Removing water surfaces

[Guest misho]

Hello everyone,What would be the easiest way of turning water surface into land, on a large scale? For instance if I wanted to "dry up" entire lakes? Thanks in advance,

[Guest luissa]

Hi,Add a LWM polygon of type equal to "land". The texture of the polygon (large area that can cover many lakes) will be taken from the land class definition. The water is changed to ground. Or add a VTP polygon with a layer 1 2 or 3 and declare whatever texture you want to see painted on the polygon. In contrast to the option above you are not changing water to ground. It is as if you were using a water texture that looks like ground.Regards, Luis

[Guest misho]

Thanks Luis,Well, I've never done this before, so I'm going to ask: How exactly do you go about doing option #1? I need to change water into actual ground.Thanks,

[Guest luissa]

Hi Misho,There are some tools around that can do it. Ground2k is one, another is my SBuilder, but there are more. Here is some background:1) There are 2 layers available to FS to paint the whole planet: the Land layer and the Water layer. In fact these 2 layers are global arrays, LC(I,J) and WC(I,J), where (I,J) define every LOD13 square in the world and LC or WC are bytes or indexes that point to 1 out of 256 textures (actually classes that, in turn, point to textures).2) When FS starts, it paints the planet using some classes from the Land layer and some from the Water layer. For every (I,J) LOD13 FS tries a Land texture first. So it looks to LC(I,J). If LC(I,J) is different from 100 it takes it as a ground texture and uses the value to pick up the right texture. If LC(I,J)=100 then it gets WC(I,J) and picks up a water texture.3) You can use this to transform "water into ground" or "ground into water". This could be called a Land Class or a Water Class scenery approach. The problem is that your resolution is the LOD13 square.4) For precise drawings (still the 4.8 meter limit!) you can draw LWM polygons (Land Water Masks). These polygons change the attribute of the territory. You can turn "land into water" in the middle of a continent by making one of these polygons and giving it an attribute of water. This is possible because the continent is land in the first place (as described in 1 and 2). So a "water mask" is another process that tells FS to use water in addition to the "LC(I,J)=100" method explained above.5) You will find many discussions in this forum about turning "water into land" in the middle of the ocean or, more precisly, where LC(I,J)=100. The problem is that "land masks" can not change water into land when LC(I,J)=100. Say you make such a mask! What texture should FS use? 100? But 100 is used a flag! So, in this case, you need to place some Land Class tiles (indexes different from 100) and then adding water around the tiles.6) If, in the zone that you are working on, LC(I,J) is not 100, you are OK. You have both a Land and Water texture to pick up. You can make mask polygons inside mask polygons of different types (ex swimming pools, inside small islands, inside mediam lakes, inside ...). The order FS reads the masks is the order it will use to define the territory.Sorry for the long post but it might be useful,Regards, Luis

[Guest misho]

A bit of a late reply, but I finally got around to looking into this. Thanks, Luis, I understand now what's behind this. Do you know the format of worldlc.bgl and worldwc.bgl? Is it a simple byte array? I think it would be rather simple to work with it...Question: If I assign a land class to water surface, is blending done automatically?