GMT

I'ma go exploring the first ... 100hrs of gameplay. I know the map is open from the start, I sure hope everything you can do is available right from the start aswell.

you only need alpha channels for overlay textures. but it's easy. take your planned overlay texture and create an alpha channel for it by making the parts you wanna see white and everything else black. or shades of grey if you want transparency. that's all there is to it. easily done in photoshop with a further layer. import it with the sc4tool's texture tool. it also scales down the textures to the different zoom levels for you if you're too lazy to make them yourself. in the RMIP, all markings are overlay textures and everything else is base textures. I did a lot of that stuff when I converted some of the 3 wides to match RMIP2, also had to do some custom overlay textures to match the wider runway. not that much of a mirracle really. but a lot of work. took me a total of a good 20hrs to do so, incl learning curve, so I quit at the point where all that was left was RETs (rapid exit taxiway, the diagonal taxiway connectors if you want). I think the bigger problem with creating these textures is to find an empty ID range to prevent conflicts with other plugins.

except for the tank nothing new under the sun... am I the only one who thinks the city looks massive in that parachute scene? I mean, we're just looking at about 1/3 of it...

4 wides aren't that uncommon (60m) but a rather new thing, most civillian airports still have 3 wides (45m) or at least mainly 3 wides cuz that was standard back when they were built or overhauled. therefore Id rather see diagonals released than 4 wide runways and/or an RMIP version of 3 wides (I assume the RMIP3 project is dead. sadly. last update was over 1,5yrs ago...) for my airport, I created a bunch of RMIP3-ish 3wide puzzle-pieces out of the existing 3 wides and the RMIP2 to get a better transition but that's just for me...

I wouldn't expand between 1a and 1b simply because of taxi clearance between parking jets. especially with the heavies. they are long and wide, you know. and you don't necessarily wanna use lube to make sure to pass between gated ones let's take the scenario of a taxiing aircraft trying to pass between 2 parked ones, with a gate on the left, a gate on the right and the taxiway in between so you basically have to push your wings past the 2 parked planes' tails. what I try is to give 1 tile room between the wingtip and the tails on each side. a 787 is a good 4 x 4 tiles big (the 787-9 is almost 63m long and 61m wide). add another tile for safety margin and you need 14 tiles width to give a save room for taxing a 787-9 between two gated ones. 747-8 is even worse, 70m long and almost 69m wide. that's a good 5x5. 14 tiles width is just enough, I wouldn't mind for 15 tiles total. and so on. What I always do is I measure with the respective lots. I place my lot with the aircraft and then use the lot biggest aircraft in that area (not every aircraft must go everywhere on the airport, that's unrealistic. many airports have taxiways/aprons prohibited to certain aircraft, mostly to heavies due to size or weight regulations) to see if it fits. or I even go ahead and do some photoshop to see if there's enough room to allow for taxiing the ac. From my airport, what I usually do is place the ac and look for 2 tiles room between the ac-lot and the taxiway. that's sufficient room even for 747s. I'd go with 3 if you want to accomodate A380s because that guy is pretty much exactly 5 tiles wide. You can also go and measure at airports. I just did a quick check at Frankfurt (EDDF) and you usually get a minimum of 40-50 meters between taxiway centerline and tail of parked ac. Long story short, don't place anything else than taxiways/ramp between 1a and 1b. same for 1b and 1c aswell as 1c and 2a. 2b, from my point of view, reaches to close to your 18/36 runway. you need another taxiway here and together with this taxiway you barely have a margin between the taxiway and the runway and in general this area is too dense. I would shorten this arm by at least 1 pair of gates, 2 would be even better. instead, I would expand it a with couple of gate arms down towards terminal 3. you can easily fit 2 arms in there so it looks like a fork towards terminal 3. this would allow for enough room to safely place a taxiway between the runway and the gates. I see you use 3 tiles room between the taxiway and the wide runway. that's a total of 88m centerline to centerline. that's an ok margin between the runway and the closest parallel taxiway, I wouldn't go any lower tho on an intl. airport with large aircraft operations, rather increase it by 1 tile. like with everything on the airside of aviation: better safe than sorry. Just think of an airplane coming off the runway left or right for whatever reason (like it recently happened in SanFran after the crashlanding) you don't wanna risk them crashing right into the next terminal or taxiing aircraft just because the taxiway / gate is too close to the runway. EDDF for example has 160m (10 tiles) clearance centerline to centerline between taxiway and runway at the closest point (RWY 18 and TWY W) KFSO comes with 150m approx. Even good ol Kai Tak had about 110 meters. I have 4 tiles between the "new" rwy and it's parallel twy, and 5 between the 2 old rwy and their parallel twy. that's a clearance of, centerline to centerline, 96m at the new and 120m at the old runways. I'd keep terminal 3 where it is. it reaches already pretty far into the approach area of RWY 36, moving it closer to 2b would place it's C arm too close to RWY 36 threshold, even worse if thinking of the missing taxiways. on the bottom line: it's not like you have to pack everything as dense as possible at the gates/taxiways/runways. you have more than enough room to play with from the looks of the screenshots. use it. airports in general are very spacious things, especially on the "airside" (everthing past security check, incl. ramp/apron, taxiways, runways etc).

I just took another look at KATL and I'm a bit stunned. the bar-like sattelite terminals in between the runways are actually inspired by KATL as a design like KLAX or KPHX - which I tried in the first place - just took too much room and since I always start with the runways first and design everything else around them... yeah a different approach had to be done so I came on KATL as it works well with little space, gives quite a bunch of capacity and as a bonus facilitates taxiing. but now, the real funny thing: I totally made up everything else. no inspiration taken from anything. yet the passenger gates left of the 18/36 runway totally looks like KATL aswell... wow

hm.. lets take a whole different approach here... still wip and far from the final product I have in mind, yet quite a lot of work: of course that's just a miniminiminimini version of it as the original is accurate to 1px per meter...

aaaand we gonna get an "official trailer" un thursday. whatever that means... like the other trailers have been fake or what? lol can't wait to see what they wanna show us this time. hopefully some more of the plot / characters EDIT: speaking of GTA in general I just stumbled over a funny thing, coincidence, intentional, whatever: San Andreas starts with the ever-so-famous words of CJ: after five years on the east coast, it was time to go home. IV came in 2008, V comes in 2013 do the maths EDIT2: short heads up, stay tuned for the official trainer 11am eastcoast time today

Most airlines have their own terminal area, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a dedicated building. It happens to become a dedicated building especially around airports with sattelite terminals or several terminal buildings. That's mostly a coincidence if the airline just generates enough volume at that airport, but can be intentional if the airline has a base or a bigger hub here. It's a matter of logic that operators try to gather every airline at a certain terminal area so you don't have a single airline scattered all across the airport. Just like the check-in counters of an airline are gathered. Definitely not an american thing.

I suggest you take a close look at airports like the one you want to build to get an idea of the layout. how are runways situated, how are the taxiways placed, where are the terminal buildings, cargo terminals, service buildings and so on... and use the ruler tool in google earth to get an idea of dimensions. EDIT: and you don't necessarily need to build all the terminal area above ground either. just think of all the airports like KATL that have sattelite terminals connected to each other via tunnels ( a design I adopted at my current airport)

You didn't get my point. I didn't say your terminal area is too big, I was talking, in fact, about the design which is rather poor. Plus, you seem to mess up footprint and floor area. Since you mentioned Hong Kong, let's take a look: Chek Lap Kok, for example, is - using google earth and roughly translated to sc4 - at it's "main" terminal area just 20 x 20 tiles plus two 3 x 11 tiles wings. then comes the wedged part where the long "arm" starts which is about 16 x 7 tiles and the arm itself at 3 x 44 tiles. plus the two "fingers" at 20 tiles length (considering diagonals) and 4 tiles width. speaking of footprint of course. Now these are, again, just rough figures quickly measuring it, but give or take another few tiles here and there you end up at almost the same footprint as your terminal, but at a much better design, both in terms of visuals and in terms of functionality. Capacity is not just a matter of size, but also a matter of directing the passengers effectively. Or take Bankok Suvarnabhumi, the main terminal has a footprint of only 7 x 28 tiles. that's a quarter the size of your main terminal's footprint. But it is 45 meters high thus leading to a total floor area just slightly less than Hong Kong. Beijing and Kuala Lumpur, at their main terminal buildings, are just fractions of these sizes really when it comes to the footprint, but the total terminal floor area is scattered about several buildings and - more important - several floors.

oh boy sony effed up and now we have a truckload of leaked scenes from the ingame-tv... do not klickedy click it if you ain't lovin spoilers

of course there's a story like with everything SR it's a bit over the top in every title, but yes there is a story.

I'd rather bump this than creating a new one... anyone played SR4 already? I got my hands on it yesterday and I must say it's just so much more over the top than SR3 was already. especially love the super powers I'm running and jumping all over Steelport

minecraft city here we come

ever wondered what it'll be like to hit the roads gta-style? keep your eyes open for this one: R*, in association with WCC, created this one of a kind Bravado Banshee (obv. based on a Viper) and they gonna give it a way. probably only to legal us citizens but still an awesome campaign. personally I always wondered why nobody tried to mod a car to the looks of a gta vehicle as I had this idea with SA's Super GT... but yeah guess R* stole my idea out of my head... sort of plus R* updated the homepage again, added Local Artisans, Exclusive Country Clubs and Serenity & Wellness

the main terminal looks totally oversized to me. 907 tiles in total if I count correct and consider the 2 wedged parts on either side as 1 tile... thats a total ground of 232.192 squaremeters, ignoring the piers... ok I know that KATL, for example, has about 3 times as much terminal area, but it's more distributed and not such a giant bulk of terminal. I'd suggest redesigning the terminal, splitting it into several buildings and such... Imagine yourself navigating through it. I bet you'd be happy if it was not such a giant hall of 1216 x 192 meters approx. I see you plan 3 more runways, maybe you can get a better design of the terminal after the runways are placed

mission designer for multiplayer isn't new, it's just a little dusty and mainly associated with RTS and a couple of sims (arma, il2 etc) and sort of coincided with a map designer here and there. feels new to action games to me, but looks very promissing.

yeah 3 series was hard to get around with. gta 3 itself was clearly a big try and error experiement to port the open world-ish gameplay of gta 1 + 2 into the 3d world. it figuratively leaks test test test out of every vortex. it looks like the experiment sort of worked cuz then came Vice City which I played up and down and offered a hell of a lot of content. then cam San Andreas which was clearly the climax of the GTA franchise so far. then, basically, the same experiment that happened with the introduction of the 3-series started with IV. Porting the game into the current gen visually. worked again, but frankly, the game was boring. they fixed it VC/SA like with the EFLC or better the single releases TLAD and BOGT. aaaand the 4 series was over again. Now 5 is less than 4 weeks away from release (go figure) and the step taken is small visually but therefore even bigger contentwise, comparing stock-IV with V works as well as comparing 3 to San Andreas. anyways, I'm not quite sure but I think this is the first game I've ever preordered in my life. well, speaking of content, 3djuegos released an interview with Leslie Benzies yesterday about multiplayer experience. first of all, october 1st is said to be the implementation date of GTA Online and second and more important: about 700 (no typo) missions are available in multiplayer, 500 of which are permanently available and can be redone over and over and over again. Others are exclusives, events and downloads from the Social Club

for that part, I always like to cite true crime: la 240sqm of procedurally generated los angeles road network. about as close as it can get to the real la-suburban-sprawl and associated boring repetitiveness. there's like 2 or 3 different models for single family homes and the same for other homes, not to mention business. give it a little hd-polish and that's all you gotta get if you want a real sprawled los santos. not to mention the gameplay downsides this has. driving an hour from mission starter to first objective? really? hell, even la noire was, while the eye for detail and very very high level of authentic replication kept it sort of interesting, a hell to drive around in for missions and a considerably massive waste of space in terms of mission design. even if they'd only recreated half of la county it would be too big still.

like I said, the city seems to be about the same size as Liberty. tbh, I expected the city to be bigger, but I'd rather have a Los Santos the size of LC, full of authentic life and details rather than a bigger city about as empty as the "original" Los Santos. Plus I recon the goal-getter of this game is the countryside and how the city is intervowen with it. We know R* can create greatlooking cities and greatlooking landskapes lately (IV and RDR), the connection of both gotta work aswell. also, I think for a game like GTA and given that we have a truckload of countryside to go wild, Los Santos is just about the right size. I bet once down to the streets it'll feel big enough. let's see what the next days bring in additional information. there's still 10 facts about LS/BC to be revealed plus I think we get a few more pictures - maybe even moving pictures aka video - prior to release. I bet they wanna steal the show next week when SR4 hits the stores. oh boy I'm so excited to finally lay my tiny hands on V, coming home to LS and stuff...

speaking of the map shape, one can assume we have an official idea of the outlines, the achievements have been leaked over at xbox360achievements.org incl. the icons, and the one named San Andreas Sightseer - Explore all of Los Santos and Blaine County comes with this icon: with every leak, there's a bit of caution to be applied to the information, but the site is known to be considerably legit, e.g. they leaked the GTA IV achievements aswell and it turned out they nailed it. anyways, as the lower parts match the blueprint-map parts shown in the CE teaser and several other known coastline-parts can be outlined aswell, this might be what the map looks like in terms of shape. this would also match the info we - as a fan community - got from R*, that the user-estimated map comes pretty close to the real deal.

TekindusT your map makes no sense at all compared to what was shown in screenshots and videos, last but not least the blueprint-map-teaser for the CE which shows 90% of Los Santos in shape and road layout. plus the design is cleary 3 era style and you can easily determine parts of the respective maps used... fake definitely. and a bad one I might add... the map I posted "grew" over time (giving an idea of whats what rather than to be what you get as a map ingame), looking at all the visual information given and taking quite a lot of time and talking over at igt5.com to place things over 130 pages of picture and video analysis to figure out the map) This map isn't up to date anymore as it misses things like Paleto, misses a lot but you gotta keep in mind that Los Santos itself is about the size of Liberty City incl the water, and R* talked about the map being bigger than IV SA and RDR combined, or 5 times the size of RDR. I don't think we'll see the map for the next 3 weeks IF we get to see the map early at all. I'm still pillaging every picture and videoframe for a map leak like the one happened with IV, but I doubt R* does it like this. Maybe we get a real map reveal or something like the layout reveal on the homepage of IV, but like I said, maybe 1 week from release the earliest.

I went in detail through parallel runway separation a couple pages back. it all depends on what you want to do with these parallel runways. in short, it is like all safety related things in aviation, a complex rather than simple matter (considering the exact space between the runways, the approach paths, the groundbased landing equipment, the actual location of the runways relative to each other and so on and so forth; all these things go into the final evaluation about how the parallel runways are allowed to be used... and then there comes the weather into the system), but you can basically assume that 2 barely separated runways are treated as a single runway in terms of aircraft separation minima (e.g. KSFO) while runways being placed further apart from each other can be operated as 2 independent runways (e.g. the pairs at KLAX and KATL or the parallels at KPHX or the 13/31 runways at KJFK) the last post in the linked pprune topic gives a good comprehensive information tho.

me too... although I must say all the little pieces and bits that we have seen so far make for a good 90% of the entire map, plus R* already said that community estimates are amazingly close to the real one... my favorite is this rendition from igta5.com: did anyone notice how there's pictures of snowy roads (lower left, only visible if you select the view background image option in your browser)?