Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2011 19:29:09 -0700 (PDT) From: Chris Coggon Subject: Black Rock Lab for Xplane To: Austin Tate Hi Austin It's been a hot summer here - hardly any rain, though we did get a bit Sunday. It was a good day to stay inside and get pre-packed for my moooove, and mess a little with the Black Rock Lab for Xplane. Attached is an almost complete, animated BRL, ready for the sim. It weighs in at 30 meg unzipped, but the BRL itself is only 5 meg, the rest for the .dsf file that defines the terrain for that scenery tile. To install, extract the .rar, drop the entire folder into Xplane's Custom Scenery folder, then fire up the sim. You will start with your last airplane at your last airport. Hit P to Pause if you want to. Select Aircraft and choose something small, say an RC plane. You are going inside the BRL and do not want a 747! Select Location - Global Airport. In the text box type XBRL and click Go To This Airport. After loading, your airplane will appear just outside of the Control Room in the BRL. Flying out of the BRL is not recommended. Overflights are easy: Location - Local Map - set altitude, heading and speed to taste - Enter. Since you are running this in Demo mode on an iPad, I can not guarantee frame rate performance. This model was designed to run on faster desktop machines. Check eBay for copies of Xplane, or get one from xplane.org The keys A. C and @ give you different views outside the plane. Toggle Q to keep looking left, E for right and W ahead. Using these with - and = for zoom will allow you almost any POV inside the Lab. The best way to view the Lab is with the A, arrows and the + and - keys. Play around with them. Hit 2 to open the roof and 1 to close it. The roof opens based on the flap detents of the loaded plane. Try and General Aviation - King Air 200: the plane is big for the Lab but zoom out and toggle 1 and 2 keys to get the open and close cycle at proper speed. The floor is elevated from the model, the lit night textures are also bad, and the added solar farm east of the Lab is not oriented properly. On the whole, this model is late development, suffering from the drive crash recovery program. Fixing it will require back-conversion to Blender, which strips anims and textures. These will have to be re-added to the final model, but this one will give you a taste of things. I've also messed with the SC mesh reduction and that's coming along. It will yield a better model than I origianally did, thanks to experience. It is best to hold on the SC model until I have a stable aircraft to fly it. That is where I am focussed now, getting at least one of the surviving 5 aircraft flight worthy of a Supercar. That done, it makes sense to go back to modelling. Time is short to Sept 3, my move date, and the new satellite Lab will start to come on line shortly after. My commute will be cut from 90 to 10 minutes one way, so some of that time saved will be going to Supercar. Please let me know what you think of the BRL. Cheers Chris Black Rock Lab.rar