This document is a collaborative effort of the following members of the AvSim Scenery Design forum:- Bob Bernstein- Goran Brumen (gorchi)- George Davison (ghd)- Luis F

Please do NOT use this thread for questions concerning the tools or information included in the above document.For any questions, start a new thread instead.Only reply to this post in order to add new information for beginners to scenery design.Thank you.

Section: Default TerrainUnder: Programs / "AutoAsm can also import .dat files"Update: http://rimmer.ngdc.noaa.gov/coast/To: http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/shorelines.htmlSection: Image Editing ToolsUnder: The GimpUpdate: http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/stable.htmlTo: http://gimp-win.sourceforge.net/Sunday, October 17, 2004

Just a few sources of images.Free- Earthetc.com, a demonstration site for Earth Resource Mapping's web server products, home at http://www.earthetc.com/ and LandSat images at http://www.earthetc.com/ecwearth/asps/ecwe...orld/landsat742 but a little fuzzy- Global Land Cover Facility, the largest free source of LandSat images, offering:LandSat - Multispectral Scanner (MSS) at 79-meters, Thematic Mapper at 30-meters, and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) at 15-meters;ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer), various infra-red images, Level 1B;MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), various resolutions;Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), NASA elevation data, various resolutionsall available at http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml- LandSat 4 and 5 (ETM), and 7 (ETM+) http://www.landsat.org/- NASA Earth from Space, a collection of images taken from numerous Shuttle flights, http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/- NASA Earth Observatory Newsroom a diverse lot of photos http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/...ages_index.php3- NASA Gateway to Astronaut photos of the earth, http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/- NASA, site de l'Acad

Another commercial one is www.globexplorer.com. This has excellent options to purchase high res satellite imagery.Shez

SCASM (Scenery Assembler) by Manfred Moldenhauer is a basic and essential scenery design language.Without SCASM, there would not be any Flight Simulator scenery.While it comes with many programs that make use of it, it can also be found at:http://scasm.de/Manfred Moldenhauer has been developing and supporting this program for a decade. Many thanks to him.

Just a few more tools that have appeared in the meantime, available in the AvSim library, of course: - RWY 12 Object Placer by Israel Roth and Seev KahnWith this program, anybody can easily place all sorts of objects anywhere within the FS world. Objects include all the default Flight Simulator objects, as well as all gMax-created third-party objects. - AI Flight Creator by Dave WestburyOne more easy-to-use program for quickly creating AI flight plans - AI Traffic Lakes by Harold L. BallInstructions on building AI floatplane airports(In the same vein, don't forget Holger Sandmann's comprehensive guides to AI vehicles: - AI Floatplanes Starter Kit; - AI Ships Starter Kit; - AI Helicopters 101-107)

Excluding Scenery ElementsThere are essentially two types of scenery elements that can be excluded: terrain and everything else.TerrainThese elements always exist on layers within the terrain scenery; for example, all shorelines are on layer number 8. Therefore, to exclude shorelines, simply exclude that layer. A terrain element is excluded only within the limits of an Area (LOD13). These are the terrain elements for Flight Simulator 2004, with their respective layers:Terrain elementStreams and power line corridors........4Unpaved roads and railroads.............5Paved roads....................................6Airport skirtings and parks................7Shorelines.......................................8Please note that bodies of land and water (L/WM - Land/Water Masks) cannot be excluded. They must be covered with another L/WM in order to remove them (or, alternatively, the default bgl can be modified, but this is a more advanced topic.)Programs - The terrain creation and modification programs, such as Ground2K4, allow for exclusion of terrain elements; - DefArea by Christian Fumey can create exclusions while slewing over the terrain element in FS. Other Scenery ObjectsObjects, such as buildings, vehicles, trees, runways, taxiways, signs, in fact, entire airports can be excluded. The exclusion file must exclude the reference point of the object, that is, the geographic coordinates where that object is placed.Programs All scenery design programs, for example, Flight Simulator Scenery Creator, Airport for Windows, SceneGenx, allow for the creation of exclusion files.

Flight Simulator 2000 Software Development KitsSome of the SDKs can still be found at:http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimul...devdesk_sdk.aspIn particular, the following scenery documents may still be of interest:Scenery SDK, contains bgl opcodes - 953 kBhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/9/4...Scenery_SDK.EXETerrain SDK with original Resample - 2305 kBhttp://download.microsoft.com/download/5/8...Terrain_SDK.EXEGet them while you can!

SCASM TutorialYou can find an old, yet still quite valuable, SCASM tutorial by Andreas Klisch at the following site:http://combatflight.de/html/start.htmlAvailable auf Deutsch or in English.

Hey there!During the recent project I searched and found a nice tool for mounting several images without the tedious cut/paste in PaintShop ImageMagick, found at: http://www.imagemagick.orgIt's a comand-line , but works nicely in mounting images for large areas and has served me well Yours/Bqt

New link for SRTM dataPlease note that as of December 1st, 2004, NASA SRTM files will be found at the following link:ftp://e0dps01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm/Access remains free for this data.

Novasim, by Rafael Garcia Sanchez, is also a great object designer program. While it's still a SCASM-based program, it's relatively intuitive, produces an extensive range of macros and, very importantly, produces Library Objects. It can be found at:http://www.fsnova.com/

I've just uploaded a program for placing GianP's trees either singly or in groups. Search for TreePanter here in the Avsim library.George

SBuilder (Scenery Builder) by Luis de S