Coastlines... attempting the inpossible?

[Guest]

Hi,I ground to a halt with my scenery project because of the problem with coastline elevations, and concentrated on one of my other hobbies (astronomy) for a few weeks until I got some enthusiasm back.When I looked at the problem again, I thought I would try and edit the file with default coastlines, and then recompile it.My project covers four lod 8 areas, and the part I am interested in, is an island centred in them.I found the data I needed to edit in one of the lod 8 areas, and deleted the data for the other three, just so I could see what happened.I was pleasantly surprised with the result, the only problem was one small area (lod 13?), which was miles high (I edited it differently one time, and it made a hole in the ground miles deep).In the screenshot, I want to leave the land top right, and edit the coastline bottom left.Am I attempting the impossible, or is it something I am doing wrong.David.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi David.It's not impossible, but if you plan on distributing the scenery, it might be questionable. Hacking the default BGLS can lead to problems... what if someone doesn't like your scenery? Twice I have released "patched" BGLs, that were meant to replace the default LWMs. One fixed a huge trench that encircles the globe at high latitudes. The other was needed to resurrect Prince Edward Island. Both of these were big MS mistakes, and it's not likely simmers downloading them would want these fixes removed from their sim. Generally, this is not a good design practice.Just make very sure your fix has good instructions as to how to backup the default BGL, and how to remove the "fixed" version. Then be prepared for the influx of e-mails that will tell you your scenery messed up their sim. Almost no one reads instructions... much less follows them. And few simmers have even the basic knowledge as to how to add scenery via the Scenery Library screen... ( I still see references as to how simmers are hacking the Scenery.cfg file to add scenery. What a mistake! ) :(You can't just delete a line from LWM ASM code. You have to consider the poly counts and point counts... as that is what usually causes spikes and holes in LWM code. BGLC will happily compile the errors for you. :)If possible, consider remeshing the island with either LWM polys at elevation, or SCASM flattens ( Area16n e65 polys or flattens ). Then you don't need to worry about the default BGLs.Dick

[Guest]

Hi Dick,I think I found the problem. I made a duplicate of the file, disassembled it, then saved it in richtext format. I used tdfcalc to slew along the coast, and noted all the areas that needed to be changed.Then instead of deleting, I highlighted each sections in colours and "rem'd" the whole of each section out.When I checked carefully, there were a couple of sections in a chain still present, I rem'd those out, and it seems to work fine (fingers crossed!).First and foremost, this is for my own use, but even if someone published work like this, if the original was backed up they could just return to that version.I take your point that not all simmers understand what needs to be changed, but at least it does seem possible to change coastlines this way. Without this, my scenery would be a "no go". One default airport on this island has the sea lapping at the end of the runway, it's about a mile in reality.If I change the file this way, and it works, I will have approx 1 mile of the main coast to correct, deleting the file is impractical, as you have pointed out before, this would leave hundreds of miles of coastline and inland water to be edited.David