Coming soon - my freeware Landclass Assistant!

[Guest Grunt]

OK I got it to work!!!This is what i had to do:Tried the suggestions above several times without success.Got very frustrated and erased everything. Re-downloaded.Tried twice more.Nothing.Went to McDonalds for some comfort food.Came home and fired up the old AMD 350 Win98 system on the home network.Copied the files to the old system, used Winzip, ran throught the setup again, and BANG...landclass.bgl right where it ougt to be!So the problem was definatly with my new(er) system (maybe the unzipping utility of XP since I found files with Winzip I didn't see with XP and they had the correct extensions ...which wasn't the case on my other system).Specs: Athlon 1.2, 512 PC 133, GeForce 2 MX 400 AGP video, SB PCI, and the probable culprit: Win XP!Anyhow, great program John!!BTW I'll run interference for you with my wife...she'll definatly want to kill you when she figures out that I have a new toy for FS and will be holed-up in the ManRoom for a while! LOL!http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/Us...cdf6182b41d.jpg Great Lakes Express VA - The Midwest's regional and feeder airlinehttp://www.voyagerairlines.com/gle/index.html

[Guest Grunt]

What's the address to the site Kurt? Thanks.http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/Us...cdf6182b41d.jpg Great Lakes Express VA - The Midwest's regional and feeder airlinehttp://www.voyagerairlines.com/gle/index.html

[Guest Kurt]

http://mesh64.home.att.net/http://home.att.net/~mesh64/nlcd_mapping.htmlKurt :-wave

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Awesome Kurt!Thank you so much for posting the before/after shots. It's one thing for me to code out an app and use it. By the time you have it coded, you know it inside and out. But to see the results of someone else using it, well, that just makes my day!Thanks again for your shots, hopefully it will encourage others!Regards,John(And P.S.)--my appendix A at the end of the docs was built in part from the info in Orlando's tables. I haven't played with all the possible texture types or verified the values, however...

[Guest]

John,I'm obviously a complete dunce 'cause I've searched up, down and sideways over Microsoft's site and can't locate the FS2000 Terrain SDK. Any hints? I'm ready to try some repairs on the default towns of Redmond and Bend in Central Oregon and my community in the outskirts of San Jose, CA. Thanks for the opportunity.Jeff

[Guest]

>John, >>I'm obviously a complete dunce 'cause I've searched up, down >and sideways over Microsoft's site and can't locate the >FS2000 Terrain SDK. Any hints? I'm ready to try some >repairs on the default towns of Redmond and Bend in Central >Oregon and my community in the outskirts of San Jose, CA. >Thanks for the opportunity. >>Jeff Go to the developers' desk at:www.microsoft.com/games/fs2000/downloads_fs2000update.aspAirdog

[Guest eko]

Ok... I gave this a whirl, and... IT WORKS! It took me a couple of hours to go through the tutorial, figure out what I was doing, try a couple of textures, but it did work!I finally decided to give this a go, because even though I purchased the LandClass Europe set, there are still so many gaps in Spain.Here are some screenshots of a large city (Fuengirola) west of Malaga which was totally missing.Overhead Before:http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/Us...cb208857208.jpgOverhead After:http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/Us...c8c0864a910.jpgCockpit Before:http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/Us...cf808d0d00f.jpgCockpit After:http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/Us...cdf08c109a2.jpgIt still pretty rough, as I haven't experimented too much with getting the edges to blend better with the surrounding textures. Somebody needs to make a thumbnail "cheat sheet" of what all the textures look like! LOL!

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I'm glad you figured out how to add your updates on top of the FSLandclass scenery. For those who have it, or any of the landclass files uploaded to the web in recent weeks, the best way to handle "landclass on top of landclass" is:a) Create a scenery folder for the file (i.e.: Spanish Coast), and make sure the scenery folder does NOT contain a texture folder. Just create a subfolder in the scenery folder called scenery, and install the .bgl there.:( Install the scenery from FS2002's scenery config menu. Normally, just adding the scenery will suffice. But in the case of a project around SF, ORD, LA, and NYC, where there are photoreal textures, you need to "move" your landclass project's scenery entry underneath the entries for those areas. Otherwise, the landclass entry will override the photoreal textures, and they will not be visible.Eko--First..any way you can upload your pics to Avsim and repost them? By using links to flightsimnetwork, my firewall blocks access, as I'm in my office for a few hours today. Another issue you might run into, if you do a large area of the Spanish Coast that crosses LOD 5 borders, is an "overlap" problem first identified in an email I received the other day. The fix is straightforward...it involves creating a special .inf file, that encompasses the entire length and width of the project, and references all the .raw files used in the project. You have to be careful to add "dummy" .raw files to "pad" out your project, if the .raw files don't line up into a rectangle or square. In this example "X" refers to real data, and "d" refers to a dummy file (simply a flushed file)...x xx dThe W,E,N and S corners in the .inf file outline all the .raw files included. Each specific "source" raw file is referenced by its NW corner. Here's an example, multiproject .inf I created for someone doing a project for Australia: LOD = Auto NorthLat =-33.75 SouthLat = -36.5625 WestLong =135 EastLong =142.25 DestDir = " " DestBaseFileName = "landclass" Type=MultiSource NumberofSources=2 Type = ClassU8 SourceDir = " " SourceFile = "port elliott.raw" Lat = -33.75 Lon =135 NumOfCellsPerLine = 256 NumOfLines = 256 CellXdimensionDeg = 0.0146484 CellYdimensionDeg = 0.0109863 Type = ClassU8 SourceDir = " " SourceFile = "goolwa.raw" Lat = -33.75 Lon =138.75 NumOfCellsPerLine = 256 NumOfLines = 256 CellXdimensionDeg = 0.0146484 CellYdimensionDeg = 0.0109863

[Guest]

How are the blurry textures in LandClass?Tim

[John_Cillis 2,406]

"How are the blurry textures in LandClass?"Pretty much a subject beaten to death, isn't it? Landclass updates don't modify the scenery engine. But broad areas of coverage do take longer to load. Landclass Assistant skirts this issue by updating small sections of textures, and ignoring everything else (unless someone has the patience to input 10-20,000 texture updates in one sitting). If you've seen blurries with some of the larger landclass files (like the California upload), you won't see them with the types of projects I designed Landclass Assistant around....other than the ones normally seen to one degree or another by most of us.-John

[Guest eko]

Folks, I'm very sorry about the double post of the images, but I would like for JCi to see these. THX.Fuengirola Overhead Before:http://www.lovett.org/jsp/pub/fs/fuengirola_oh_b.jpgFuengirola Overhead After:http://www.lovett.org/jsp/pub/fs/fuengirola_oh_a.jpgFuengirola Before:http://www.lovett.org/jsp/pub/fs/fuengirola_b.jpgFuengirola After:http://www.lovett.org/jsp/pub/fs/fuengirola_a.jpgYou can clearly see that it is kind of a rough patch, but nonetheless, relatively accurate. (My home town is Malaga, so I've driven over the hill looking down to Fuengirola MANY times. :) )I am going to sit with the program and FS and find a nice empty patch of land somewhere where I can test what all the diff textures look like. I need to figure out exactly which textures blend well with city centers going out to the edges.Also, I already encountered the LOD border problem. It had me stumped for a second, because I couldn't figure out why I had TWO sets of numbers to input in the .inf file! :) Reading two or three times through the tutorial eventually shot off a lightbulb in my brain, and I adjusted my initial samplings slightly so that it did not cross the border. (Go figure... what were the odds of the city I wanted to place as my first trial project being on a border... PHHT!)Might not be a bad idea to write down all these additional tips (like the one in your post here) and start collecting them for "stupid" users like me. :) Maybe add then to the docs for the next version or something. :)And yes, that is exactly what I did for my landclass files. (I got that tip from Orlandos site, where I read all his great info he has there.) I put my Europe FSLandClass file in it's own folder ("landclass") and added it to the scenery library just below the default scenery, then I created a second folder ("landclass2") for my Fuengirola BGL (and any future one's I'll do) and put that one just below the landclass folder in the scenery library. Worked great.I'm going to keep tinkering with this great tool, hopefully, my next addition won't take a couple of hours, like this first one did! (Baby steps, baby steps!)Wish list: (not at ALL intended as anything I am expecting from you, BTW, just stuff that would be UBER cool)1. A thumbnail view selector for the different textures you can assign. Click on a button, and a window with previews of all the possible textures you can add shows up... click on the texture you want to use, and the number inserts itself in the required field. (Hey, I can dream, can't I!!)2. Automatic .inf file creation from the values already visible in the program. Click a button, and an .inf file ready for batching with the correct values already present is created.Hehe. Yea, I know... I'm crazy... but hey, it is a WISH list. :)Great proggie JCi.. thanks so much for giving it to us!!

[Guest]

It even placed a building where my house is sort of at! Amazing!Previously I had only forest where there are many houses. Now I have too many houses and not enough trees. This is a great tool :)

[Guest Grayal]

so basically those of us running WIN XP are screwed?????

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I've been emailed by many XP users who have no problems (some have even noted they made no changes, such as the Win 98 compat mode fix I posted here). One gave me a simple to do list:1) Don't modify ANYTHING in landclass.inf other than the lat/lon entries. 2) Mark the Terrain SDK .exe's, the batch file and the folder containing for Windows 98 compat mode. 3) Be logged in as admin while running the tools.The same user had mentioned that his project folder was created within the Landclass Assistant program folder. Don't know if that would make a difference, but I'm sure Microsoft did some odd things as far as security and running of DOS Apps.Bear in mind the failures are related to the SDK tools--a Microsoft product. I received an email from someone saying "Thanks for nothing, why didn't you test the d**n thing under XP". Well, to my knowledge no one's reported any bugs with my app--all issues have been related to the way XP parses DOS commands and tools. That's the beauty of freeware--being able to relate to the user my opinion of his comment. And the truth of it is, this is an app I wrote for myself which I decided to share. I don't have a lab with dozens of computers (except for the one I'm an admin for at my office). My computer time (on a 98se system) is shared with my family time. Meaning strong looks from my wife and wishful looks from a two year old toddler that wants to play with Daddy.Others are running the resample tool under XP.... Hopefully, they'll be able to participate and offer suggestions to those who can't. Maybe someone running under XP can post their .inf file here as well.-John