Is it possible to change land class? / pic and 3 Q's?

[Guest]

4 questions in fact; 1) Is it yet possible to change the way certain areas are categorized in fs2002? That is can I for example change a farm region to look like a city region? without having to redesign new scebery for it ?2) Has anyone been able to resolve the blue haze issue in the game? low visibility with overcast clouds is a joke.. looks way too weird to be as real as it gets! Fs2000 did a great job in this respect.3) Is it clear whther it would be possible in the future to change the way sky colours are in Fs2002? I always find it a bit too milky/hazy to be real and lacks proper graduation. (32 bit enabled with GForce 2 ).. real skies have a distinct brightness in clear weather that fs skies just don't have. see the FlyII, cold early morning shot below.4) Finally, Is it possible to edit the texture bmp's that are in the texture folder of fs2002? I tried with clouds the other day and after saving it back the whole type would not appear anymore. Which tools /programs can I use for that.. What I am after at this time is to make the broken cirrus layer yellowish/brownish in colour so as to simulate ( dusty /muggy skies) which are frequent in many countries of the world for many days of the year. Sorry for the long post.. Hope to hear all your comments.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I can at least answer the first question in regards to landclasses. There have been payware tools to reclassify the land assignments in 2K2--FSLandclass is the most widely known. But several of us have been working on a process to perform "spot" updates to scenery, without having to reclassify an entire LOD 5 grid (which is a limitation associated with the process) or purchase an outside program like FSLandclass.Reclassifying the land involves some fairly basic steps:1) Create a 256x256 pixel "RAW" bitmap (possibly 512x512 could be used), which is simply a straight matrix of grayscale values, each associated with a specific landclass according to a spec posted by Microsoft.2) Build an .inf file which is used by the Terrain SDK's resample.exe to process the bmp into a "tmf" file. The bitmap, as mentioned above, must span an LOD 5 grid. Several sample .inf files are posted, and really they are quite simple to set up once you get the math down (which is also fairly simple, IMHO).3) Run tmf2bgl to convert the file in step 2 to a .bgl file.Recently, it's been suggested that a "mask" value of 254 could be used in the bmp, which would allow existing landclasses to appear everywhere the mask value is assigned. This would allow one to create a raw bmp, only being required to assign byte values to the areas you wish to change. The bitmap would still have to span a LOD 5 grid, but it would be much easier to play with and "tweak" the scenery than dealing with a grid a couple of hundred miles wide. If you're interested in more (and perhaps better) detail than what I've added here, there's ongoing discussions of this in both the Terrabuilder and Mesh forums.John, KPHX

[Guest]

4) Yes it is. You need a utility to uncompress/recompress the .bmp's. If you have FS2002 Pro, you can use ImageTool.exe in the Gmax gamepack. I find Martin Wright's DXTBmp much easier to use. You can find it here:http://fly.to/mwgfx/

[Guest]

I am surprised at the little amount of response one can get nowadays, miss the old days when there was much more help around.. well Thanks for those who answered. )-: