Before and After Action - Phantom by Heatblur

[jenrick]

Nice, is it something that pulling the chart off Skyvector could be automated?

@Deacon211

Without maps (usually JOGAIRs) you could use Skyvector for sectionals, edited via some painting program, then printed, hopefully at the same scale, and glued together into a flip chart.

I’ve done something similar for long flights in MSFS where I’m trying to do it old school, I just don’t print it out. Usually use my tablet to keep track of where the heck I’m going.

Course line

Cut and rotate (I’d usually just have heading and time to go for the next leg.)

Having the turn radius would have been nice, but for general aviation flying this works pretty well.

@jross

They had something similar, a primative version, for cars IIRC. “Trip Tic’s” or something like that. Lemme see…

Ok, AI comes through. They were call TripTik’s:

Nice! Never saw a purpose built one for that. My mom made road atlas covers that had a clear plastic overlay sheets, book marks, and had about 5 dry erase markers. Whoever was riding shotgun’s job was navigation, and we better have primary and alternate routes for the days trip! I know my parents still have one atlas setup that way, I have to look around and see if I have mine somewhere.

[wheelsup_cavu]

@jross

Need an installer; I’ve had to learn a lot of things from scratch. Haven’t had time to figure out an installer. I’m sure it’s not a big deal though. Should make the download smaller and easier to update.

Have you considered using WinRAR’s built in self extracting executable?
There are several other videos on YouTube on how to do this too.

Create an Installer using WinRAR

Create an Installer using WinRAR

Create an Installer using WinRAR
https://youtu.be/6BGZYIEqx7s
Uploaded to YouTube on April 03, 2010

Wheels

[Deacon211]

Those are awesome!

They’d look just like the leg strips that you have, except folded in the middle and glued back to back.

Like a pop up book turned sideways. Your leg would stretch from the near end to the far.

Flip the page toward you and the next leg would be laid flat before you. And so on.

The one thing that was nice about these things (and paper in general) is that it was all at the same scale.

So, not only could you develop a sense of how long it took to transit a certain distance after awhile just by looking at it. But, for the same reason, you never had that awkward experience that you get on a map app where you think your turn is 3 miles away when it’s actually only 300ft away!

[jenrick]

@Deacon211

The one thing that was nice about these things (and paper in general) is that it was all at the same scale.

So, not only could you develop a sense of how long it took to transit a certain distance after awhile just by looking at it. But, for the same reason, you never had that awkward experience that you get on a map app where you think your turn is 3 miles away when it’s actually only 300ft away!

Ah, hand’t thought about that. I usually end up with a given chunk of the route at the same scale, but it wouldn’t be hard to keep the whole thing at the same scale. I’d just want to have more checkpoints to break it up, versus a long straight leg. Excellent suggestion!

[jross]

I need to get out more…I’ve lamented the inabilty to make my UI look ‘pretty’ since I can’t access the chart images (maps - images; map ‘tiles’). These things:

A random one from Afghanistan.

Well, seems that 2 years ago-ish they started to publish them in the main install folder: Mods | terrains | [map name] | RasterCharts. Appears to have happend on/about the release of the Sinai map.

I KNOW I’ved looked before but didn’t realize it was more than TWO years since my last attempt. Time files.

They appear to have even named them in a logical and understandable (to my simple brain) manner.

Along with, finally, figuring out the map projection (or coming up with a method to do so) will provide me the final primative tools to do the UI “more better”.

Now to convert & stitch them all together, then geo-reference the result. Then I can do, via kneeboards, what @Deacon211 and @jenrick demo’d above. Or at least something ‘good enough for government work’

[jross]

Man I’m such a nerd…this is fun.

Starting with Nevada at lowest resolution (fewer files and establish a work flow)

From this:

4 Folders, 64 images per folder…convert, stitch together..

To this:

Then 2x2 and stitich together…

Finally this

That was the tedious part, made MUCH easier using ImageMagick (need to throw them a few bones: saved me days of coding this)

Now for the icky part: math - need to get it projected into DCSGrok. It appears ED has already done this from first glance but still need to geo-reference it (not sure the correct term - I’m still working on my Cartography Merit Badge)

I may be up too late tonight

[smokinhole]

Very cool @Deacon211! I wish more had survived for you to share.

[jross]

Ok so, the above all sounds like a great idea but as I churn through all the images (there’s a bunch that seem useless; inconsistent ‘tiling’; etc) I’ve come to the conclusion that the ‘VFR sectional-like’ charts, whille cool, matches up with DCS very little - there’s a whole lot of stuff in there you’ll never see from the cockpit. No way they really could I guess. So, making a compromise.

[jross]

So while the Phantom was down for maintenace I played with a few things:

• Added the ability to pick sortie types under certain conditions so you can practice basic stuff.
• Played with GIMP (image manipulator) - I am NOT an artist.

Relief map of sorts

Learned how to Bump Map

@Troll I need a better image for the Viggen Any ideas?

Got the C-130 in there, with Air drops. I have no idea how to operate that thing; just give you a target, with dudes on the ground to play ‘catch’; spawn some boxes, etc. This is a cross-country (Afghanistan) to do an air drop on a FARP it looks like.

Need to icon-ify the map me thinks. Lot of text and such.

Getting the colors to all work together isn’t going well. Why did I use this color for the ‘Kill Box’ sorite. Must have been drinking. My color palette needs work. Will work on this over time.

@Deacon211

Here’s a start on getting fix-to-fix information. Initially on the kneeboard

There’s not a lot of room there if I want to keep each fix on the same line. The above shows an overwatch sortie you can:

• hold at the IP and wait for something to happen to the grunts (on a descrete freq)
• do orbits around the grunts as they move waiting for a ‘call to action’
• scout out ahead.
• They will ‘halt’ should you see something dangerous (via voice command or that icky F-10 menu thing)

So you have:

• WP name
• Zulu time over each WP
• [ flight time to next WP ]
• Mag heading & range (NM’s)
• Geo coords

The IP is where the grunt convoy starts; your IP. Their desitnation is END. These are dynamicially created fixes but they need a name to make the code happy. I truncate them to <= 8 characters to try and save some space on each line. Perhaps giving those 2 points a more military name would sound better (simple to do using the phonetic alphabet even).

AOR is a bug. S’pose to be “BULL”[seye].

Geo coords: do I need those I wonder. Seems I do as I recall wanting to know this info at one point.

Now you may ask, “how did I come up with those times?”

Since DCSGrok [now] supports 14+? platforms, from the UH-1, A-10/V8B, Apache, Viper, Mirage, yadda, yadde, to include the C-130 I have to ‘classify’ these things. Hornet/Viper/Mirage/Tomcat are all in the ‘multi-role’ class and all have the same speeds (TAS) defined depending on phase of flight. I wanna say the multi-role is 420 (I’d have to look into the database but sounds right).

AV-8 “Fast attack” slightly less

A-10 “Slow attack” much less

etc.

Made them what seems to me to a tad bit slow to allow you (mostly me) some ‘fudge’. Engine start and taxi time is figured in (configurable, default 20 minutes). I use geo coords (round Earth thing) and on paper the distances all seem to work out. The full INS thing lasted a lot longer than I thought it would on my first Phantom training sortie.

Thanks for playing,

JR

[komemiute]

I’m just a small time artist… but if you need to bounce ideas off of someone, I’m always available.

[Troll]

@jross

I need a better image for the Viggen

What do you have in mind? Real or DCS image?

[jross]

Just curious if you have or know of any. The Viper ones I use are from DCS. Say what you will about DCS: it is a good ‘cinematic’ platform.

These are ‘me’, in DCS of course

‘Action shots’ - I could use the AI for Viggen pix’s but, meah. I dont even now how to fly that, yet.

[jross]

It’s the tools that frustrate me. I downloaded GIMP a few days ago…man, there’s a lot of buttons on that thing!

I know nadda about this. Pretty sure it is ‘shaded relief’ using the elevatin of each pixel to assign a color value. Here’s a random example from the web (some state agency):

What I do is: programatically generate a source (a height map) by processing a LARGE world-wide dataset, using multiple files, of terrain elevations. I had to build tools to convert; change the endian; stitch them together; etc - from an arbitrary section of the ‘world’.

This gets me a matrix of 16-bit integers which I then normalize to map each point to a value between 0-255. For the image I just set all three channels to the same value. Viola. a gray-scale image.

Now, while I’m doing the above I could color it myself (instead of all channels same value use, say, some shade of brown, or green, etc). It works but looks like an algorithm did it (a very simple-minded one).

Seems there’s another skill I need to learn: masks, layers, etc. To keep it from looking too ‘digital’ it will take more knowledge of all the tools in these types of apps (GIMP, cus it’s cheap) than I have.

Oh, and how would one get those contour lines in there, as they do here:

Using the same source, one layer does the contour lines; one does the coloring; one for lighting (bump map?); then ‘sandwich’ them all together, each ‘layer’ with an alpha channel?

[Troll]

@jross

Just curious if you have or know of any

The only ones I’ve got of real life Viggens are old scans from my military days.

Other pics may be copyrighted.

I’m not much of a screenshot artist, but I could get a few for you…

[jross]

@Troll

Other pics may be copyrighted.

Good point. I used wiki and my own from DCS with that in mind.

[Troll]

PM sent

[jross]

[komemiute]

So… okay there’s a lot to digest and not everything is easy.

But it can be done. The first step would be to get in touch in a voice chat so I can narrow down my questions to tackle your specific needs.

I mean - you don’t have to, I’m just saying that like this I can’t simply write a few paragraphs of text to tell you what you need. I’m not that good.

[jenrick]

For the contour lines I’m think you set an standard distance between them, say 10 meters, and just throw a black pixel on those height pixels, add 10 meters repeat. You’d have to figure a work around for plates, etc, but on slopes that would work I’d think.

[jross]

Day 2, more ‘Pattern Work” in the Phantom (cus I need it, bad)

[ooops, wrong campaign image]

Day two saw me putting black streaks on the runway(s) at KLAS. Man, this is a lot more work to fly smoothly. Not much to say but it did call out some missing things in DCSGrok

• Fumbling with the map (F10) is a bit more of a chore when I don’t have the comms or TACAN freq (Jester helps but he won’t always be there)
• So, I’m going to create a separte (or 2) kneeboard maps with all the airport comms freq’s and TACAN’s.
• Found a bug I created when I added the “Heading & time to” next WP data on the kneeboard.

It brought home to me the rationale for the 4TH Gen jets, esp. the Fly-By-Wire thing-a-ma-bob. And I’m a HUD cripple. Got the sense that I need be more ‘in tune’ with my internal Velocity Vector, esp. on final.