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Holger

Landclass in regions?

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Hi all,another landclass question...I'm working on an update to landclass files for southern Africa. Given the absence of suitable "African-looking" landclass textures in the default region (B, North America) I decided to try some of the Asian and tropical landclass types instead.Based on my reading of the FS9 Terrain SDK (TerrainTextureNames.doc) I was under the impression that I should be able to make a region-specific texture set, which then would be used in that region (sub-Saharan Africa, Region E) only. Strangely, that doesn't seem to be working; the Region B textures keep showing up despite the presence of my Region E replacement textures.Is there a specific way for doing this or is the presence/absence of region-specific landclass types hardcoded in the lclookup.bgl?Cheers, Holger

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Hi Holger,I think it is indeed coded in one of those BGL files (probably lclookup.bgl) which regions have specific textures for which types and which regions don't. If the region texture is not there in the default scenery it does not work if you add one.It should probably be possible to change some BGL somewhere to fix this, but I never tried that :D.


Arno

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

FSDeveloper.com | Former Microsoft FS MVP | Blog

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Hello Holger,As you say, that look-up table is the key. As the Flight Simulator Development Team creates more regional textures, they update the table, but otherwise it displays North American textures everywhere else.Probably the only work-around for the moment is to either lay down VTP2, not as land class, but as textures (tedious) or to create a large assembly of ground textures and place them as custom ground (but you lose autogen.)Or, wait for the next version of Flight Simulator. Boo!Best regards.Luis

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Hi all,thanks, Luis and Arno, for the quick response. Too bad about that hard-coded lookup table.While browsing through old forum posts I came across a suggestion by Dick that might offer a work-around for a limited amount of texture sets. His idea was to copy the desired textures into a local scenery/texture folder structure, with a landclass file that uses only those textures contained in the folder (all other areas in the LC file are classified as transparent). The local files can have the same name as the default landclass textures and thus override them in the area covered by the custom LC file.This suggestion was for FS2002 so who knows whether changes to the priority of landclass display in FS9 will allow this. I'll give it a try and report the results.One interesting thing I noticed the other day: thus far I had assumed that a smaller landclass file (in terms of LOD5 sections covered) would always override a larger file. Well, I had a 4-LOD5 file and a 1-LOD5 file in the same directory and the larger file overrode the smaller one until I renamed the smaller to 0_*.bgl. In other words, alphabetic order plays a role for landclass files as well, at least when they occur in the same directory. Cheers, Holger

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Hi Holger,I think that approach should work. I have used it for my Dutch lanclass files. These seem to work fine both in Fs2002 and Fs2004.The only slight but is that some users report crashes that are solved once they remove the landclass files. But i have never been able to reproduce that on my own PC.


Arno

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done.

FSDeveloper.com | Former Microsoft FS MVP | Blog

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Guest HotShot

This approach works with FS9, as long as you keep a few things in mind. It is actually the only way I know to create a regional 'modified' landclass (e.g. modified textures or textures from a different world zone).-> Just put a 'texture' folder next to your landclass 'scenery' folder, with the whole set of textures in it.The downside with such a method is you have to put *absolutely all the textures used by your LC* in this 'texture' folder - whether they are modified textures of your own or FS9 default ones - resulting in very large distribution files. It prevents the well-known memory leak issue due to empty (or incomplete) 'texture' folders.By providing some kind of batch file duplicating appropriate FS9 textures during setup, it helps decrease weight and works flawlessly AFAIK.(sorry for my bad English)HTH,

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Hi Holger.Hotshot has pretty much covered it.If you only want to use 5 different textures, make a landclass with the 5 values, plus 254 for transparent, and place all the altered textures in the "texture" folder... if you miss some, they will cause a memory leak.The autogen will probably default to the default... not sure of that.================Alternately, you could make a new region.bglHere's a link to an experiment in creating a new world regional BGL, and a smaller local BGL.http://webpages.charter.net/ludowr/regions.zipI used the newest version of resample for my tests.I suspect #254 may be valid for regions as well... but check it out. That would allow some rather small regional changes without a lot of tedious placement.Christian Stock covered this material in his tmf_manual.zipDick

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Hi all,thanks so much for the detailed responses. They enabled me to finish up an initial local landclass project, which will be used, along with other landscape enhancements made by Johan van Wyk and I, in this week's President's Air Race, held, as a multiplayer LAN event, parallel to the real-world race in Pietersburg, South Africa.Given the lack of time, I only replaced two landclass (one Asian, one US tweaked) and one waterclass (hand-made "murky water") files but it worked well and provides a nice improvement. I also included tweaked .agn files in the local texture folder and they are used too.I've also received an email from Joachim in Germany (of seasonal CTD fix fame) who shared some of his experiences with local and custom-made landclass files. One interesting observation of his is that the custom .agn files are "sticky". That is, when leaving a region with custom landclass and agn files, the custom autogen versions will still be used and only revert to the default versions when re-loading the scenery (and vice-versa when flying into a local landclass area). He's actually not tested this with FS9 (only FS2002) but it's something to look out for when using custom .agn files.Rhumba, thanks for the region file, I haven't had time to test this yet and must say I'm a bit reluctant to consider distributing altered region files (yes, me!). Nevertheless, it's good to know all the possibilities. Belated thanks also for the tips in my other landclass thread; I ended up decompiling the faulty LC file with tmfdecompress, changing the 255s to 254s, and recompiling it - highly elegant ;-)Cheers, Holger

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