Photo terrain and water in FS9

[Guest CoordinatorYS]

I tried to create photo terrain of an area which includes both sea and land (coastal area) in SBuilder. Some LODs include both these landclasses so I painted water in the photo terrain texture with alpha so that it is invisible in the simulator. The problem is that after I put the photo terrain bgl in place and start the sim, it crashes every time I approach the area in slew mode. I guess this is because the photo lies on both land and water. What should I do to get around this? Thanks in advance.

[arno 1]

Hi,Usually such crashes are caused by using the from texture format or having the texture in the wrong location.Did you use the VTP polygon option of SBuilder to place the photos? In that case the textures need to go to the worldtexture folder.As I said before also the texture format could matter, it is best to use DXT1 textures with mipmaps.

[Guest CoordinatorYS]

Thanks for the answer. The textures are in the proper worldtexture folder and as they contain alpha Sbuilder automatically made them 8 bit format with alpha. However I tried DXT1 and DXT3 to no avail, the sim just quits to desktop giving no errors. Obviously this is somehow connected with the landclass boundary, but I could not find anybody having the same kinda problem... Thanks anyway and waiting for other suggestions...

[arno 1]

Do the textures also have mipmaps? I think not having them can also cause crashes (the 8 bit vs DXT should work).

[Guest CoordinatorYS]

Sure they have. I've found the solution. The provlem has been solved by drawing a land mask which made the land portion wider and then water mask where necessary :). Now everything works fine, but recquires extensive editing of the coastline... So it seems that the default land/water boundary was the problem.