Need help with terrascene

[Guest]

I am working on a scenery with terrascene and everything worked fine for the first two quarters of the global tile. I made my tga's, done a little photoshop painting and sliced them into FlyII. But now something seemed to be wrong. I make my tga's, do a little photoshop painting and slice them into FLYII (with terrascene). Then I delete the files in the data folder (they are all in the pod file) and with these files my scenery disappeares. The pod-file is in the scenery folder but fly don't read it, so it's impossible to fill the global tile.Thank you for your help,Frank

[Guest Paul Brooks]

Hi Frank,Check that there are two files in your folder, one should be the pod which should be between 80 and 90 megs in size, the other is a small windows explorer file of 1k.If the pod file is small, say about 128k, then TerraScene has made the scenery, but Fly2Slice has not worked.Paul

[Guest Dean]

Is there a reason you are doing the area a 1/4 globe tile at a time? This might be the problem if the 1/4 tile areas are part of the same whole globe tile. They all will have the same name and may not load properly. When the scenery is poded fly uses the .scf file mentioned by Paul to load the area based on the lat and lon specified in the scf file.

[MGS 0]

Frank, do the whole globe tile at once with the snap to grid option turned on. Full globe tiles load every time, even when other globe tiles are adjacent. One tip: on a few occasions I've had to add/subtract one degree of latitude or longitude with the load parameters in the SCF file to avoid a "can't load" message for some texture files.On the other hand, I never have had consistent results with quarter tiles in the same globe tile loading in the original Fly! The same has been true for Fly2. Usually, one or more quarter tiles just won't load. (BTW, if adjacent quarter tiles lie in different globe tiles, then loading is not a problem).

[Guest]

Thank you for your answers and you're right mgs, the problem is the scf file. It's impossible to load the quarter tiles in the same global tile without changing the load values (but the next time the same values produce an error, strange). So the better way is to slice the whole global tile. but my photoshop version (7.0)can't handle tga's in this dimensions (800.000 MB) and irfan view and acdsee either. So what can I do?FrankN

[MGS 0]

Frank, you can edit the individual segments with PS and merge them with Terrascene later. Under render, Options (right pane), uncheck "delete segments after merge". After rendering you'll find 49 segments of 16,588KB for each of day, night, and watermask images, along with the corresponding 812,806KB merged tga's. Delete those 812,806KB tga's you don't want; you can reconstitute these after editing the segments. To merge the edited segments, be sure to check "use existing segments" in the RIGHT pane of Render Options, under Options of Terrascene.Editing a number of the 49 segments can be a pain, its not very difficult to figure out which ones to edit. The problem comes when the feature you are editing spreads over more than one segment, like a road, river, or lake. It then is quite difficult to get these features to line up in the merged image. Maybe someone else knows a trick for this. I use Paintshop Pro and have 256MB memory. I can't edit merged tga's, and I am uncertain whether a memory upgrade will solve my problem. So for now, I am stuck editing individual segments.

[Guest Dean]

>The problem comes when the feature you are editing spreads over >more than one segment, like a road, river, or lake. It then >is quite difficult to get these features to line up in the >merged image. Mark,Could you describe the problem in a little more detail? I'm sure somebody might have a suggestion.

[Guest]

I have 768 MB of RAM and editing the full tga in PhotoShop Elements works fine. Need to be careful though, if I create too many layers and then save, PhotoShop can't get the file back open. As long as I reduce things down to a couple of layers before closing everything works fine.Don

[MGS 0]

Hi Dean. For example, the Missouri R. was missing in the water mask between two segments. After filling in the missing parts of the river in each individual segment, the full tga had to be generated to see if the two parts lined up. Several iterations usually were required before the river lined up in the full image. Another example was the Portland globe tile. In that case it was roads, which were curiously missing to the East of the city. The missing roads had to be filled in those segments and lined up with roads in adjacent segments. The only way to align them was by rendering in the full image, move each road, then render again. Fortunately, I don't remember how many attempts were required before the roads connected in the full image after drawing them in 1/49th individual segments of the image. Also fortunate was a portion of Raystown Lake in PA, which I had to move off a ridge. That portion was in a single segment, a piece of cake. In that case all that was needed was to connect the moved lake to a portion of the lake which wasn't moved in that segment. That unmoved portion crossed into a second segment, so no trial and error was needed to make the moved lake join up with the rest. I see in the next message, below, that Don has been able to edit full tga images when equipped with more RAM. My question now is whether more RAM can be used by Paintshop Pro, or whether I would need to purchase both the RAM and Photoshop Elements.Maybe I should point out that I find the above great fun. Fly2 has many facets to enjoy, and it will take a while to explore them all.

[Guest Dean]

Hi Mark,I missed the part about you using Paint Shop Pro. I was able to edit full TGAs on my 256 meg system using Photoshop LE which is the light version of Photoshop that came bundled with my Umax scanner. It did take a while for the full picture to open and save but I could do it. As you indicate, it is much easier to edit the individual segments then merge them but in the situation you describe it isn't practical. You are absolutely right about this being fun. If I don't feel like flying, TS2 and Terramodels add a completely different element to this hobby.

[MGS 0]

Dean, thanks. I'll look into it.