Terrascene - Useful In Some Areas

[nudata 10]

In some circumstances Terrascene is an applicable tool. If no color photo exists for an area of interest. If the use of available corrective tools would be too time consuming. If the area is so large that the time to correct and add roads, rivers, lakes, and coastlines is excessive.With Terrascene you can achieve quite an accurate scenery of a large area although it remains synthetic. The roads, rivers, etc. are MORE ACCURATE than FS2002. Married to 38m terrain roads and waterways follow valleys and rarely climb hillsides except where the elevation resolution is just not accurate enough to place a highway close to a cliff. Ground2k can be used to tune those anomolies.The two picture illustrate roads following valleys, in fact, lots of roads! The third illustrates the may water sites in the estuary. In FS2002 this does not even appear. Because of the detail it is unfeasible to try to manually correct.Drawbacks are - slightly less resolution, no autogen (unless you manually tune each texture), no blending of adjacent textures. This latter item is, to me, the greatest issue since some texture boundries look hand drawn.It would be wonderful if someone was able to revive Terascene as a toll for FS200X.Dick

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Dick.There are other drawbacks.A large area would be composed of hundreds or thousands of CUSTOM textures. And each season and nights would need to be accounted for... multiplying the textures by a factor of 6 ( about 260Mb for an LOD8 sized area ).The same scenery, ( LOD8 sized ) with the same detail, can be made with VTP and LWM polys and lines for about a cost of 1Mb, using the default textures and autogen.The problem? We don't have a way to automatically convert shapefiles to LWM and VTP. We currently have just drawing programs ( Ground2K and Coastline Maker and AutoASM ).Terrascene already works just fine with FS2002. You just need to make a set of textures that will blend better to the default. That's as good as that approach it's going to get.There was some work done with GIS to TDF conversion, but it has apparently stopped. One problem is that GIS data usually requires an expensive GIS program so we can use a script function to progam and export the ASM files.Another possibility would be a program to convert shapefiles to DXF format. That format can be used by some freeware CAD programs. It can also be imported to GMax... and Gmax has scripting capability.Dick

[Guest christian]

Hi Dick,About the shape file to VTP conversion. I'm still working on it (on and off). What I'm stuck with is that I really don't know how to split more complex polygons. When I look at the default ones it just looks complete and utter nonsense to me. Either TMFViewer just renders crap (which is possible), or the FSTeam has used a very strange algorithm (which is also possible).Cheers, Christian

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Christian.Here's an LWM watermask made with Ground2K. I don't know what algorithm Christian Fumey uses, but it looks a lot like some of the complex VTP polys. This is Whitewater Lake in SE Wisconsin.Of course, another great advance would be if we were able to load bgls into a CAD-type program like we load them into TMFViewer. ( TMFEditor? ). But I don't suppose Microsoft would like to give us that. :(Dickhttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/2940.jpghttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/2941.jpg

[nudata 10]

Indeed the "photoreal" (semi-real Terrascene) hogs disk. However, they are becoming less costly and faster. My personal compromise is to start with summer textures for an area that offers considerable geographic viewing potential, such as Salt Lake. I used FLY and was horribly disappointed with the appearance of the shoreline and roads when it appeared in FS2002. The largest texture collection I have generated is about 500mb. Takes some time, about an hour's CPU usage to get the BGL result. Combo of Terrabuilder (make INF file) and a BAT file to do SDK tools work. Playing a lot with the selection of textures in Terrascene since the FS2002 textures are quite good and blended to set a high standard.Certainly Terascene is not the answer partially because of its static state. Since Christian's Ground2k can draw roads, rivers, coasts, etc. perhaps he, or someone in cooperation with him, could use the USGS data as done in Terrascene to automatically create the synthetic geography. Rather than some poor human dragging a mouse around for hours trying to trace something, doing the same thing from readily available digital data seems the way to go. Ground2k just appears to be the vehicle to do that.I am a tools user, not a programmer (gave that up 20 years ago). Dick

[Guest christian]

Thanks Dick. I'll ask Christian Fumey.Christian