Condor Soaring Sim: Post Mills VT Short Flight

What to do aviation-wise under quarantine? I've been building a landscape for the Condor 2 soaring sim, for the region in which I mostly fly, Vermont and New Hampshire. I don't fly gliders but am hoping to this summer, and like with my private and instrument ratings, the simulator was a huge benefit--I cut dozens of hours of expensive training because sims, despite their limitations, do help build skills. The glider sim Condor comes with some great scenery for Slovenia and Europe but nothing for my region. So, I learned how to build it (not easy!) and put scenery together for VT and NH. I just finished the tree maps which give the sim a much more realistic feel, especially when close to the ground. I have no idea if the gliders fly like a real ones. I've flown in a Blanik L-23 a few times, and that's what I'm flying here. Seems pretty close. I haven't figured out which way the tow plane departs--it seems to change. At 4:00 I release and I turn right, like I always do, and the plane followed this time! This video is a recording of the left eye of my VR goggles.

[@surveyore7]

Very Cool!.. I do a lot of 'simming' with FSX.. Watching your flights with your 'Mooney' inspired me to buy one for my simulator. Fast plane!.. ;)

[@aloofdork]

Thanks! Wow, glad to hear. Yes it is, in real life too!

[@christheother9088]

I used to fly hang gliders and sailplanes and I'm retired and looking at simulators. Can you give a general explanation of what you did to build the "tree maps"?

[@aloofdork]

Sure. In Condor 2 a forest map is a 2048x2048 grayscale BMP that maps onto a scenery tile. Anywhere pixels have a value greater than 0 trees will appear in the scenery. To make mine, in Photoshop, I super saturated the aerial photograph for each tile (which are 8192x8192), did a color selection on roads, buildings, water and any other odd colors. I filled that selection with black and the inverse with white. I shrunk that image to 2048x2048 and then did a threshold filter on the reduced size b&w image, because in shrinking one gets gray pixels. I adjusted the threshold filter to produce what looked like it'd make good forests (roads, lakes, fields, mostly clear of trees). It's time consuming!

[@christheother9088]

@@aloofdork Wow, thanks for that detailed description. Your results look great.