Is it true that Sbuilder is based on SCASM? It says that you need to install SCASM beta before you can use SBuilder. In the case, wouldn't there be a chance that your scenery will not work in FSX when it comes along. Based on the support for the previous generation theory. The Fs only supports one generation back. Which in this case would be XML. Is this true?

It uses scasm that is true, but it can also places FS9 objects. I am sure that others can give you a better answer but SCASM is just one way to compile MASM based scenery and there is still a lot of that about in FS9. Also it may still be there in some form or other in FSX. At the moment there is a lot of stuff you need to do with 'SCASM' only things like objects and airports are converted to xml. It may well be that everything else is moved to xml in FSX and therefore tools which have to use the old code now will not work. This happened with FS9 when tools such as AFCAD and FSNavigator needed to be changed to work with the new formats. Whether SBuilder would be updated will depend on whether Luis decides to do it or not. The same would be true of all the other design tools which currently use the older formats forthings like land class, roads, streams etc etc.

A quote from the FS2004 Compiling Scenery with BGLComp SDK"Scenery should no longer be created with BGL opcodes or the BGLC compiler from previous versions of Flight Simulator. The older BGL opcodes are supported for backward compatibility, however, we cannot guarantee their support in future releases."We've been warned.

It doesn't matter if the compilation is SCASM, BGLC, C++ or hand-coded binary.The output is what matters, and the output of SBuilder conforms to the standard for scenery creation.Go ahead and use it. It's perfectly alright.Dick

"Scenery should no longer be created with BGL opcodes or the BGLC compiler from previous versions of Flight Simulator. The older BGL opcodes are supported for backward compatibility, however, we cannot guarantee their support in future releases."Thats' true but there are new BGL opcodes created from time to time. I read that as saying that old opcodes are no longer supported and should not be used. Some are already depreciated and don't work in FS9 but there new ones and they are used in to describe FS9 objects - mdl files are full of them. The objects are placed using the newer xml code. I do agree that we can't expect that some of the older opCodes will work in FSX but I suspect ( I certainly don't know) that there will still be some about in that version :-)

I guess i'll avoid SCASM for the time being. Thanks for your opinions. Maybe something new will come along with FSX. And we'll all have new stuff to catch up on. I wonder when would the FSX SDK be released? Before FSX is released?

SCASM was updated to create FS9 terrain. AFAIK, it is no different than using BGLC. Perhaps FSX will have some sort of XML terrain, and a replacement for resample. If that happens we will have to adjust (assuming FS9 terrain doesn't work). Probably the most likely to be a problem would be the hi-res photo polys.scott s..

As written above, it is perfectly safe to use SCASM to create mesh scenery (as SBuilder does). That part of SCASM has been updated to meet the Fs2004 scenery standards. So as long as the backwards compatibility of the Fs9 mesh scenery works, the SBuilder output will also.The warning from the BGLComp SDK that was quoted deals with the scenery opcodes that are used to place objects. In that area it is indeed not a very good choice to use the old SCASM commands, but once again SCASM has been updated to allow object placement like the XML code (with BGLComp) also does.The only area in which SCASM has not been updated is the generation of the 3D objects. It is not capable to generate 3D objects using the latest MDL file standard. So for this part I would try to avoid SCASM if possible, but all other areas are fine.