Well after hours of getting the night textures to work correctly the PMDG JS4100 aircraft is finished.  I have put it on the forums section for now under Fleet News until I figure out where I want to put it permanently.  That was a rough one for some reason but it is complete.  I will now be working on our new focus city in Omaha but would like to get a few flights in myself this weekend (at least thats the plan).

Well the JS4100 looks great in the day time, nut the night textures are a nightmare.  PMDG and most payware companies now use a .DDS conversion with a DXT5 compression instead of a 32 bit DTX3 compression.  This is specifically for FSX and can be a royal pain in the… well you know.  So when all the textures are “flattened” to go into the sim the night alpha layer goes away thus the plane GLOWS in the dark.  This is no good and has to be fixed.  O when I get home from work I have most likely an entire night night of pulling my hair out, lots of cussing, then lots of confessing.  I have been told when you pray for patience you are given a lot of opportunities to be patient… gee, thanks.

I am putting further expansion of Hartford on hold for a bit even though I have the routes all set to go.  It seems the BDL hub is taking off a bit slower than I anticipated which happens.  While Cleveland and Milwaukee are doing well Hartford will need to pay for itself a bit before going further.  We put an “ad” up at flightsim.com to see if we could get some new pilots for Hartford and that ad is not really producing what I had hoped for “so far”.  We will wait and see what the weekend brings.

We are looking at an extraordinary month so far, we may actually hit 600 flights which is amazing considering I took the airline over two months ago with virtually no pilots other than myself, Zane and Chris.   I think the short flights and the smaller regional aircraft are a really big attraction and this is the reason for the growth.

Well I did not want to buy this one as I have always thought that the Jetstream planes are some of the ugliest birds in the sky.  I know it is a good plane and all but it still is ugly.  So I bought the ugly bird and am beginning to paint it in GLE colors.  PMDG makes the finest paint kits in the business which makes it nice to paint.  I have completed the main fuselage and am now waiting for the plane to download.  I hope I don’t have any issues with the .dll files and the Wilco planes I have on board.

I have a feeling that once I get the new colors on her and fly it, it will no longer be an ugly bird but one of my favorites.  I am a big fan of just about anything PMDG makes, although I could do without the 747-400 and MD-11 (I am a regional equipment guy).  I would like to get this thing done tonight but I have a feeling it will not.  Everything needs to be converted to DXT5 files and flipped upside down.  The templates are HUGE and my computer LOVES to flip large images (NOT).  Just the GLE texture has 27 layers and once I bring the 27 layers into PMDG’s 40 layers everything kinda goes to a slow CRAWL.  I know, my problem, not yours.

Obviously I will let you know how that goes.

I thought I would start a little blog of my own, me sharing my thoughts and projects I am working on.  This may bore the heck out of you but I am putting it up anyway, who knows, it may spur some interesting discussion.  So there it is…