I'm ok with making 3-D models and airports etc. What I need help with is implementing roads and trees.Firstly, am I right in thinking that best way way to add roads is to change the bitmaps? Secondly, is there an easy way to do forests in FS2002? What I'd like to do define a boundary and fill it with trees. Is this possible? May be it would be too heavy. I'd appreciate help in any form.J

Hi,I'm sure others will reply, but I'm using Ground2K for forests and roads.Ground2K has a bit of a learning curve, but well worth the effort.David

There are a couple of methods you could use to simulate roads in your scenery. The first is, as you mentioned, to essentially paint them onto a texture and then use that texture for your groundwork. This has drawbacks, and chief among them is the fact that textures, when mapped to terrain, have a very low resolution -- something on the order of 4.8m/pixel at the equator. That means that every pixel in your image would correspond to 4.8 metres in the sim world. It doesn't take long noodling around with that idea to conclude that even a narrow road could only be a minimum of 4.8 metres because you can't draw anything on an image that's less than 1 pixel wide. Also, you'll find that even at that resolution, lines tend to look grainy and blurry.A better solution, and the one that you'll be using if you learn ground2k, is to use VTP lines. This is the way Microsoft does things. Essentially you can use a set of points to draw a line in your scenery, give it a width and select a texture (dirt road, concrete, etc.) and the sim will map the stock road texture you choose onto that line at runtime. A word of warning, though; even with VTP lines, there's a limit to how narrow you can go before the lines start looking really pixellated, especially in the curves. But experiment, and you'll find settings that work for you.As for forests, these are determined by the landclass of the terrain in question, and Ground2k will let you alter that landclass for a given area, so you can use this to make an area map to a forest. If you choose the proper forest landclass, FS2002 will draw the autogen trees in for you -- poof! Instant forest.Good luck,

Thanks Davidg58 and Spotlope.This Ground2K sounds great, so I'm going to try it out!J