Hello Gary,
Thanks again for this second thread.
I must say it is an overwhelming amount of info, but I will certainly examine it.
The Fun with Lines article is indeed a very nice one and I think indeed exactly the thing I needed to create what I meant in my initial posting.
I will see, how much 'extra light' this new thread gives on the subject.
I have ever read somewhere, that the way FSX creates autogen on normal textures, is indicated by invisible dots on a texture file.
As far as you know, is this nonsense, did I understand something wrong here, or is there a bit of truth in that idea ?
Thanks again,
Bram
Hi Bram:
AFAIK, the general concept of how FSX (and recent prior versions of FS) places autogen is basically somewhat as you described.
FS uses a sort of "
transparent land class texture tile" with vector coordinate positions relative to the NW corner of the tile, which are used to reference the placement (annotation) coordinates of autogen objects.
These can be created as blank tiles for use with
ex: custom photo-real land class textures of aerial imagery and used with a blend mask file or alpha channel having specific gray scale attributes to allow underlying default or 3rd party land class terrain textures and existing assigned autogen to "show through from below".
And IIUC, this same process is used when we simply create a land class "polygon" (
actually an entire tile as a layer in the land class rendering stack !) ...using a FSX default land class texture type.
Inside the '
visible' area of one's custom drawn polygon the default FSX land class texture (with its associated autogen when applicable by land class type) is displayed.
Outside of one's polygon, the face and edges of the land class "tile" we have actually created are '
invisible', and that area extends outward to the edges of the FS land class tile.
The land class texure tile 'corners' are then "placed" by the SDK SHP2VEC compiler onto the local FS terrain quad matrix grid at the corners of the quads.
Autogen objects "placed" (aka '
annotated' in the case of autogen objects) onto a invisible / transparent land class tile can be either default FS-supplied
or custom created entities (individual or multiple objects assigned to a single "look-up" GUID) in FSX, and can be scenery library objects or other object "entities" or "meta-objects" ...defined via the '
active' Terrain.Cfg file located in the [FSX install path] root folder.
Additional FS system files which may require edits in order to implement one's custom defined autogen include the [FSX install path]\Autogen sub-folder *.SPB files and Default.XML files.
With some additional configuration, such custom autogen objects may be made available for placement via use of FSX SDK Autogen Annotator.
Once one has defined the custom autogen objects that one wishes to use in the FS system files cited above, one can also define those objects in configuration file(s) for a scenery making utility such as SBuilderX, ADE, FSX_KML etc. (so that they are available from within those files as a "GUID lookup code") ...for placement via the GUI of one's scenery making tool.
The content assignment and placement output info from one's scenery making utility is then compiled to a CVX vector BGL via FSX SHP2VEC.
There are a number of threads which can be found here at FSDeveloper which discuss these related topics, although it is again somewhat of an advanced topic.
With a few searches here at FSDeveloper and via Google, you should find a good amount of info which will help with learning how to implement custom autogen in FSX.
Hope this helps !
GaryGB
