / rwy15.obj assets / runway / rwy33.obj assets / misc_objects / pile1.obj lib / cars / car_static_invar.obj assets / taxisigns / Taxisign_ESUT.obj assets / lights / lampa1.obj assets / buildings / Terminal / Terminal1-3.obj assets / buildings / Terminal / Terminal1-2.obj assets / buildings / Terminal / Terminal1-1.obj assets / buildings / Garage1.obj assets / buildings / Hangar1.obj assets / buildings /TaltHangar.obj assets / misc_objects / Elhus.obj assets / buildings / hangar2-2.obj assets / buildings / hangar2-1.obj assets / buildings / hangar2-Door.obj assets / buildings / Misc1.obj assets / GSE / Truck -1-Orange.obj assets / misc_objects / fuelstation.obj YLOP ??? assets / lines / White_line_solid.lin assets / Vegetation / Grass_overlay.pol assets / runway / Runway_overlay1.lin Ground-textures \ ESUT-7.pol Ground-textures \ ESUT-6.pol Ground-textures \ ESUT-5.pol Ground- textures \ ESUT-4.
Please share your own learnings here if you are also looking into this kind of thing so we can all learn and who knows what we could add to "A century of flight"!
Kind regards
Kobus