Roads & Rivers FS2002

[Guest]

Hi all, as a newcomer to this forum, although not to scenery design.I wish to Edit the roads and rivers in Fs2002, or even exclude and add my own. I have Read alot of post's, last 6 pages, which advocate the exclude option.I have tried this in Airport 2.6 and Arch2002 and these have failed, surely I must be doing something silly!!!!I have ASD 1.2 and can edit roads and rivers in FS2000 (F5406331.BGL)but am unable to locate any bgl file in FS2002 that does this, I suspect Asd is unable to interpret some of the Fs2002 bgl's, may be I am wrong.May be the Fs2000 file recompiled, and used in my scenery might put the cat amongst the pigeons.You all seem very friendly in the forum, I hope someone can help or point me in the right direction Thanks in anticipation of any help Regards David

[Guest]

Hey DavidRoads and Rivers are defined in the mesh portion of the scenery now. This means that you cannot manipulate them as you could with FS2000 or before. :-( For some more bad news, nobody knows how to do it as of yet. Or at least nobody is saying how to do it. There was one fella who had invested a great amount of his personal time to decipher the code, but he couldn't come up with the solution. I was assisting him for a bit, but couldn't come up with anything either.Leland Steffensen.

[Guest]

Hey David,This was one of the first things I wanted to address in October.Sadly, I'm unable to do so.I've heard people call them 'decals' or something.They changed from 2000 because the use of higher terrain detail and a new approach was needed since the flat polygons would no longer work.

[Guest]

Hi Guys, thanks for the repliesI guess that the fact that this info (R&R) is in the terrain mesh may explain why the exclusion has failed, because I am using "Visual Flight's" terrain mesh, guess I'll have a fiddle around here!!!Thanks again, I'll feed back if I discover anythingRegards Dave

[Guest]

Hello Leland,recently I created a mesh from a 24K/10m dem of southern Utah and observed that in some places the Colorado river didn't run through the canyons which were clearly visible in my mesh but were cutting through some elevated terrain nearby where it (or are rivers 'he' in the US?) shouldn't.I assume that the river data don't come from my mesh but must come from some default scenery files. Isn't it possible to locate and eliminate these default scenery files?Shouldn't it be possible to decipher the river data from comparing a handmade mesh with the default mesh of the same area and the same resolution?I assume that the river data override the elevation data because at least larger rivers seem to be always flat and cut into elevated terrain. If this impression is correct, couldn't that be a clue to decipher the data?

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi all.Road bgls are of the type: "rdl492072.bgl" The 'rdl' probably means 'roadline'. All rdl files are roads or rails. They are found in folders like: "C:Program FilesMicrosoft GamesFS2002SCENEDBEasthemseasiaScenery"Just rename the BGL extension to OLD, and they will be deactivated. You may also need to delete the local scenery folder's "SCENERY.dat" file. ( Don't worry, "SCENERY.dat" for the local folder will be rebuilt automatically. That deletion should be done each time there is a file change to a local scenery folder to force the sim to recognize the change. )abp = airport backgroundsF = airport sceneryflt = FS2002 TMF-style flatten commandshyl = beaches and shorelineshyp = lakes and seacoast corrections ( contain both water poly and flatten )rdl = road and rail linesstl = streams and small riversnph = dry streambeds ???pkp = ??????

[Guest]

Cheers,Thanks for all the info on all file types, this is very useful.They don't seem to have kept the same grid filenames (F5406331.bgl), may be these files now cover a larger area. Wales is the area I am interested in, in the UKThanks againRegards Dave

[Guest Claviateur]

That's intersting, but do you think every ABP file contains data for 1 airport or multiple ones in the region? I mean if I want to disable the airport background to put mine, and by renaming the file I find, will it affect 1 airport or many do you think?And yes MS should tell us more about all that in the still not released terrain sdk :(Cheers!Michel

[arno 1]

Ussually a lot of airport in one region are placed in one BGL file, so you can not remove an airport by renaming the BGL without losing most airports in the region.But can't you use an exclude to remove that airport background?ArnoMember NL2000 Teamhttp://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen

[Guest Claviateur]

Actually the exclude command removes the taxiways, the runways and the buildings + objects, it does not remove the grass of the airport wish is a sortof texture mixed with the ground ones in a specific way and that is what I want to disablePlease MS release the terrain SDK with all those tips!!!!Cheers!Michel

[arno 1]

I see, I thought these were also removed, but I must have remember wrong from a previous test :). Just did a test with it and all the roads and the airport polygons indeed stay.I hope the SDK will contain info about how to exclude these too, because otherwise we have a big problem.ArnoMember NL2000 Teamhttp://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen

[Guest]

Here is what I've found concerning large rivers, roads, and airport polys... Some of this information comes from Christain Stock.For those of you that have seen rivers cutting through the mountains, what your seeing is a flattening poly. This is part of the new mesh terrain. Basically the new system has two new features..Flattening PolysDecal PolysThere may be more but this is what I have found. The flattening polys are used to create the airport polygons, large flat rivers, lakes and coastlines that airplanes can land on. Airport and water flattening polys use two different methods.Airports. A flattening poly defined in the fltxxxx.bgl file is used to create the flat ground. This makes the mesh rise up or sink down to meet it. Then a decal poly is used to cover the flat area with a texture. This information is contained in the abpxxxx.bgl files.Water. The flattening poly used for large rivers, lakes and shorelines is for the most part the same as the airport flattening poly. The one difference is a flag is set that makes the poly "transparent". What this does is that it allows the underlying water texture to "bleed" through to the poly itself. This makes the landable water we all love. No other texture needs to be applied. The files that define these are the hypxxxx.bgl files.Now for the other non-airport decals...This includes the roads, small rivers / streams, beaches (lake, river and coastlines).The decals actually are defined with some form of an X, Y (Lat, Lon) definition. There is no vertical or height value associated with decals. Thus, they lay on top of the mesh. The texture associated with the decal is linked to the textures.cfg file in the main FS2002 directory. The indexes in that file coorespond to the texture definitions in the bgl. This is how some beaches can have waves and other cannot. The special effect of the waves is included in the texture. The following files define these items...rdlxxxx.bgl = roadsstlxxxx.bgl = streams / small rivershypxxxx.bgl = beaches around lakes, rivers, and shoreline (which are usually flatten polys)Right now, I can make flattening polys until the end of time. That means better defined lakes, rivers and shorelines. But I cannot determine the method used to define the lat / lon of the decals. Without this info, there are no beaches or waves to go with that flattened water. And they have to be removed from the scenedb folders for the area being modified or they get in the way. In any case, this is what is holding me up from getting better defined scenery to go with the better defined mesh that Justin Tyme and I have created. But I'll keep working on it and using the work that Christian did, hopefully a solution will result. No, I don't expect Microsloth to come out with a new terrain SDK anytime soon. I hope they prove me wrong!Leland Steffensen

[Guest cwright]

Leland, that's very interesting! If I understand you correctly, you are able to generate coastlines, though without beaches or waves. If I could do that with my scenery it would be a *huge* improvement. At the moment my coastlines are defined by ugly generic texture squares. Could you describe how you do this or describe the file structure etc? But if it requires a knowledge of MASM etc then I'd have a lot of studying to do. Apologies if it's already been released, but I may have missed it as 'flattening polys' sound pretty boring. But after reading your post I think they are the most exciting things in the known universe! Best regards, Chris

[Guest]

Hi leylandYour reply proves very interesting, I just hope Ms take note of all us amatures, (in their over due Sdk), for us that have created our sceneries. Cause all we want to do is either delete or modify existing road's or river's.In my case the river/roads are inaccurate, but I can't even get rid of them!!!Thanks for your lengthly contribution, and others, in response to my post.Regards Dave

[arno 1]

I hope that the SDK will provide us some answers to our problems, but I must say that I don't expect it to do so. If you look at the information that has been provided by the previous SDK's (both for Fs2000 and Fs2002) I don't expect to much of it. And then it will depend on a lot trial and error again to find some solutions :(Let's hope MS surprises us in a positive way this time :)ArnoMember NL2000 Teamhttp://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen