How does Landclass Assistant work?

[turner112 52]

Just saw a mention of this in the "favorites" thread over in the FS general forum...I haven't downloaded it (yet) and am hoping someone could explain, perhaps by a "dumbed-down" ;) walkthrough or something, the steps taken to edit scenery.Also, can rivers be changed? The Delaware near Philadelphia is atrocious.Thanks,Andrew

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I'm the author of LCA Andrew....First, the original release I made last year contains a fair bit of documentation, but I've updated it several times since then, so some of the documentation reflects "older" ways of using the program, such as those prior to my inclusion of the FSUIPC interface.Basically, all Landclass Assistant is is a "Front end" to build two files --one known as a raw file, and the other an .inf file, which can be processed into scenery by Microsoft's resample.exe. In fact, LCA is coded around the original FS2000 resample.exe, as I was too much in a hurry to wait for MS to come around with a FS2002 SDK. LCA allows you to "draw" updates to the way land is shown in FS2002, swapping out farmland for urban area, as an example. Rivers can't be changed with it however--there are other tools for rivers and coastlines. Think of LCA as something that can take the city you live in, and make it match today's reality vs. 20 years ago. Missing a few subdivisions? LCA lets you add them in. Many cities in FS2002 were just plain missing. Carson City/Gardnerville, an urban area of about 100,000 people, was one such example. With LCA, one can "draw it in", build a .raw file, and process it into scenery in a few moments (once you've gotten used to the program, that is). LCA is not the most accurate way to add landclass. I had to "fudge" a few things to code it quickly, and thus sometimes textures can be off by 5-600 meters. My last version (version 1.3) attempts to fix most of the placement issues in "code". And many have used it to add to FS--more user involvement than I ever expected. All of Switzerland was done with LCA, same with much of Alaska and Florida. As many of my users know, they may compile scenery one or two times to get things "just right"....Ironically, I only coded the program so I could start adding detail to some of the places I'd lived in over the years. When I mentioned it in this forum, someone suggested I release it. It's evolved quite a bit since then. But I've been winding down support a bit. Some of the suggestions that came in were great, but required a level of support far greater than I intended for a freeware app. What I believe you get with the program is a simple interface for doing simple landclass updates--provided you update the program, and read the documentation originally included and that released with the updates. -John

[turner112 52]

Thanks John - heck, at least you know how to do this type of stuff. I'll be looking into it in the next few weeks.regards,Andrew