Hi to all good people at this great forum. My name is Svjatoslav, I am 45 years old. I am from Serbia And Montenegro, former Yugoslavia republic. I was a military pilot for over 20 years and I have 10 000 + hours in russian military trasnport plane Antonov AN-26 I am relatively new to scenery design. I try to read about scenery design as much as I can, but from time to time I must ask other for help. After reading FSX SDK about terrain design I am in very big confusion.I cannot explain to myself how to CREATE A CUSTOM, MY OWN LANDCLASS file that I can later use to make my home town more realistic. I noticed that the product of FTX Orbx - Australia which I admire, has many custom landclass files. EVERY CUSTOM LANDCLASS FILE HAS ITS OWN TEXTURE AND AGN FILE THAT GOES WITH RESPECTIVE TEXTURE. That reminds me of default landclass system of FSX. I ask people who know scenery design and all those who want to help, how to learn to make that kind of scenery, what are the tools. I know that is a wide subject and it requires time amd patience but I am willing to make effort to accomplish my dream to have my home town in FSX look like a real one, like one I used to fly over many years in real life. please sorry for my poor english, and many greeting from Serbia and Montenegro !!!!

Hello Svjatoslav, Welcome to the forum and congratulations on your interest in this aspect of scenery. If you already know how to create land class scenery (you can use any of the available tools such as SBuilderX), then you are well on your way to making custom land class. Essentially, land class will use the default ground textures unless you include your own textures and/or autogen definitions (agn files) in the local scenery folder. In that case, FS will first search that folder for the required textures and/or agn files. So, simply create the necessary custom ground textures, make your land class file, and rename your custom textures so that they have the same name as the assignments you used in your land class file. Some essential points: - the land class values are NOT the names of the ground textures. You will need an equivalency table in order to determine the true names of the textures. If you need this, just say so and I shall be happy to provide it. - Different land class values use different tiling methods, so it is good to experiment in order to see which is best for your custom textures. Don't hesitate to ask if you need more details. Best regards.Luis

Hi Luis!!! Thank you very much for your answer. It menas a lot to us (scenery design beginners) to have some expert like you with us. I am not flattering foy, I mean that. I have started to read FSX Terrain SDK very carefully. slowly slowly I begin to understand landclass system taht fsx uses. You talked about thing called equivalency table. I have a hard time finding it on the net. I realized that without it I cannot do anything (like identifying texture sets that goes to particular landclass). please sorry if bother YOU with my questions

Hello Svjatoslav, If you need the equivalencies, please provide me an e-mail address, preferably through the Avsim forum private message system (so that it does not appear publicly) and I shall be happy to send it to you. I recommend SBuilder for making land class files, and most other scenery modifications as well; you can get it here:http://www.ptsim.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=40&Itemid=18 Best regards.Luis

It should also be pointed out that, because ORBX uses their own landclass values, textures and autogen, looking at their data to try and understand how to make your own landclass in the Dominican may lead you astray- It is best to try and find out what is happening in your own region by using something like TcalcX to discover which files cover the area you want to change and then examining them in TmfViewer (the default scenery .bgl viewer which comes with the SDK) As Luis mentioned, even trying to find which landclass value matches which texture can be difficult- An easy (ish) way to find out what landclass value looks like (i,e, texture and autogen in all seasons) is to make a grid of landclass squares (say, 5km by 5km) of each landclass value placed over your country. You can then fly over each square and decide which landclass values to use when creating your final coverage.

Timmo, thank you very much for your help, I understand your point. It is very helpful to me.