Terrascene and Terramodel newbie question.

[Guest]

When loading Terrascene the program wants the me to find the fly2slice.exe, where in the world is this file, I can't find it anywhere. For Terramodel 2.1, what folder should I install this package within FLyII?Thank you for your response.

[wsieffert 0]

Well, if you have FLY!2, patched to the latest then fly2slice.exe resides in your drive:Program FilesTerminal RealityFly! II folder. You can get the patches from AVSIM library.If you have FLY! or FLY!2K then the file will be flyedit.exe. You should have a copy in your fly folder. You can also download some fly updates from AVSIM and other websites.

[Guest]

Did you find it?

[Guest]

Yes, I found it thank you very much. I do have the latest patch for FlyII! Now that I have been able to load the program correctly, I started my first project with the project wizard (Ver.2.1), creating a terrascene file for Louisiana using the Baton Rouge Airport with a 100mi radius, with this file I included high map detail,rivers, and airports with my download, and using slow dial-up internet service, these files are going to take time to download, no problem, however, I have another question,how do I install this project once downloaded within my Fly!! program?On a personal note, thank you very much for your quick and helpful response to my first question. I am finding that the people that occupy this GREAT website show interest and enthuasism for all that occupy this site from the experienced to the inexperienced, this says alot about the character of the people that use this site. Thanks AgainCharles R.

[Guest Colins2]

Charles,Glad you got sorted out.I'd like to clear up a couple of mizconceptions:TerraScene is not part of Fly!What TerraScene does is to create a TGA image suitable for importing into Fly! as scenery - that's all.I mean no disrespect to TerraScene or Todd Klaus, the creator, regulars will know that I'm one of it's biggest supporters, but TerraScene seems to get blamed/praised for a lot of things that it doesn't do.Selecting the options on the project map has no bearing on the created image. These options simply tell TerraScene what to display on it's own map. Similarly, TerraScene doesn't use the Fly! databases to display the airports and other items, it uses it's own built-in ones. There are a lot of smaller airfields missing, but that doesn't mean that they won't be in the final image.Once you define your area, TerraScene will d/l the data it needs from the USGS or other archives. This is automatic for US scenery.Once it has d/l the data files it will create (render) the image.This operation can take a long time depending on RAM/ CPU speed/ connection speed etc.Non-US scenery is a whole different question, but irrelevant here.Depending upon the options selected, TerraScene will create 1 ~ 3 images, daytime, water mask and night time for your area.You also have 2 other options; slice with Flyslice and create a pod.At some stage, you will want to do both.The flyslice program is part of Fly! and will take the TerraScene created image and slice it up into ground tiles that Fly! uses.It will also create a POD file for you, which is basically an archive of all your scenery data files.Just to put this in perspective, if you were to slice a complete globe tile, an area of (approx) 60miles x 60 miles and you selected all the options, i.e. day, night & water mask, then you would end up with some 24000 files just for that area!Creating a pod file puts all these into a (very large) archive file for you.To answer the last part of your question:After all the rendering, slicing and podding is done, you will end up with just 2 files, a pod (whatever you called it) and a .scf file.The pod contains ALL the scenery files and the .scf (named the same as the pod) contains loading info for Fly!You can just put these 2 files into your Flyscenery folder and they will work.One other thing that you must do is to delete the sliced images from their locations in the Flydata ditectory.Say you have created scenery in tile 200:135 (for example) then you will have a folder called ..flydataD200135Inside that folder will be all your sliced textures. Once the pod has been created, these files can be deleted, in fact they need to be deleted.A couple of last points:Once TerraScene has d/l data files, it stores them in one of its's subdirectories. If you wish to render the same area again, then TerraScene will find the d/l files and will not try and d/l them again. This is a great time-saving feature.If you don't tell TerraScene to delete it's partial images (segments) then they will also still be there and can be re-used, again saving a great deal of time Sorry for the long post, hope it helps.Colin