Jump to content
The simFlight Network Forums

Edge

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    844

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Posts posted by Edge

    DBC update

    in FSNavigator Support Forum

    Posted

    Maybe this was asked before, I don't know. The data base creator seemed to not work at PANC. Runway 14 and 32 appear ok, but 7 and 25 show as 6 and 24. Maybe that was default. But I have installed, pancv3.zip, which is correct after looking at it with AFCAD. Why didn't the DBC change the runway numbers to 7 and 25 which is correct in the download and also in real life?

    Thankyou.

    Difference btwn landclasses/terrain products?

    in The simFlight FS200x Tips & Tricks Forum

    Posted

    YES, YES, YES, to all three. I have FSG mesh and UT, but not GE, but I know others that do. They compliment each other well.

    PM received!

    EDIT: I forgot which forum I was in, lol.

    Try UTX and GEX first, then go for the mesh for FSX. Last I heard mesh is somewhat of a problem in FSX, but he's working on it. Even if you do get the mesh now, you will get the updates as they are available. I have a lifetime membership at FSG. They had a deal I could not refuse awhile back. I was thinking of it anyways. The deal just clinched it, lol.

    Sounds like a woman at SALE, huh. No offense ladies, if there are any abouts. :wink:

    All the above I have in FS9, I haven't added those to FSX as yet.

    Difference btwn landclasses/terrain products?

    in The simFlight FS200x Tips & Tricks Forum

    Posted

    AUTOGEN

    AutoGen objects are the last piece of the puzzle or layer. They are placed on top of the textures, and can be two or three dimensional. Each texture or 1 square kilometer can support 300 2D or 3D objects and 600 vegetation objects. AutoGen objects cannot be placed one on another, each must be placed in its own area or space. If there are conflicts with placement, 2D objects will be given priority over 3D objects. Objects like rivers, streams and roads can be flattened or embedded into the texture. This makes them part of the texture, and 2 dimensional. Their beds can be also be cut or carved into the terrain mesh making them 3 dimensional in appearance. This works out well when an addon places roads or rivers and streams where 3D buildings are in default or addon AutoGen. Some addons can have so many major and minor roads that they displace almost all 3D objects. Most of those types of addons have the ability to switch off minor residential streets, which allows AutoGen houses and buildings to be shown, but keeps the major roads intact. This combination of accurately placed roads and rivers plus library objects gives each city or town some degree of uniqueness and helps the problem of every city or town looking the same because of generic textures. 3D objects are classified in four subcategories; 2d objects are classified as library objects, and are highways, freeways, streets, roads, railroads, rivers and streams.

    The subcategories are:

    1. Buildings This category includes all single dwellings or houses and apartment buildings, commercial and industrial buildings and all high rise buildings.

    2. Row Houses This category includes all row house types that are typically seen in older or dense city urban settings.

    3. Vegetation This category includes all types of vegetation such as trees, shrubs or bush.

    4. Library Objects This category includes both 2D and 3D objects such as major and minor roads, railroads, bridges, rivers and steams, telephone and power poles, transmission line towers, power stations, radio, television, radar and microwave transmitter / receiver antennas and sports stadiums. Specialty buildings include gas stations, fast food and convenience stores, shopping centers and malls. Some roads are actually drawn on the textures, and are usually generic except in photo-real textures. Some are added as AutoGen by Addons, and are usually very accurate and true to real world placement.

    Hope that sheds a little light for ya. I will try and find a site with some images. Tends to make it a little more clear.

    Difference btwn landclasses/terrain products?

    in The simFlight FS200x Tips & Tricks Forum

    Posted

    LAND CLASS

    Land class is a map of different areas where specific textures are placed. Every texture is linked or assigned to a specific land class type classification. Land class tells the scenery generator which textures go where. You can compare it with a coloring book or those paint by the number painting kits. The canvas in those kits has many outlined areas and each area has a number that corresponds to a color. If you could look at the sim world before any textures were applied, it would look very similar to the coloring book or paint by numbers canvas before you started painting. Another analogy of the way Terrain Mesh and Land Class work together is that it looks like a tent, where terrain mesh elevation measurement points are the tent poles and landclass is the canvas that is supported by the poles, with areas drawn on it for Land Classification.

    Default FS9 land class is a general land class and actually does quite well in some areas but is lacking in others. There are about 150 different types of land class classification and 60 types of water class. Land class products or addons will vary in the number of types they use depending on what they are trying to do. Some are specialized for a certain type of land class.

    Land class is divided into regions because each region uses specific classes unique to their areas. Though region "B" is classified as North America, many of its land classes are also applicable and used globally in other regions.

    The regions are further divided into many vegetation, ground and city/urban type classifications. These different types of vegetation, ground and city/urban textures, variations and seasonal textures are too numerous to list in this tutorial. They can be viewed in the MS Terrain SDK available for download at:

    http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsids_sdk.asp

    and are contained in the Terrain Texture Names document.

    It is important to remember and understand that Land Class and Textures are two separate elements and act independently of each other.

    TEXTURES

    Textures are files that depict things like city/urban areas, farmland, trees, grass, brush, rocks, lakes, rivers, streams, highways, roads etc. All things that can be seen from the air in real life can be painted on a texture file. Texture files are miniature paintings of a particular land class, they are generally 256 x 256 pixels square in size but some are 512 x 512, and developers are experimenting with 1024 x 1024 files. They cover a square kilometer in the Sim. The more detailed a texture is the more real or lifelike it looks.

    All textures are assigned to a specific land classification type and make up the virtual world we see in the Sim. The scenery generator will determine which landclass type is being called for and apply the appropriate texture for that type of land class. The land class is filled by repeatedly drawing the texture over and over. Additionally, each texture is rendered in 5-7 variations that are a little different from each other. This is done to help alleviate the tiling effect caused by repeatedly using the same texture over and over in an area.

    There can also be up to 5 seasons for each texture file. A separate texture file and its 5-7 variations must be drawn for each season. The seasons are Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Hard Winter. Some land classes have all 5 seasons and some have 1, 2, 3 or 4 seasons. Most textures are generic in that they are a general representation of a particular land class, they don't represent specific landmarks or scenes in the real world. There are exceptions though which we will discuss next.

    Textures come in several different forms or types. They are:

    1. Hand drawn or painted. These are hand drawn or painted textures by artists. They are for the most part generic and depict a specific land class rather than any real world scene. An example is city/urban textures and farmland. The artist will paint streets, houses, fields, crops, plowed or barren ground and farmhouses on a texture, but they do not reflect the actual layout of streets and farmland in any real city, town or farm. In these cases the 7 variations of the texture are important to give the illusion of urban and suburban residential neighborhoods with their varied streets, roads, and houses on them. Or with farm land a varied mix of different crops, plowed fields, barren ground, and farmhouses. These tend to make all cities, towns and farms look the same. Most of us aren't familiar with the real world layout of cities, towns or farms excepted for those that we live in or have visited, so the generic effect is acceptable in most cases.

    2. Photographic. These textures use actual digital photos of scenes and depict real world scenes in exact detail, however they present problems in load times and processing. Their file size is huge when compared to painted textures. Addons that use these textures are large in size and usually cover smaller areas. These textures also have other drawbacks that include the "Blurries" at lower altitudes and high airspeeds. They cannot support AutoGen objects and tend to become distorted when used with high resolution terrain mesh products. Because they can't support AutoGen, they also have a flat or two dimensional appearance. These textures are very taxing on a PC and some older ones will crash with these Addons or run so slowly that it is unacceptable.

    3. Photo-real. These are hand drawn or painted textures that are made from actual photographs of real world scenes and were developed as a compromise to the problems of generic textures and photographic textures. These give a much more individual and accurate rendition of the Sim world than generic textures can, but at a price. Like photographic textures, they must use many more textures to fill the landclass with detail, so these types of textures are mostly used in individual or specific addons for a given area. The number of files and overall size of the addon are usually quite large but smaller than photographic addons and present less of a problem with loading times and processing.

    Addons can incorporate all three of these textures types in a product or may contain only two or a single type.

    Difference btwn landclasses/terrain products?

    in The simFlight FS200x Tips & Tricks Forum

    Posted

    The following was put together from a couple of my fellow VA members. They did an excellent job. I don't know if the images will show or not.

    I t5hink I will do this in stages.

    Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS) in its default form is a remarkable product, you can fly anywhere in its virtual world that you can in the real world. In order to accomplish this, MSFS builds its virtual world with four elemental building blocks.

    For the purpose of this tutorial we will define scenery as what can be seen on the ground around the globe. In order to be familiar with the different aspects of scenery Addons we should first have a good working knowledge of what Addons are doing and what they have an affect on. All scenery uses at least one element and some use two, three, or all four of them. The four primary elements are:

    1. Terrain Mesh

    2. Land Classification or Land Class

    3. Textures

    4. AutoGen

    TERRAIN MESH

    Terrain mesh is the base structure of the Sim world. Without it the ground would be completely flat everywhere and appear in two dimensions, it adds that 3rd dimension of height or elevation. There are different degrees of the level of detail in elevation, these are defined by either a LOD number (Level Of Detail) or a number that corresponds with how often an elevation measurement is taken or the sample size in meters.

    This forms a grid or mesh that if looked at in the sim by itself would resemble chicken wire that has been bent and formed at regular intervals to reflect the elevation data or lay of the land. The closer together these measurements are, the more defined the terrain will be. Of course the more points you have, the harder the computer's processor must work to provide the graphics engine (Video Card) information it can display. MSFS uses different LODs because there are vast areas on the earth where elevation changes little such as the oceans and relatively flat terrain. Mountain chains and their surrounding foothills do change elevations often. Here we need to take elevation samples more often, the closer together they are the more detail the Sim will show. Lower LOD numbers results in the rounded or rolling hills view of mountainous areas and loses much of the detail of jagged peaks, canyons and valleys.

    Here is a graphical representation of an area of terrain mesh and a table that shows LOD numbers and their corresponding horizontal resolution....

    Figure 1 Terrain Mesh

    Table 1 LOD Table

    FS9 and previous versions use LOD 3 as a base over the entire globe and then overlays selected geographic areas with increasingly detailed mesh. To see where these areas are located, go to

    http://portal.fsgenesis.net/index.php?md=6&meid=4

    for an excellent graphical representation of these enhanced areas.

    IMPORTANT: You must have the MSFS Version 9.1 patch applied to FS9 to view higher resolutions than LOD 10. LOD 11 is the maximum resolution for FS9. LOD 12 and above will be rendered as LOD 11. In addition, go to your fs9.cfg file and change the line that reads TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX= 19 from the default value of 19 to 20 or 21. There will be a trade off in performance vs detail so 20 may be a better value with older machines.

    There are several good products available for higher terrain resolution or detail. Some are freeware, some are payware. The main difference being that payware has usually been tested for anomalies and removed or corrected them, they have ongoing support and upgrades and come with installers/uninstallers...an important feature we will get into later.

    There are several sources for the raw elevation data. One popular source that has been made available free on the internet is the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission ( SRTM ) the shuttle mission used radar to map the earth in 76 meter resolution or LOD 9. Virtually the entire land surface between +/- 60 degrees latitude was mapped by SRTM. Unfortunately this does not include much of Alaska, Canada and Northern Europe, so other sources must be used for elevation data in those areas. In the U.S. the United States Geological Survey department ( USGS ) is one of the best. It also has data for the rest of the world. Most freeware and some payware products use the SRTM data but do not use other data for the missing data above and below 60º latitude. Visit the following website addresses for details:

    http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/index.html

    http://www.usgs.gov/

    No images, sorry.

    EMMA Field CTD!!

    in Emma Field Flying Club

    Posted

    Sarge. Beings you don't have VOZ installed or the Scout. Do you have those files listed in your addon scenery, scenery folder. I do have VOZ installed, and all those files are in mine.

    Posted a message at VOZ forums about this issue. We'll see what they have to say.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use. Guidelines Privacy Policy We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.