Ultimate Terrain and Ground 2K4 Question...

[Guest abent]

I seem to be losing my night textures placed in Ground 2K4 when using Ultimate Terrain regardless of whether I use default texture or select the textures using "other textures". The day textures appear normally but no night ones.Has anyone experienced this and if so, is there a cure? Ultimate Terrain is great but I need to spice up the areas as UT does not place town/city textures in a lot of places where it places roads.Thanks in advance,Adam

[Holger 0]

Hi Adam,Al Sibley (of Flight Ontario) and I independently came across the same problem a while back. It seems to be related to the inverse issue I noticed about a year ago: glaciers and golf courses placed as VTP2 polys would display city-type night textures when mixed with residential or agricultural polygons.The solution for the golf courses and glaciers was to place polygons with night lights in separate G2K4 project files from those without lights AND to assign different VTP2 levels to those two types of polys.With the missing night lights problem this approach didn't consistently help. What I found is that I need to place those two compiled bgl files into separate scenery add-on folders (activated in the scenery library) to get my night lights back.If I interpret one of Al's emails correctly he found an alternative solution: directly assign the textures via the "custom textures" option in G2K4. However, I believe that doing so will make the sim use only one texture tile per season of the full set (usually 5 or seven) so that solution may be a bit more limiting with larger residential areas.Hope that helps. Let us know if one of these approaches gets the job done or if you find an alternate solution.Cheers, Holger

[Guest Lucky]

You are correct Holger.Another problem with my idea is that you loose all autogen. you get the texture but the autogen does not show up. You suggested placing a residential landclass texture down using EX Landclass or simmilar.Than in G2K cut out the vegitation areas that the landclass tile over runs. This is what ive resorted to doing although it wont work on areas of steep hills like mountainous areas.Still serching for the answer. Al Sibleyhttp://www.flightontario.com/images/sig_asibley.gif

[Holger 0]

Hi Al,oops, didn't even think about the lack of autogen.That other idea about placing settlements as landclass and using vegetation-type polys to trim the settlements to their accurate boundaries does only work in areas with slopes <11 degrees; anything steeper and FS will autoswitch the settlement landclass to 027b, which is a mixed forest.So the reason you're not using my approach is because you don't like the separate folder entries in the scenery library? It's not a perfect solution but it does return the nightlights without any of the other issues (other than the general issue with VTP2 polys of vertically flipped textures not matching with the autogen).Cheers, Holger