MSFS20/24 CA21 Limberlost Ranch Dev Update 6

Limberlost Ranch – the longest running project in Emerald Scenery Design history. What started as a passion project back in 2022 has continued to evolve and take massive leaps in quality over the last several years.

My last official dev update for this scenery was all the way back in July of last year. A lot has happened since then, including a complete rebuild of the pool and interior of the ranch house.

Along the way, I have also been fighting numerous sim issues across 2020 and 2024, which have been slowing me down from getting this dev update out. I have mostly finished the 2020 version of the scenery, however I still need to go back and try to address some issues. It seems with SU16, there might have been some regressions when it comes down to how elevations are calculated upon starting a flight. Each load is a bit different, where on one load a model might be fine, but on another load it may sink into the ground or float. None of the usual tricks seem to be working either, so before considering release, I will need to figure out if there is a way I can mitigate this issue.

The 2024 version of Limberlost Ranch has also had its own difficulties with elevation inconsistencies. Luckily there are new 2024 native solutions in place to alleviate these issues. Though, that did mean going back and redoing a lot of model placements, which slowed down progress even more, but I am now happy to declare these issues as resolved!

I had previously started to show off this model in Dev Update 4, but at the time it was still being textured.

The model has since been finished, and with 2024’s increase in ground-level detail, I figured it would only be appropriate that I give it some additional detail and make it so you can walk through it in avatar mode. Originally, it was only ever intended to be viewed from the exterior.

Adding collisions and opening it up for your avatar to be able to explore meant going back and making some additional changes, such as adding some missing interior doors, windows, and doorknobs. All parts that were never modeled, because they didn’t need to be for a model that was originally intended to be viewed only from the outside.

Alongside these changes, I also went back and added another layer of detail to better fill out the interior, as well as a nice hammock model for the deck – since that was feeling a bit empty as well.

I still need to go back and make some adjustments to the interior models and do final optimization, however I have been waiting for a 2024 SDK fix before doing so, as I cannot currently apply simple collisions to my 2024 models. Which is pretty important for a model that you can navigate through (unless you want to roleplay as a ghost)!

A lot of changes were made to the Ranch House, but the model with the most modifications thus far is without a doubt, the pool.

When I first started building the pool, I had kept it fairly low poly in design. The water depth effect – like the pool in my Myakka scenery (which was actually a revision of the one done for Limberlost), was done in parallax. This creates a cool depth motion effect with little impact to performance, however it also has a drawback: Because of the more organic shape of the pool (not just a rectangle), and because parallax in MSFS is a bit limited, it doesn’t portray depth nearly as good as if actually done in 3D. There are no walls or shading to actually portray depth, and thus it looks a little odd up close.

So, I went back to the drawing board and reworked the entire pool. The mesh for the stone pavers has been completely reworked with a higher resolution mesh, easing a lot of the hard edges I wasn’t happy with in the first rendition. The stone pavers texture was also replaced with something a bit closer in design to what I have in my photo resources. The parallax water material was also scrapped for true 3D depth, which also meant going back and carefully terraforming a hole into the terrain. This alone took a lot of back and forth to get right as the terrain displayed while working in dev mode was slightly different than that of the built project – leading to a lot of clipping or too aggressive of changes at times.

However, once all of the refinements were sorted out, I was left with a pool I am actually pretty happy with. And of course, just like with the Ranch House, what good is a pool if you cant actually let your avatar take a swim?

Logically, this was the first thing I tried after adding the collision. I have since gone back and added ramps at the base of the railings to be able to get back out of the pool as well – as my initial cannonball test left me a bit waterlogged.

With this added 3D depth, I also wanted to make the pool feel less static, so the top layer of water has been animated to give it a bit of subtle motion. A simple implementation of water caustics was also added for another layer of motion – something I have not seen done in MSFS before. This is present in both the 2020 and 2024 versions of the scenery as well, though I may revisit the 2024 version to try a different method before release (as long as there are no limitations with the system in mind).

To tie it all together, I filled out the garden areas with some of the new vegetation models made for this scenery. Night lighting was also another big focus for me, so I added underwater lights to the pool and made some garden lights with various colors to spice things up a bit and add to the nighttime ambiance.

Don’t know. Actually, it’s more like I don’t want to jinx myself for another month (4 years is enough).

Past a few refinements I want to consider for both versions of the scenery, and one elevation bug I still need to look at for the pool in 2020, it’s mostly just come down to final optimization and testing at this point.

I’m hoping that with a bit more elbow grease, this one might be done sooner rather than later. However, until then here’s some additional photos from the latest 2024 build!