There are a number of possible ways to change the appearance of the ground: - a new land class file will let you assign more appropriate ground textures where you consider them needed; - a new region file will change the displayed ground textures to those of a greener part of the world; - John Venema and his team at OrbX have, I believe, addressed this very issue and many others in Australia. You can find their files, many of them for free, at their web site.Best regards.Luis

Thanks LuisFelizTirado.I see they have some addons for Oz.I do not want to really change anything else except to green up the grass in this region.Might contact them later.The textures I need are already in use in FSX for areas north and south of this region.Just need to figure out how to make FSX use them for here.Regards

Thanks LuisFelizTirado.I see they have some addons for Oz.I do not want to really change anything else except to green up the grass in this region.Might contact them later.The textures I need are already in use in FSX for areas north and south of this region.Just need to figure out how to make FSX use them for here.Regards

I imagine most folks who sim a lot in Australia use the payware "FTX" titles. At least in the opinion of the Orbx authors, the terrain system in FS9/FSX isn't up to displaying Australia terrain well, so they use a "texture switcher" that installs the appropriate set for the portion of Australia to be used.The default textures are all in the scenery\world\texture folder, but you see they use a number/letter encoding scheme that makes quick identification difficult. Note that FS has a detailed and simplified terrain drawing scheme. When you are zoomed out/looking at the distance, the simplified scheme is used and there isn't much you can do to change the appearance. Mostly we work on the zoomed in/nearby terrain. Here there are three files (forgetting about water) that determine the actual bitmaps used for the terrain. If you have deluxe gold or xcel version of FSX you can install the sdk which has a tool, tmfviewer, that can show you the data from these three files. The basic procedure is this: 1. Find a lat/long of interest. 2. Load the worldlc.bgl file (landclass). This will show you tiles, each one having an integer value assigned in the range 0-255. You need to consider not just the tile at your lat/long, but also all the neighboring tiles, as they are blended together in the sim.3. Each number of landclass can be translated to the texture ID number (first part of texture bmp filename). To do this you download one of the landclass definition files from the library (I typically use one done by Holger Sandmann). The translation from landclass value to texture ID isn't exactly one-to-one. Note that in many cases, the texture ID depends on the elevation mesh. When the elevation is changing (slope) often the texture ID will be substituted (within the sloped area). The excel tables show this. So at this point you have the 3-digit numerical portion of the texture bitmap filename.4. Next load the regions.bgl file in tmfviewer. This file works the same way, except that the integer values are translated into a one of a set of letters which depicts the regional variation. These letters are encoded in the texture bitmap filenames. In many cases you see that there are no texture bitmaps for the region letter code. In this case FS uses region "b" as a fallback.5. Finally load the seasons.bgl file. Same thing, but the only integers are for 5 seasons (the common four plus one called "hard winter" which means snow on the terrain). Note that you have to use the menu in tmfviewer to select a specific month of the year, as each month has a unique set of season tiles (in FSX effective from the 1st of the month). These seasons are encoded as two letter abbreviation in the texture bitmaps (sp = spring, etc). At this point you will see a group of texture bitmaps that are numbered variations so that the same one isn't just used over and over resulting in repetition. Example for your area 1. lat/long (-21, 148.5)2. worldlc.bgl in tmfviewer (mouse over tiles in tmfviewer to see value in text line at bottom)In that lat/long are I see:33 Tropical Rainforest48 Dry Evergreen Woods91 Woody Savanna3. I look up those three values in Holger's excel fileIt turns out that value 33 corresponds to texture 019b while 48 and 91 both correspond to 011b (numbers in cells to the right show what landclass is used in increasingly steep slopes)4. Now I look at the regions.bgl file and see that the entire area is Region 6 (G:Australia)Turning again to Holger's tables, I see that a region G texture exists for 011 (011g2), but not for 019, so the fallback region B is used (019b2)5. Load seasons.bgl and set the month to October. Tmfviewer sows that the entire area is 3 (summer) so our textures will be 011g2su and 019b2su.I like to use the freeware xnview to look at graphic files as it can read many formats. These are the texture bitmaps (011g2su and 019b2su both have 7 variants).Just looking at it the 011g2su textures do have quite a bit of yellow in them, which I think is a common complaint about the default textures. The 019b2su shouldn't be a problem.scott s..

Thanks scott967Now I understand it better.Hard to find good solid info about FSX about what all the files and folders do, and where they are.I only have FSX Deluxe [not sure if it has the required editing program]What other program should try?I do not want to invent new textures at this stage.Just use the ones from far north Queensland to cover all the eastern and central Queensland and cover central Northern Territory.The western Queensland and southern Northern Territory are reasonable.Regards

Thanks scott967Now I understand it better.Hard to find good solid info about FSX about what all the files and folders do, and where they are.I only have FSX Deluxe [not sure if it has the required editing program]What other program should try?I do not want to invent new textures at this stage.Just use the ones from far north Queensland to cover all the eastern and central Queensland and cover central Northern Territory.The western Queensland and southern Northern Territory are reasonable.Regards

My explanation shows you specific texture bitmaps which will be displayed as ground terrain texture in the sim. If you decide you don't like the colors, you can edit them with graphics editing software like photoshop, GIMP or maybe even Paint. Note that the different variations are designed to blend together at the edge, and even different texture groups will blend, so if you aren't careful it is possible to ruin the blending resulting in obvious color changes. That's why many folks use payware texture replacements. But there are a couple methods that might be more do-able.1. Look at the corresponding seasonal sets for the same texture. If there is one that you like better, back up the summer ones (assuming those yo don't like) and copy over the ones from the season you do like, renaming the copies to the season you are replacing. Example, say you don't like 011g2su1.bmp, but you do like 011g2sp1.bmp. Back up 011g2su1.bmp and copy 011g2sp1.bmp, then rename the copy so you have a "new" 011g2su1.bmp. You might use the same approach, but instead of looking at different season look at different regions. 2. If there isn't a good replacement in another season, it might be possible to just play with the colors in a graphics program. Maybe boost the blue a bit. That gets into some artistry, though if you do some searching you can find ideas on how to color match or adjust color levels. To do this, though, you need to be careful because the format of these textures are not the same as they typical ".bmp" you might find. A common approach is to use Martin Wright's DXTBMP program to extract a common 24-bit rgb image out of the .bmp file which you can then edit. Once you are done you reverse the process in DXTBMP to restore the format FSX uses (DXT1 compression with mip-maps).scott s..