FMSXYZ New Version V1.1.0

[Perry]

Because of this issue I posted a new version of FMSXYZ. V 1.1.7
When you create a new Pano, a red line now appears which you can drag up or down with your mouse. This represents the horizon of your pano.
If you need to adjust this, place it where you believe the earth and sky would meet to your view.

This may be published a bit premature. I had to quickly tidy up some loose ends in the programming. but I think I got them all.

In this version, the positions of the Aircraft and Pilot now yield integers, for those which had problems with it. Additionally It also has included a replace feature in the edit menu as well as as a find.

http://polywop.com/fms/FMSIndex.html

Perry

[TreeHugger]

Hi!

@Perry:
I'm glad to hear FMSXYZ will see developement in this department! Perhaps you could think about mapping onto a sphere as well? Practically all Panos for download are spherical and it would extend FMS usefulness by a big margin.

@lcsaba:
Youre welcome to experiment a bit with mfv73, that's what it's meant for.

To get a better overview, I suggest to get rid of the fixed pilot position. Just replace the FIXED keyword with a number slightly higher than the third one, like 0 0 1.7 2. Now you can navigate through the scene via Numpad keys (not useful for flying, but for examination)

The ground level is the first face in the list, there are four lines like this:
1000 1000 4
1000 -1000 4
-1000 -1000 4
-1000 1000 4

The last number is the height (4m), change it together with your pilot position to move the ground plane relative to the background. This way you can match the real and the visual horizon.

If the horizon is tilted, things get more complicated. My solution was to counter-rotate the pano-sphere, just a little bit. I've written a comment line to the file: // rotation 1° 0.5° 120°, this is the rotation around x, y and z-axis. This will not match perfectly with your pano, but the difference is rather small.

The long list of coordinates are faces forming a sphere with 1000m radius(or a three-quarter sphere, since the lower quadrant is missing...). It's just basic trigonometry hacked together in a script.

Good luck with your scene!

Regards,
Frank

[Perry]

Oh FMSXYZ is still ongoing developemnet, It just is a bit slow, because I work on it while I have time. It's a hobby.

Question ... how many panels does a sphere have? and can you give me a good example I could look off of ? I could create my own of course, but I would like to follow popular convention.

The pano example I used for FMSXYZ was service High and that one isn't a sphere.

Perry

[TreeHugger]

Hi Perry,

take a look at mfv73-scenery, I gave the link is a few postings back.

I found 32 slices for latitude and 16 for longitude to be sufficient. This way the quads are nearly square around the horizon and you'll need a multiple of 8 to match 8 texture patches.

Since the lowest 45° are missing on many panos, that makes actually 32*12 quads. 384 unlit polys dont hit performance noticeably and it's just enough to smooth over trapezoid stretching.

Regards,
Frank

[lcsaba]

I have to draw your attention to the General Discussions/Compared to G3 subject.

If it is true that FMS is good for beginners but later the professional simsulators are better, and the development of FMS is frozen something has to be done, (for instance the efforts of Perry are such).
Especially because someone stated somewhere at this Forum that the professional simulator providers are waiting for the death of FMS, this would be their interest.

I am in correspondence with some Hungarian modelers, one of those is a professional who live on this business says:
(I guess ddwaner would say this as well.)

”I would be happy if there will be no need to use expensive simulators, and I would be able to give to the hands of my clients free of charge products. If there were such product I would be happy to produce the exact copy of the real models to practice with those.
Although a lot of people are using FMS before their first take offs later only few of them continue practicing (clearly the advanced needs are not met by FMS).

This is the reason, that not mentioning some simple (for beginners) models there are hardly no phisycally and grafically precize models.”

This is the reason why I am now dealing with panorama landscapes, on one hand, and although I have never seen Reflex or Real Flight models flying I guess that there are nicely flying FMS models as well not to mention my “Mefisto” and ggunners R4. I am playing with those a lot.

The memo:
I might be very naive but would like to propose or to suggest something:

1. There are weird things about FMS said TreeHugger,
2. It seems to me that the development of FMS is freeze or stopped.
3. There are FMS fans and there are software people among those, (I am not)
4. Some of my fellow modelers are saying; forget FMS, the professional products are better.
5. That costs a lot of money.
6. I like very much some functions of FMS and I have enough flying practice using FMS that now I am flying reasonably well my real RC sailplanes (see http://www.sztaki.hu/~csaba.laszlo)
7. Just as an example I mention that among the FMS functions is the “chase”. The Reflex XTR has got a same function.
I like it because it reminds me to my feelings when I followed a sailplane on a slope or in a thermal.
I would like to have a new FMS function, a camera attached to the helmet of the flying pilot.
8. RealFlight 3.5 has got this function.
9. It is possible that only the distance parameter of FMS chase function should be decreased to: “0” to achieve this new function.
10. The OpenSource software’s are spreading, my colleagues are using a lot of them, not only Linux, but other Internet related product, even SW vendors like SUN has got the Open Source Access manager, the federated identity SW.
11. The proposal: somebody who knows them has to ask Möllers to open the source of FMS.

[TreeHugger]

[lcsaba]

[lcsaba]

[Perry]

[TreeHugger]

[Perry]

[TreeHugger]

[Perry]

[TreeHugger]

Hi Perry,

every 3D application follows its own axis definition, it's just that some are more popular than others. Metasequoias axis paradigm isn't standard and neither is any other. E.g. I'm used to work in Blender, where Z-axis is up. This only really matters when importing/exporting data.

All I care for is this: If you have three values for coordinates in FMS, then the first one determines left/right, the second front/back and the third up/down. Since this is the order in FMS, calling them xyz appears to be most natural to me, but I can live with any other definition just as well.

(Hehe, snide remark : Following your definition, shouldn't you rename your software to FMSXZY then?)

Nevermind, as long as we can agree upon a common meaning...

edit:
The .par files for FMS airplanes use a really bizarre coordinate system:
positive X is forward, positive Y is right and positive Z is pointing down... figure that!

[Perry]