Fayetteville TS Render Pack Uploaded (pic)

[RandallR 444]

Sorry about the long absence, friends! Because of the type of work I do, the months of November & December don't allow much time for Fly!ing. I've had a nice vacation and am enjoying working again with Fly!I've just uploaded a new TS render pack to fill in a missing segment for the Carolinas Project. The Fayetteville global tile is built around Fayetteville, NC. If you've rendered the other global tiles, this will now allow uninterrupted TerraScenery from Fontana Lake in the west to Cape Hatteras on the coast and from Raleigh south through Myrtle Beach, SC.Over Fayetteville Regional Airport with the city of Fayetteville in the background.

http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/56515.jpg

This project pack also includes a customized version of the base texture render pak which I've named Base Fly!2 w/Water Updates (7.5 m/p). This updated version is identical to the standard base pack, except for how roads are rendered in water areas created with the water mask. Roads will actually "cross" the water now, instead of becoming underwater shadows, appearing more properly in a bridging manner. This will only be the case where I was able to identify a bridge while editing the water mask, but it certainly improves the appearance.You can see the result in the image above where I-95 crosses the river. A very special thank you to Pascal who pointed out a bug in the original render pak settings which gave the appearance of "sunken bridges". I will post this render file and similar updates to my southwest texture render files so that bridge areas will be better represented in the future when you render my packs or wish to render your own.

[Guest swathdiver]

Thanks Randall, looking forward to this one too! My little one is sick so I'm home today working on my Florida project.JamesHmmm... Tastes Like Chicken!

[Pascal_LSGC 298]

Hi Randall!Welcome back from vacation and happy new year!Very nice scenery! (although I usually Fly in mounaineous areas I must say, not used to flat countries ;-) )The underwater roads bug was found thanks to a question someone asked. I usually start TS with a fully customized render file and never noticed it before.Cheers!Pascal

[RandallR 444]

Hi James - I saw your post on Florida and am looking forward to its release!

[RandallR 444]

Greetings Pascal!Though I have some custom packs, I've found the "start-up" base pack to be appropriate for the eastern through midwestern areas of the States. As far as the roads bug, I thought it would be a good idea to just include the pak file with the proper settings for some projects rather than attempt to describe the editing steps.Regarding topography, I really enjoy mountainous and hilly terrain, but the Carolinas encompass a nice mix. You get a lot of shore area and islands along the Atlantic seaboard - as you move inland there are swamp and lakes, flat rural areas mixed with forest, then hilly terrain with gullies and ridges, ending with the Great Smoky Mountain range extending through the western Carolinas and part of Tennessee.There are only two global tiles to go in the 20-tile project.

[Guest tonyc]

Randall, your beautiful work has inspired me to to some TS rendering. One quesiton.I did Catalina island and included some "distance from coast".The end result is beautiful, except for the ugly white lines that delineate the end of the TS rendered tile. Is there any way to prevent these lines from appearing?tony

[RandallR 444]

Tony,Are the white lines in ocean/water areas? Do you have any images?

[Guest tonyc]

Yes, Randall. The white lines are in the ocean. Essentially, these lines represent the perimeter of the rendered TScene area that I picked. Unfortunately, after I posted the question, I erased all the files and this time decided to experiment with the "distance from coast" setting. I entered 0 miles( in the first instance I had entered 5 miles), but now I get a crash to the desktop when I teleport to this area.tony

[RandallR 444]

Tony,There is no "distance from coast" setting in TS2 that I am aware of, so I'm guessing you're referring to the project bounds setting: Specify an airport and a distance or the distance around airport entry? Though you can certainly create a project of any size, I would recommend that you refine it on the map and drag your project out to no less than a 1/4 tile grid in size, using the snap to globe tile grid option.You're far more likely to have boundary issues if your borders are not tile to tile. Even then, border issues should only occur if there are elevation mismatches between the tiles - this shouldn't occur in the ocean (as all elevations are 0 feet).When you made your original project, did you delete all the image and data files from TS2 in the Fly! IIdata directory? If you rendered a pod in TerraScene, you don't want to use the files in the data folder - delete them or Fly! II will run slow and the pod itself will never load (Fly! will load the "raw" scenery from the data directory instead). Be careful - you may have had many other files in the data folder already that you need to keep (special scenery files, taxiway files, etc.) The only safe way to use TerraScene for rendering when you have other files in the data folder is to temporarily rename your regular data folder before rendering: name it "data_" or "hold_data", etc. Then, make a new empty data folder for TS2 to use. When the project is finished, simply delete the data folder and everything in it, rename your original folder back to data and you're good to go.As far as your current problem, you cannot produce a project of "0" size, so you probably created something incompatible with Fly! Get rid of the project, deleting all project files (all TS2 files in the data directory and erase the scenery pods). With all of those files deleted, you should be able to teleport normally to the area and it should contain the generic scenery again. Once everything is working normally, create a new project with scenery bounds snapped to the globe tile grid. Be sure to use a temporary data directory while rendering - when the rendering is finished, be sure to delete it and rename the data folder back before you teleport into your new scenery.I hope this helps you resolve your issues.