Hi All,I own copies of the GenerationX VFR Photographic scenery (v2.0) by horizon and was wondering if it is possible to edit it. I'd like to try and see how well I can make a copy of an area into snowy winter scenery. After some searching around I found BglAnayzeX which might be useful but I haven't tried using it yet.I'm new to creating scenery and have recently had a go with SBuilderX, and with a bit of trial (and much error), I managed to create a small area of photo-scenery - very satisfying :( (running FSX with Vista home)Thanks in advance for any advice and ideas you might have.

BglAnayzeX (and any other decompiler) will only process BGL files made with the BGLComp compiler. These files being airports and scenery objects placement files. For other work done for FSX, such as mesh or photo scenery or vector based work, there is no known decompiler available.You caan make your own seasonal photo scenery and have that shown in your desired area. Your work must be of equal or better resolution than what is already in place. If equal in resolution, layering in the Scenery Library comes into play.

Also, when FSX was first released there were some attempts to extract the images out of photo-bgls, but the problem is that the images use some compression, and the exact compression seems to be modified depending on the compression setting used when resample creates the bgl, and it wasn't possible (at least at that time) to reverse engineer how the compression was done. There seemed to be no one with the requisite skill and interest in taking another crack at the problem.scott s..

You caan make your own seasonal photo scenery and have that shown in your desired area. Your work must be of equal or better resolution than what is already in place. If equal in resolution, layering in the Scenery Library comes into play.

Thanks for your responses. If there's no way of accessing the GenX photo scenery images then presumably I must grab and modify equivalent images from the net using SBuilder When you refer to layering do you mean that I must simply use layering to allow my new patch of scenery to be seen 'over' the existing GenX stuff or are you meaning something more clever where I could add a transparent (?) layer to be used over the existing photo scenery to change it's appearance? This second thought sounds horrible!

I'm not familiar with the GenX product, so I'll speak in generalities. Most all of the time this holds true, but FSX does act up at times in ways that are still being discovered. Photo scenery will display at the highest resolution regardless of the layering in the Scenery Library. It's when you have two files of the same resolution that layering comes into effect. Say the GenX is 1.19m resolution. If you make 60cm resolution files those will display or take priority. But if you make 1.19m files? You would need to make sure your work is higher up in the Scenery Library of FSX. Guaranteed to work 99% of the somewhat/maybe time! :( Scott,When I think of a decompiler for Resample and Shp2Vec work I can't help but think of the TMFviewer included with the SDKs. It does a nice job of extracting and displaying, so turning around and writing that data to file would be a trivial task for a competent programmer. I'll never fall into that category! Having tried to do some terrain work in FS9 and having problems, I applaud Doug Matthews from ACES/Microsoft for the FSX tools that are greatly improved. If a person wanted to get into the different compression schemes used in FSX terrain files they could probably end up, as you say, reverse engineering a tool. But there would be a whole lot of unhappy developers out there who would have their work exposed.

It is fairly easy to create seasonal textures to cover the Gen-X photo-textures. Here is Newcastle (EGNT) in winter:The problem is that the Gen-X 2.4m textures occupy 15.5GB then you need to add the 1.2m textures.George

George,Your picture is very encouraging. Please tell ... how did you do it? Your discription ("fairly easy") translates to challenging but do-able as I'm new to all this scenery editing business. Oh and I can quite believe my remaining harddisk space will take a hit, but I have a bit to spare! Thanks.Chris.

Hi Chris,You need to edit your photo bmps in an image editor and add some snow. I used the Metrix effect in Paint Shop Pro as a first step, then painted more white. From this I created a blend mask.You then need to compile them with the resample Variance option to the months when you expect snow.I couldn't imagine doing this for a large area.Note. You can not use the Gen-X textures since they are in an undecipherable format.George

Thanks for that George. I'll give it a go when I get chance. It's a shame that the GenX textures can't be used as a starting point, but then I'm not surprised. I need to familarize myself with the processes involved a little more such as how to set a particular resolution (metres / pixel) etc. But no doubt many of my questions will already be answered somewhere on the net, so I'll do some research and experimentation before asking loads of daft questions. Chris.

When I think of a decompiler for Resample and Shp2Vec work I can't help but think of the TMFviewer included with the SDKs. It does a nice job of extracting and displaying, so turning around and writing that data to file would be a trivial task for a competent programmer.

Indeed reverse engineering TMFViewer and then creating something a la LWMViewer v2 for FS9 would be great, but hasn't been done. "vec2shp" would come in mighty handy for integrating a project into surrounding default-ware.scott s..