Roads idea?

[Guest]

In designing landclass scenery it is possible to use value 254 and the layer underneath your file shows through. Is it possible to make a sort of "decal", a big photoreal area that lets the default scenery show through but has roads painted on so that they will conform to mesh as does photoreal and landclass?

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi andylandfather.I've been experimenting with CFS2-style line TMF decals. They are actually small polygons that are defined as "ribs" that have a texture, or part of a texture stretched between them.By enlarging the ribs to cover the entire LOD13 area ( 255x255 ), you can stamp a mesh-clinging bitmap onto the landclass texture... and it can have transparency, because the alpha channel is transparent for CFS2-style TMF line segments, not water! I've been using 8-bit, mipped with one alpha channel.You'd need extract the roads from a satellite photo, and paste on a suitable background ( that will become the transparency color ). Then resample it to get your slices lined up as 256x256 and covering the LOD13 area. Then make the resulting slices alphaed and mipped ( I'm not sure if 8-bit is required... I think 16-bit will be OK for FS2002).The hard part will be decoding the bitmap filenames into a format that you can understand, so you know where to place them!I'm still experimenting with this, but it's very possible. This is all quite a new application, and there are no examples of this from Microsoft, because the designers probably never knew about it. CFS2 line segments are an old remnant of CFS2 code in the FS2002 terrain engine... they replaced the lines with a new technique for FS2002.The good news is that framerates appear unaffected by this. Together with FS2002 decal polys ( which stamp a texture as a landclass for an irregular or small area ), this technique will replace the old FS98 flickering, mesh-adverse, ground polys.An crude example from CFS2... Ford Island:

[Guest]

rhumbaflappy, thanks for understanding what I was getting at. That is exactly what I was thinking, a sort of "transparency" that would overlay the roads in FS.I guess I don't understand LOD's, I know of LOD5 for landclass but is LOD13 of a finer resolution? And would it give the resolution needed to make descent looking roads?The beginning of the project of course would as you said be the gathering of roads data. But rather than sattellite, I thought of just scanning a paper road map. Then apply the transparent color to the white space on the map. Then of course get fancy with the look of the roads, using a "search and replace" kind of thing in the paint program. And there are a lot of details I would need to learn about the image processing.Then comes the resample, I would worry that the whole thing would get tremendously bloated in size, like photoreal does when you feed it to the resample tool. May be something that the end user would have to do on their computer, sort of like when FS expands some textures after installation. Maybe a batch file or something.Glad that the idea does hold some promise!See ya, Andy