FTX- How Do They Prevent Forest Insertion On Slopes?

[nudata 10]

One of the more annoying "features" of FSX is the automatic insertion of blocks of forest textures on slopes. This is particularly disturbing to see on agricultural fields when a square block of forest appears in a field. I guess that the assumption is that no farmer will tend to fields that exceed a certain slope.FTX (Australia) seems to have solved this issue with their Tasmania free scenery package. Nice clean fields are shown on slopes without blocks of forest appearing. Does anyone know how this is done? I would like to do this for landclass in may favorite flight area.Just a note - Tasmania is done in landclass but in a way that presents a very real scene that exceeds the original efforts of Microsoft.Regards,Dick BoleyNear Pittsburgh, PA.A PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke

[Holger 0]

Hi Dick,as you know all that information is stored in the lclookup.bgl file and that is what we alter. Because that file is global we (have to) use the external FTX mode switcher that replaces the default lclookup.bgl with the modified version (among a few other, autogen-related files).Actually, we modify much more than just the slopes. For example, one of the main issues with default FSX is that for many classes the binary blending masks (the "M" tiles) are not fully activated. Thus, if your texture set has 16 variants but lclookup by default only activates the first seven then the others would have their content (fields, ballparks, housing, etc.) cut in half, as is the case with the default textures or "generic" replacements.In case you're wondering, there is no publically available information about the internal coding of lclookup.bgl, at least to my knowledge.There is a work-around and I believe I mentioned this before: if you're creating your own land class files you can pick classes by their slope behavior. For example, you could take a class that doesn't switch at low gradients and use that for your agricultural areas. You would then copy the default (or custom) agricultural textures and rename them to fit that class. I used that approach extensively in my FS9 projects, like Glacier Bay v2, and it gets around having to "hack" a global file.Cheers, Holger

[nudata 10]

Thanks Holger,Indeed I remember the ICLOOKUP discussions and its mysterious format. I was hoping that some other approach had been discovered. I did not recall the renaming trick but age is the standard excuse.... Your msg goes into my FSX "stuff" file.Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke

[nudata 10]

One other thing to help is this link:http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthrea...hlight=lclookupBy - Arnaud Cl