Ground 2k4 - landclass bgl generation

[Guest Anthony_D]

Hello,I've been playing with ground2k4 this evening with the intention of creating some scenery Lancashire/Ribble estuary area in NW England.I've pretty much sussed out road generation and am also getting to grips with coastline generation.My current problem though is with landclass generation. I've created two landclass tiles and clicked on the "BGL Generation" button. A raw file is generated as per the documentation but no bgl file. I've renamed the .raw extention to .bgl but this leads to an error upon startup related to fs2004 running out of memory.I've read the documentation and there seems to be no clue as to what to do here. The file parameters are for the raw and bgl files for landclass to reside in the same folder.Any suggestions?This is my first stab at scenery creation, I have to say ground2k4 looks like a superb product! Expect something for Lancashire, NW England to be released sometime in the future!

[Holger 0]

Hi there:I had this problem too initially but it got solved when I chose a project directory that doesn't contains any spaces; mine is F:Ground2K4. I believe it does say something to this effect in the ReadMe.Txt file, though it doesn't state the reason why.Alternatively, you could set up a project in EZ-Landclass (by Russel Dirks) and load the .raw file. That's not a bad idea anyway because it allows you to quickly check for goof-ups in the class designations.Cheers, Holger

[Guest JoeW]

John Cillis has an excellant program named " Landclass Assistant" that connects with FS9 and and all you do is slew around to the area that you want landclass in and it finds the area and converts that to cells and you can add the tile in that cell.Bob Brown and I used it to do the State of Florida. Great program.Joe W.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Anthony.Much like Holger, I installed Ground2K4 as "C:Ground2K4".This is because "resample.exe" doesn't like spaces. When I use the default Ground2K4 location for the creation path, the bgl and the raaw file will be in "C:Ground2K4". I then move the BGL to the project 'scenery' folder.A side note.If your project has twin 'scenery' and 'texture' sub-folders, the sim will create a memory leak due to the landclass BGL. Landclass must be in a project folder that has no twin 'texture' sub-folder.Dick

[Holger 0]

Hi Joe:it's a bit off-topic but I always wondered how you guys made an entire state (and then some) in this manner. Did you have maps to guide you when slewing around?I haven't worked with LC Assistant but the beauty of Ground2K is that it allows you to use orthophotos or satellite imagery as a background and, once you know which classes to pick, it becomes almost WYSIWYG. Here's a screenshot of my workspace for the Rockies project I uploaded a while ago; each of the dashed squares is a LOD13 area.Alternatively, you could use screenshots of the digital (color-coded) land cover information available for the US and other places.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/50610.jpgCheers, Holger

[Guest Anthony_D]

Many thanks for the pointer. I'll have a look at it later on - are the tiles easier to apply en-masse than ground2k4? Also does it make tile visualisation easier?I've got the landclass working now using ground2k4 and have a few questions. I'm trying to use the right landclass tiles for the area. For towns I'm wanting densely packed terraced streets as well as more leafy streets with detached houses. Currently I'm using assignments #103,#111 and #115. The problem is that these tiles have 6 storey apartments everywhere is isn't really representative of the local area.For the countryside I'm using tile #38 but again it's not very green and lacks the trees lining boundaries between fields that are characteristic of West Lancashire.If you could suggest more representative tiles then that would be great.I'm working on a pilot project to smarten up the West Lancashire area bounded between the M55 motorway and the Ribble Estuary. In essence this covers Blackpool and Preston. The features will eventually include:- the ribble estaury- Lytham sands- All motorways, A roads and B roads- All towns and villagesWith luck I'll be able to release my first stab at this tomorrow (Saturday). Would folk be able to provide comment on improvements?Cheers

[Guest JoeW]

Bob at the time worked for the state of Florida. He had access to the landuse maps for the state. I was doing the east coast series of cities and everyone thought they were great. I was working on the Tampa area and Bob kind-of came up with..." Lets do the whole south Florida. ... Well... thats where it started. Bob converted the landuse maps to colors that corresponded to the Landclass colors. The pixels were about right for cells and that was the start of the raw files. Bob did all this part of the scenery, but the landuse was several years old and the urban areas were outdated... I used the same method I used for the east coast cities in editing it. By using maps from Topo Zone to place the cities and towns. BGL's 1, 2 and 3 and one half of 5 I did by hand, Bob did the others. That was a long drawn out process.Joe W.

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

Hello Anthony,Land use and land cover classifications are very comprehensive systems that attempt to determine all sorts of terrain in the world. However, the world is a large and varied place, and it is not possible to subdivide the classification into endless categories.The Flight Simulator land classification is a very shortened version of land use systems. You will not find fields with hedges, nor will you find date palm groves. Or cemeteries. Or mobile home parks. Or ancient ruins, or industrial parks, or terraced rice fields, or a myriad of other land cover that is quite common in the real world.The best that you can do is to choose a good background for your hedgerow area - for example, the corn and bean fields will give you small cultivated fields - then, you can place trees or hedges along the roads or fields using Gerrish' famous tree library. It even contains macros for lines of trees - very useful.This should give you a good approximation of what you want to do.The same goes for the urban areas. If you find the buildings objectionable in the extreme, you can lay down a VTP polygon for your cities and then populate it with your own buildings. However, this is a lot of work.Best regards.Luis