kemp@convex.com (Phil Kemp) (06/20/91)
About a week or so ago I posted a request for coordinate conversion
information for the Microsoft Fligth sim ver 4.0 as well as a request
for scenery file archives. I received a few responses but most people
were interested in the same data I was looking for.
Thank you to Alex France for his note: I include portion of his
response here for anyone who is interested.
Alex writes:
Yes, I couldn't agree more. I've recently been playing with the
scenery editor adding my local field correctly and local visual
reporting points. I started from SubLogic's Western Europe scenery
disk which has the runways wrong for my local field (Cranfield) and
doesn't have the VOR on the field, etc.
Now, when I slew to the field the Latitude comes out OK (i.e the North
bit), but the longitude is wrong by a few degrees. I put this down to
the 'grid canted by -8 degrees to map onto Lambert Conformal Conic'
comment.
So, I stuck to putting in the scenery in MS co-ords relative to where
it thought my local field was. As far as I can work out,
0.0001 MS Co-ord units ==> 1 inch
(which gives 6.336 ==> 1 st mile, 7.2 ==> 1 nt mile)
These seem to work out about right for objects within 5 to 10 miles
from a known reference, but I could really do with the maths to
convert Long/Lat direct into the co-ords for further afield stuff.
Thanks for your input Alex.
I called Microsoft directly and the support person while quite helpful
could not provide me with an equation or an explanation of how to
convert from one coordiante system to another. I suggested that they
put a little 'convert coordinate' program into the software
distribution in the future.
It took a while but I finally have a static scenery file for the
Banff-Calgary corridor. It seems that the conversion routines internal
to the scenery editor cannot handle lat/longs when one is too far
north. 'Too far' I can't quantify but when I slew from within the
scenery editor, there are some rather large discreet jumps in the slew
coordinates. Sometimes as much as a minute or so. So I took a guess
and plopped Calgary International somewhere reasonable. From there I
used VOR and DME readings combined with a map to place much of the
scenery. I could have saved many hours if there was a program to
accuratly convert from lat/long to internal coordinates.
As an aside I would comment that the scenery editor cannot handle
large mountains or long rivers. When plotting the Bow river from
Calgary to Banff I was forced to split it in to three pieces. Large
mountains and 'ridges' also cannot be built. The editor simply refuses
to slew to larger/further coordinates...
Now that I have the base mapped I would like to offer my scenery in
trade for someone else's work.... I would be prepared to send you what
I have in return for some interesting scenery from your part of the
world... What I have now is modest at best but the start is there... A
couple of downtown buildings, three airports, a few rocks by banff and
some limited NAV aids....
I am not interested in breaking any laws here so I am only soliciting
for personal efforts of scenery building. Please don't offer anything
that would infringe on anyone's copyright laws...
To those folks who mailed me with requests for archive sites, I
received zero responses offerring any scenery files. The only
suggestion was to subscribe to FSFORUM on COMPUSERVE. It seems that
there is some trading of files there. Thanks to whoever sent me that
tidbit.
Well long enough for now.
PK
--
Phil Kemp
CONVEX Computer of Canada Ltd.
Voice:(403)-233-2815
UUCP:kemp@convex.comgedwards@ncratl.AtlantaGA.NCR.COM (Gordon Edwards) (06/21/91)
I have some scenery of Atlanta and the surrounding area that I would like to trade for other scenery files that have been designed on Microsoft's Scenery Designer. -- ============================================================================= Gordon Edwards, N4VPH | "Nothing Unreal Exists" NCR Engineering & Manufacturing | gedwards@ncratl.atlantaga.ncr.com | Kiri-Kin-Tha's First Law of Metaphysics