Ground2K4 file aesthetics

[Guest webin]

Hi all (at least those with Ground2k4 experience),I'm currently at work with the southern half of teh Willamette Valley, Oregon. So far I have all teh railroads within my image area finished, as well as the Willamette River from Corvallis to Salem (as polygons).Sometimes I wonder if I should use seperate projects to keep roads and railroads and water in seperate bgls.... but tht's not my question.When doing the excludes, should I blanket the entire image area, or just those sqares that contain data I want excluded? In terms of file sizes, as well as how much work it will take to do three clicks for each of the roughly 7200 squares. Also, I noticed that some people have broken the excludes into regions or areas and stuff like that.Any suggestions?//Ryan

[Holger 0]

Hi Ryan,great to hear that you're moving ahead quickly ;-) Railroads tend to be pretty difficult to spot in the satellite images so I guess you use Terraserver or other maps as reference?For my projects, I tend to do water bodies with the false-colour image, and human-made infrastructure with either the 30-m true-color or the 15-m grayscale bitmaps so they end up in separate files anyway. One thing to keep in mind is to not mix landclass-textured VTP2 polygons (if you do any) with and without nightlights in one project file (e.g., cities vs. golf courses). Otherwise you might have problems with night lights showing up on the golf courses.Regarding your question: I always wondered whether "blanket" excludes would have an impact on frame rates but I can't tell, even on my lame machine. In any case, I'm using DefArea for doing the excludes, specifically Excl8.exe for those LOD8 sections that are entirely within my project area and DefArea.exe (i.e., via slewing in FS) for vectors in the remaining areas. Alternatively, you can load the default vector .bgls in LWMViewer (via "Open by Coords" function), activate its LOD13 grid, and then write down the coordinates of the LOD13 Areas you need to exclude with G2K4. That same display method also works well for joining your vectors with the default roads, streams, etc., if desired.Cheers, Holger

[Guest webin]

Greetz,I am doing railroads first because they actually show up best (after big water) in the 15m black and white. I think the reason is that the satellite photos were taken when the farm fields were mostly brown, so the long straght black lines show up well. It gets much harder up in the hills.As for reference, I am using Delorme TopoUSA 4.0, which is essentially all the 24k topo quad data in digital format. As backup, I also have most of the important information as shape files from the Oregon Geospatial Data Clearinghouse loaded into ArcGIS (I'm lucky enough to have access to a site liscense.)What I've decided to do for the excludes is to branch my master drawing project off into seperate projects for each of the vector groups (roads, rails, streams, bridges). I'll do the Ground2k4 excludes from these seperate projects. It makes me sound pretty anal about organization (guilty), but should make it easiest to make improvements down the road. I will give the DefArea thing a shot soon, and see what that produces.In terms of how I did the excludes for the railroads (which I just finished), I put CellGrid lines on my project area (12 cells), and slew around the default flight sim data, following the railroads. By hand, I then excluded the proper cells in Ground2K4 running on my laptop. It came out to about 500 (counting? guilty again) individual LOD13 excludes, which compiled to a 4kb file size. And in testing, I only made 2 mistakes.It took a lot of time to do by hand, and I will try DefArea to see what results I can get from that. Major roadways are next on my list.For those interested, this sat photo stuff Holger is supporting works spot on. I'm using the FSG 38m west coast mesh and all the railroads I added line up EXACTLY with where the hills say they should be.//Ryan

[edgarone 0]

Hi Holger,>up in separate files anyway. One thing to keep in mind is to>not mix landclass-textured VTP2 polygons (if you do any) with>and without nightlights in one project file (e.g., cities vs.>golf courses). Otherwise you might have problems with night>lights showing up on the golf courses.this is the first time I read a reasonable solution for this annoying problem: 'light in the night time texture for woods etc.'. Great!Where do I learn, if a landclass has a night texture or not?Cheers,Edgar

[arno 1]

Hi Edgar,In the Fs2002 SDK there was a list of the different landclass textures. The number of variants and if they have a night texture was listed there as well. I don't know if this list is still accurate for Fs2004 though.

[Holger 0]

Howdy,"this is the first time I read a reasonable solution for this annoying problem: 'light in the night time texture for woods etc.'. Great!Where do I learn, if a landclass has a night texture or not?"Credit for this solution goes to Joachim (who also brought us the "seasonal CTD" fix). I recently noticed that a second condition has to be met for VTP2s with and without night textures in close proximity: if they have the same layer the problem will still occur, even if they are in separate project .bgl files. In other words, use different layers as well as different files to avoid this bug.Thanks, Arno, for pointing out the list in "Terrain Texture Names.doc". I don't think much has changed and, in general, only those lanclass textures with buildings on them (cities and about half of the "crops" texture types) will have night lights.Cheers, Holger