Hi everybody, I am looking for ideas to represent coral reefs in FS2002. If you ever had the chance to fly (either in the cockpit or even in the window seat of a passenger cabin) over the Great barrier reef area in Australia you will be absolutely disappointed by doing this trip in FS2002. Some of the small beautiful islands are missing (they could be done with LWMPolygons without much difficulty, if you download the coastline coordinates the job is not too difficult). But for the reef line around such islands (and for the reefs without islands) we will probably need a rather wide VTP line structure with a special kind of texture (possibly a semi-transparent bmp to let the water shine thru?). Has someone already tried to do such a thing?- osman

Hi osman.You can use WaterClass BGLs to do some of the work for you. Again, Christian Stock has the info on these:The WaterClass numbers are described in the MS 'Terrain Texture Naming Convention' document of the FS2002 Terrain SDK:[link:download.microsoft.com/download/FlightSim2002/Install/sdk/W982KMeXP/EN-US/terrain_sdk.exe|FS2002 Terrain SDK]They are numbered 0-60, but I think we are missing one ( #12 ). They ar in "C:Program FilesMicrosoft GamesFS2002SCENEDBWORLDTexture", and if you do a search in that folder for "wa", you'll find them.The WaterClass bgl is very much like a LandClass. Both Christian and I use a 257x257 sourcefile for these. It can be made in a paint program, and saved as a headerless, 8-bit raw file. I believe the OLD resample is needed to make these. My [link:www.flatface.net/~rhumba/Zips/TDFCalculatorsAll.zip|TDFCalculators Package] has LandCalc and Landcalc2. LandCalc will allow you to enter a Lat-Long value, and will give the LOD5 x,y position on a 257x257 grid. LandCalc2 requires FSUIPC installed in FS2002 ( or CFS2 )... you must be in a flight, with the sim in windows mode, most probably in slew mode with topdown view. Then doubleclick LandCalc2's icon to start it, and it will give all kinds of info for TMF-TDF usage.---------VTP polys are very possible over water. Layers 0-3 are meant for texturing water. You can use 8-bit mipped, with alpha ( just like the road and shoreline textures ). That gives you the possiblility of transparency with the alpha. If you use a "spraypaint" to apply color, you can get some blending of the texture to the see-through alpha.Martin Wright has made [link:www.mnwright.btinternet.co.uk/programs/bmp2000.htm]BMP2000 to handle these "Extended Bitmaps". And MS imagetool can convert a DXT1 with alpha to 8-bit with alpha.Imagetool can also load a PhotoShop ( *.psd ) image with an alpha channel, and convert it to 8 bit, and mip it properly as well. Dick