Landclass Project.

[Guest]

I and few other enthusiasts are planing to make Landclass Projects for the few areas of our country and perhaps at this stage around its major hub airports. We need some pointers on how to best proceed with the Project. Help in questions would be greatly appreciated: * where is best place to get some resources (we are already familiar with NIMA site)? * what area size should we use for the starter for each Project? * what LOD to work with in order to keep things manageable in workload and size?* what tools are suggested for the beginners? * are the road, railroad, hydro and power networks better to be made in smaller sections (say equal in size to Project area) or one big for the entire country? And/or any other hint help you can think of. Thanks in advance. ted

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I'll answer the questions for which I have answers:>what area size should we use for the starter for each Project? Although methods exists to allow you to concentrate on rather small areas, the landclass bgl's will cover an LOD 5 area. >what LOD to work with in order to keep things manageable in workload and size?Landclass updates are limited to LOD 5 detail. When you designate an area to be covered with landclass, accuracy is roughly about +/- 1 km. >what tools are suggested for the beginners? I've written a tool called Landclass Assistant. It's a good starter tool, as it uses a somewhat visual concept for updating landclass, and it manages setup of the files needed for creating the end result--landclass updates. Also, it seamlessly exploits the feature mentioned above where you can limit the scope of your update to a small area. I wrote LCA around MS's FS2000 resample tool, so you'd have to have access to that. >are the road, railroad, hydro and power networks better to be made in smaller sections (say equal in size to Project area) or one big for the entire country? These objects actually aren't covered by landclass updates. Landclass deals with the underlying texture (say farm vs. city), whereas road, rail and utility grids have to be handled in other ways, I am not the best to ask on this, but what I can say is you can break out your landclass projects from these updates.There are more technical explanations to my quick answers, but I wanted to give you something to think about, until someone else adds to the thread...-John

[Guest]

Thank you John for your comments. As I have mentioned I have briefly familiarized myself with informations contained on NIMA site here:http://geoengine.nima.mil/Maps and photos are real treasure chest of data, but VFP file database containing, I think, all imagineable informations was for me real "jaw dropper".Is there any way to pick up all that and convert into scenery? Looks like folks from Flightgear already figured out how and are already using it to make their scenery.Ted

[John_Cillis 2,406]

"Is there any way to pick up all that and convert into scenery?"There most certainly is, but I don't think there's any FS2002 only tool yet that makes the process easy. Terrascene can be used to create large amounts of scenery reading government data, but what you're talking about tackling in FS combines landclass, road, river, utility, etc.... Currently there's no easy package to do this. It's something I've never tackled.Much of the custom scenery seen that does incorporate this isn't using landclass, exactly. Instead, unique scenery textures are being generated, creating gigabytes of data. Think of the roads, rail lines, etc as being "Etched" onto each scenery .bmp This can already be done by converting a Terrascene.tga file into a .bmp, then slicing it with resample. But all it this is well beyond my program, which was designed for a much simpler task.