Adding Roads

[Guest crushinski]

I have looked everywhere but cannot find how to add roads to fs9. Is there a program that will automatically add roads from data from the seamless usgs website for example? If not is there a way to add them manually?

[Guest Bell206freak]

The best program to use is SBuilder. It has a rather steep learning curve if you're a newbie to scenery design, but as soon as you master it, you'll be hooked at changing the scenery in which you like to fly over. It can also import default LWM/VTP BGL files so you can modify or study them for your own works.

[scott967 62]

Sbuilder can do what you want. But, to make it much much easier, you need appropriate GIS software. I recommend Global Mapper, but this costs about US$190. There used to be a nice freeware called fGIS which also could be used (to some extent) but this software was removed recently due to license problems.It appears you are referencing the US. I recommend downloading the DLG files for your area of interest. There is a "transportation" file with the roads in it. The alternative is to download the US Census "Tiger" data set.Both of these result in vector data that can be displayed in the GIS software. For purposes of FS9, you need to reproject the data into Geo/ WGS84. The advantage of Global Mapper, is that you can export your vector data in Shaper BLN format, which can be used by Sbuilder. Alternatively, you can export the file as a shapefile, which can then by used by a freeware named "Mapedit". Mapedit has the capability to export in Polish format, which Sbuilder also uses. The advantage of this format, is that it is possible to tag an attribute to the feature which sbuilder can recognize (more important if you ar importing different feature types). There is a file in sbuilder, rgn40.txt, which sets up how sbuilder will create VTP lines for various feature types.Edit comments:There is also a design tool called TerraScene2 you might look into. This was designed to create scenery for Fly!, but there is tutorial around somewhere on how to use this with either autoasm or slartibartfast to create FS9 scenery. TerraScene2 can read DLG data. I can't remember now if it does roads or not.scott s..