Chris;Any news on your Scenery design program? I Just got my new system and I an eager to make some better scenery. Are we going to use TerraScene, Tiger or USGS data?Richard;AMD 2500+128 MB Nvidia512MB DDR 400 RAM

Richard, thanks for the interest! By chance I've spent a lot of time this week on it (when I should be working on other things!) And it was on TerraScene import. Very briefly, this is how it works. In TS you set the colours for roads and streams etc for the water mask. The colours must be non-grey. You convert the TS targa water mask image to an 8-bit colour bmp that AutoAsm will read. The program will then display all the lines with the same colours you defined in TS. Unfortunately TS generates quite a lot of artifacts that could screw it up completely. But, so far, all the artifacts are grey! The program will only accept non-grey colours, so the artifacts are automatically rejected. This works very well and solves most of the earlier problems. The program will import all the lines you defined as non-grey colours (coastlines, lakes, roads and streams etc) The amount of data in a TS image is massive, so yesterday I added a 'box' feature which allows you to import just a part of the whole image. Yesterday I tested a complex TS image. Using the box function, it imported about half a million points and took maybe 4 minutes. I expect the whole image (about 8000*8000) will yield about 2 million points and will probably take a quarter hour to read in. I hope to optimise it to reduce the read times significantly. A TS question to the experts: unfortunately TS failed to draw the coast line on part of a large polygon. I suspect this is because the water mask itself is still anti-aliased, and may overwrite part of the coast line. You can switch off anti-aliasing for lines in the options, but I couldn't find a way to switch off anti-aliasing for the actual water mask (the black and white polygons). I may have missed something obvious, as I only just started using TS. Any ideas? Another way would be to switch off the solid polygons completely, as AutoAsm reads the coloured lines and not the actual water mask. There are still lots of problems to fix so it'll be a while. But I might consider releasing a public beta before the end of the year. Autoasm has many other new features. I may write a post giving more details and including a few screen shots. Best regards, Chris To Dick: Hi, Dick, I was thinking of emailing you to give you an update on TS import, as I know you were interested in that, but now I've given some details in this post. Now FIX is a thing of the past! There's just one READ button and it works for TS images as well as native AutoAsm images. It's looking very good, though there are still problems to fix. I'll try to write a more detailed post in the next week or so. One thought: right now it reads in streams as VTP lines. But it would be possible in principle to automatically convert streams to LWM water with a defined width. What do you think? Chris

Glad Richard Hill posted the inquiry. I did not know that anyone was actually working on the utilization of Terrascene output for the creation of FS2004 elements. GREAT!! I was thinking about deleting my 2gbytes of Terrascene data. Guess I will hold onto it!!!!Dick KLBE

Hi Chris.There's no reason not to have streams as LWM water, if that's what you'd want. One problem might be if you wanted riverbanks for the streams.. then you might just as well have VTP streams (?).I'd be happy to try and beta the project with you if you need it, and I'm sure the other two Richard's would also like to help. :)Terrascene can create an image of water without it's mask, and the colors could be assigned as black on a white background, and could bypass the anti-aliasing as well. Just assign water a color ( black? ), and don't add any other SHP files to that image. Instant watermask.I haven't been using Terrascene much lately, now that I've been using GlobalMapper. But the Terrascene images should work fine, as long as the projection of the SHP files is right ( nothing new there ).Other images should also work with your program... images from GIS programs, or altered aerial images ( as long as the gray is bypassed, the roads, streams, etc. could be drawn right on them ). The only problem is the data will need to be in lat-long ( geographic ) projection, and is best with WGS84 datum. Most SHP files are already in this format. Aerial images may need reprojection.I'm glad you're still working on AutoASM, as it provides a means of generating VTP and LWM BGLS for large areas that might be too tedious to draw in Ground2K or Coastline Maker.Dick

Chris;I usualy do one degree segments at a time, I have plenty of disk space and now have a DVD burner so I can save them. Ant suggestions as to colors to define roads will help, as I usualy used texture rather than solid colors. I only have to use shape files for two one degree areas as Stonewall Jackson Lake, opened in 1988 and one of the largest man made lakes East of the Mississippi is not in the default, or Stone Coal over 30 years old. The Monongahela river ends belowPittsburgh, this is a rather large river down to Fairmont, WV.I would be more than try out your Beta anytime you might want to send [email protected] foe the reply;Richard L Hill

Hi, Richard, you can use any colours you like as long as they're not grey. Blue for streams is an obvious one! I got a half degree image working fully last night. There are *lots* of roads, with a total of about 800,000 points. It took about four minutes to read it in and a similar time to create the asm and bgl files. I was amazed that bglc compiled that lot without a single error. The VTP asm file was about twelve megabytes! The scenery worked fine. I'm very pleased with the progress but there are still some significant problems to fix (particularly islands - using lines instead of solid polygons makes the original island method useless). Perhaps a first beta in late November.... I'll try to post some more details and screen shots this week. Best regards, Chris P.S. just saw the new AFCAD is out, so there won't be much progress on AutoAsm today!

Chris;Thanks, if you don't post it, send me an email with your address, and cost for CD and shipping. I would be more than willing to contribute to you very worthwile project.Thanks again;Richard

Hi, Richard, I'll email you shortly. Best regards, Chris