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LuisFelizTirado

Help with Ground2k4

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Guest TFLeonard

I have been using Ground2k4 to work on scenery for New Providence island in the Bahamas. The attached screen shot shows the work in progress. I have managed to eliminate most of the default scenery by using the "exclude" feature in Groundk4 with its default layers checked. I also made the entire area Water Cells in order to remove the default scenery. Unfortunatley there are some remanents "floating" in the right side of the ocean.1. What do I need to do to eliminate them if there is already an "exclude" setting in that area?I also have a number of lakes (one of which is a big one almost in the center of the island) and harbors/inlets that are seperate LWM No Shoreline polygons tagged as water. These are not showing up. I tried giving them all individual Imbrication numbers but no luck.2. How to I make my lakes and harbors visible?3. Should lakes be LWM's or VTP2's?I also drew a new airport layout in AFCAD2 which is partially obscured by the terrain.4. What do I need to do to make sure my runways and taxiways are visible? Is there a flatten switch I can turn on?Thanks for you help,Tim

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Hello again, Tim,Let's see:You can only exclude VTP lines (beaches, river and lake banks, roads, streams, etc.) So, you cannot use Excludes to get rid of land. In order to do that, you must cover it, either with a Land/Water Mask or with a Fill.If you see remnants of land in the water, then you simply need to cover them.Your other problem with lakes and harbors is not so clear. We probably need more details in order to help you. Please be so kind as to give a step-by-step explanation of what you have done, and also please show a screenshot of your Ground2K4 workspace zoomed in to the relevant parts. Please do not post large images - resize or crop them to a smaller size.Best regards.Luis

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Guest TFLeonard

Thanks for continuing to help me with my problems. As you may remember from the posts in the Mesh forum, I created my objects in the following sequence.1. Exclude all areas in my work area (everywhere that my scenery will be)2. Draw land LWM polygons with shoreline(islands)3. Assign Water tiles intially over almost everything (see attachment 87484.jpg)4. Draw water LWM polygon no shoreline (harbors and lakes) (see attachment 87481.jpg) Examples of some of the lakes that aren't showing up in FS2004 are circled in Red.5. Assign Imbrication numbers trying to keep them in the sequence of the innermost having the lowest number. Attachment 87482, shows the settings for the harbor in the upper left corner of attachment 87481.jpg and attachment 87483, is the very large lake in the middle.6. I also cannot see the VTP2 polygons I created as mangrove areas on the bottom shore, the setting is shown in attachment 87485.jpg. Should I be using VTP2 polygons for this?Thanks again for you help.Tim

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Guest TFLeonard

Sorry, I didn't realize that attachment would be renumbered. Just ignore the first four digits in the filenames and you should be able to decipher it i.e. 87485.jpg is attachment #5.

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Hello Tim,Thanks, everything seems much clearer now. (By the way, great idea to use marine charts!)I have a small doubt concerning your 3rd step. When you say that you assign water tiles, I assume that you mean Water Fills, right?In principle, you have done everything correctly, and it should work.However, I have had the same problem as you when re-doing the island of Antigua. L/WM for the lagoons do not show and I really do not know why. It may just be a quirk with this particular version of Ground2K4 (I see that you are using the latest version.) It may be possible to get this to work using a previous version of Ground2K4, but I have not yet had the time to try this.As soon as the holiday season ends in France, I shall contact Christian Fumey and see if he has any ideas. Until then, you might try making your harbor as part of your coast polygon, and your lakes and lagoons as VTP2 polygons using the default water textures - this last will give you greater control over the water color anyway (since if you used L/WM Water, you would get the color of the underlying water class, probably the same as the sea.)As for your mangroves not showing, I see that you have left the layer number to the default of 4. You might try placing all your VTP2 on a higher layer number - this should solve that.Let us know if this helps.Best regards.Luis

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Guest TFLeonard

Attached is a screenshot of what has happened to my scenery when I changed all my interior lakes and harbors to VTP2 polygons. In addition I put some lakes on layer 3 and some on 2. I had to delete my marsh polygons since I got overlapping error messages (weird since they seemed to be fine when the lakes were LWM's.Anyway, it seems that by making those changes my original island is now just a coastline. You can see that some little islands that lie in the big lake in the center are now visible as land. Talk about confusing! I guess this is a learning process. Before I "guess" as to what to do I thought I run two options by you:1. Should I make the island a VTP2 polygon also?2. If I simply add land fills will that just wipe out the lakes again?

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Hello Tim,I understand very well where the confusion can arise. The layer numbers in Flight Simulator terrain start from the bottom up. Therefore, layer 1 is the lowest and layer 101 is the highest.By placing all your VTP2 on layers 2 or 3, you are hiding them below the default land and water masks.Try putting them on layer 10, for example (or use anything higher than the default land polygons).Just as a reminder, here are the default layers, as taken from the Terrain SDK:Layers define the order in which Flight Simulator applies the textured polygons to the ground and in which phase of the texture building process they are applied.

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Guest TFLeonard

After changing the VTP2 layer numbers to 9 & 10 as you suggested, when I load the resulting bgls into FS9, it crashes the whole program. So obviously, something is bad in one of the bgl's. After some trial and error by eliminating the bgl's one by one, I have found the bgl file that causes the error. I also noticed the filenames in my scenery folder to be New_Providence_3.bgl, *5.bgl, and *9.bgl. Do these numbers correspond to anything? In this case New_Providence_9.bgl contains the problem, but from what I can gather its the one with everything for the main island so that doesn't narrow down the problem when I try to find it in Ground2k4.Since I'm developing on one PC and previewing in FS9 on another, its pretty tedious to try and discover the problem by having to go in and out of FS9. Is there another solution?I ran across LWMViewer which loads my files OK, is that a good way to check for problems?

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Hello Tim,The following information can be found in the Ground2K for Beginners guide, as well as in Christian Fumey's extensive documentation:All scenery will be created in distinct bgls that contain the varying terrain elements: - xxxx_2.bgl -- contains the re-mesh LWM polygons - xxxx_3.bgl -- contains all other Land/Water Mask polygons - xxxx_5.bgl -- contains all VTP2 (textured) polygons - xxxx_7.bgl -- contains all VTP1 (textured) polygons - xxxx_9.bgl -- contains all lines (shorelines, roads, etc.) - xxxx_9nn.bgl -- if you have selected SCASM night lighting for your roads, this contains the SCASM code The lines bgl should not in itself be the cause of your crashes. But, if this part of your project (shorelines and roads) should turn out to cause the problem, you could try deleting them and drawing them again.Perhaps you could indicate the precise nature of the crash, that is, when launching FS, or when flying above the new scenery, or when using Map or GPS view. This would help to pinpoint the problem.In past versions of Ground2K, it was possible to use the real Fills, according to the Microsoft technique. This can now crash FS2004, so they have been replaced with some different techniques that give the same result without crashes (thanks to a suggestion by Dick!) If you were using an old version of Ground2K, this might be a problem, but I seem to remember that you are using Ground2K4 version 5.33.By the way, have you drawn your lakes as VTP2 using the default water textures? How have you indicated the textures in the Properties window? This may possibly be a source of crashes, so it would be good to know what you have done here. But, if this were so, it would be the xxxx_5.bgl that would cause the crash. Are you certain that it is the xxxx_9.bgl?By all means, you should always use Jim Keir's wonderful and very complete LWMViewer - thanks very much, Jim! - to check your scenery. But, as you are still new to all this, will you understand what you see? If you have any doubts, don't hesitate to post a screenshot of the LWMViewer window here. PLEASE resize your images to something smaller than what you normally post.Don't despair, there are simple solutions to all this. But, it seems that your project now contains some elements that should not be there. It just remains to remove them and you will finally have success.Best regards.Luis

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