Autogen- Trees Only Setting?

[Guest product]

I've got a question on Autogen that I haven't seen covered before. I like the way it does trees (and indeed the way it looks in general from the air), but low down/ at airports I really don't like to see family homes next to the runway, offices on hills, etc... very unrealistic.I was wondering if there's a way to just have it generate trees, leaving out the houses? Or perhaps some better way to control where / how it places buildings?Best,Joel

[Guest Max Cowgill]

Joel, I don't think there's any way you can do this... Even if you deleted all the textures for the autogen buildings, the sim would still draw the buildings on the ground, they just wouldn't be textured. So instead of having semi-realistic buildings you'd have big blocks on the ground like much earlier versions of FS.Obviously there's no way of doing this within the sim, or you wouldn't be asking this question. You may just have to wait for FS2004 to have more realistic autogen (I hear they've improved it).hope this helps,Max Cowgill

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Only way to do this would be an edit of the AGN files using the SDK tools.... With patience, it can be done....-John

[Donmo 6]

You can always use a scenery maker and exclude the offending buildings. This is practical if it's at only a few of your favorite airports. You couldn't do the whole world, but the frequently visited ones wouldn't be a major deal. I hate those MS office buildings too!Don

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I don't know that exclude works with Autogen. Even if it did, I don't believe there's a way to distinguish the trees from the buildings.... But no worries...I only found 728 agn files that need review :)

[Guest JonP01]

As John says, the only practical way to achieve this is with the FS2002 Autogen SDK. Late last year I downloaded the SDK just to see how it worked. I won't say it was a paradigm of labour-saving computer technology but it does do the job. For that particular exercise I just changed all the trees in the sim to palm trees (a good way I thought to verify the program actually worked).But I might add that it is not neccessarily mandatory to change every single .agn file. In my case I took a considerable shortcut by changing just one of them and then writing a vba macro to automatically copy it to the remaining 700 +. In this paricular instance, I don't think there are actually a large number of .agn files with those office buildings in any case. Presumably you don't mind keeing the smaller buildings in rural areas, so the job might not be as big as first thought.EDIT: btw, the Autogen SDK does differentiate between buildings and trees. When you run the program, the physical location of the tree or building on a particular texture tile is shown by (I think) yellow and red boxes. I can't remember exactly because it's been about 6 months since I used it, but it definitely differentiates between them.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Good points Jon...I agree the Autogen SDK certainly distinguishes trees and buildings... My comment above was related to excluding scenery. Since autogen is laid down on top of scenery (almost independent of it, since the underlying texture doesn't care what's in the .agn file), I don't believe you can write an exclude for a bgl that will exclude what's in the autogen. Even if one could, I don't think the exclude could be as specific as the type of object (tree vs. building).

[Guest Matthew Murray]

Hey, Why don't you just paint the bulding textures black, with a black alpha channel therefore making them AND the building invisible?

-----------------------[bR]Matthew Murray[bR]Jet-Precision[bR]

http://vatsim.pilotmedia.fi/statusindicato...tor=OD1&a=a.jpg

[Guest PaulL01]

The proper way of doing this wouldn't include any modifying of AGN files as that would effect all other areas that use the same textures that the AGN are assigned to that are displayed outside the Airport area >whole planet.There are probably more than a few ways to do this, here are a couple:1.Change some of the landclass Via JohnCi's excellent Landclass assistant program around the offending area. 2.Exclude all of the AGN (as pointed out its either all or none, but you should verify) and then use a alpha (transparent) texture via a vtp poly- and use the SDK autogen tool to assign trees to your transparent texture, then use ground2K to define the areas to be covered and the shape of the poly in effect you will be "painting" with trees! :)Visit the scenery design forum here and the folks there will get you up and going in the right direction.Take care.