NY Finger Lake Region

[Guest]

Hi,I have Version 2 of Bob Shubinski's Finger Lakes region of upstate New York mesh scenery but there is still a big discrepancy between the net result and reality. Aside from a few hills where there are not really hills, the terrain itself appears to be totally forested - valley and hills alike. In reality, the valleys in that region are mostly open farmland, and only the hills have forests. Also, there are whole small farming communities missing. I am not blaming Bob for these shortcomings but am curious. Are these things that could be corrected via Landclass Assistant or is there another tool that would be better?Stan V.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Stan.Yes, this is exactly why John Cillis invented Landclass Assistant.All the tiles in the LOD5 area need an assignment to a landclass number. Since the discovery of value 254 being transparent, you can now use a grid made entirely of transparent values, with only a few tiles given actual landclass numbers. The original discovery was made by 'schampi', and has been confirmed by the recent SDKs.This lets you change a tile or two, and leave the majority of assignments alone. A single landclass tile is 1223x1223 meters at the equator ( same size as LOD13 ).I hope to have a tutorial out in a few weeks covering the new VTP poly methods of using landclass. That allows you to change a landclass assignment as small as 4.8 meters squared if desired! The downside, there is no 'tool' that will do that... it's all hand-coded BGLC instructions.For now, Landclass Assistant is probably just the tool you need.In the future, landclass BGLs may become an even more important tool. Schampi had noted that in addition to transparency, there is a value for photoreal! In fact, the 'Creating Terrain' SDK notes there are 2 photoreal types...253 is custom and 252 is custom with all seasons.Just place value 252 in the RAW file for the BGL... and the correct photoreal textures in a texture folder. The textures must come from resampler and assigned the usual names, like 003101031303203Su.bmp ( that weird name/number assigns the world location for the texture ).That allows us to create landclass BGLS with a mix of transparent, photoreal, and default valued tiles... and I assume autogen will follow the standard rules for tiles.Dick

[Guest]

Thanks, Dick. This is exactly what I needed to hear. However, I am such a newbie that I have yet to really get oriented in this whole process so I may or may not attempt to actually do something besides chew on my thumb. I look forward to your tutorial and then maybe we'll see.Stan V.

[rhumbaflappy 113]

Hi Stan.Landclass Assistant is pretty easy to use, and John ( 'JohnCi' )is a good guy, and will answer your questions quickly.Just remember to place your landclass BGLs into a scenery folder that is NOT paired with a texture folder.Dick