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Photoscenery with 2 season and Night light

jtanabodee

jtanabodee

Resource contributor
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3,924
Country
thailand
Hi everyone,
I'm new for scenery design. I'm using FS9 and trying to make photoscnery with only 2 seasons and nightlight since in my country, Thailand, there are only summer and winter. I'm wondering how to do that. I read in FS2004SDK that there have to be 6 seasons. I tried this in S-builder and get error message. Are there anyway to correct .inf file? I have been tricked S-builder using the same picture for spring and summer, fall and winter. But this makes more textures that waste the space.
Thank you,
Jirayu Tanabodee
 
In FS2004 I don't think you can get around this -- most of my sceneries only have one day texture plus night, but when I add night I need to add all the others as well, which drastically increases the file size.

You may only require 4 seasons -- not all areas use HW, so it pays to check.

One solution I've considered -- but never used -- is to include a batch file to allow the user to create the season copies, as in:
copy ???????????????Su.bmp ???????????????Sp.bmp
etc.

However in the end I use an installer which is clever enough to recognise the duplicates, and creates a smaller install. But of course the end scenery is still huge.
 
Thank you for your reply toprob
I've got the same problem. Can we choose just summer and nightlight?
 
Hi,

As Robin says, if you want night, you should also create all other seasons. That is just how it is in FS2004.
 
That's too bad.:( Thanks you for your reply anyway, Arno.
One quick question. I did all the seasons and night light in one scenery and sometime when I flew in that area the summer texture just disappeared and became water. But when I switched to spring, the texture came as usual. Any thought about that?
 
I've got and idea. It just came out last night. I was wondering if I make a simple Gmax such as roads, bridges and whatever I'd like to be lit during the night. They will replace the night light texture. So my scenery files will not be too big. At night we cannot see photoscnery anyway because it is too dark. The only things we see are road lights and buildings. Any thought about that? Or anyone have more ideas?
 
Hello,

I think that you could create a seasonal BGL file using the SDK tools. You would specify only one of the two seasons for each of the 12 months. This could also be done in FS2004 but would affect a very large region. I think that in FX you can have much more control on the extent of the region that you want to modify.

Regards, Luis
 
Thank you for your reply, Luis. Do you have tutorial or more information to do two season and night light? Please tell me where to get them.
Best Regards,
Jirayu Tanabodee
 
Hello,

I spent the last 30 minutes reading the source code of SBuilderX. I did not made any tests and so I may be wrong. But as far as I can tell, you can add a map to SBuilderX from the Background (Google, Live Earth ...) or you can load a previously prepared map from the disk. So you have a project with a single map. In Map View you right click on the border of the map. You choose Properties. In the first page you give a proper name to the map so that SBuilderX will treat it as a photo map and uses it to produce a photo BGL (please read Luis Tirado tutorials about photo scenery creation).

Now you go to the seasons sheet. All the seasons will point to the same picture file. If you decide to generate the photo scenery at this stage, all the seasons will show that picture (but no duplicate images are created - FSX will know from the BGL that a unique picture is to be used all the year round). For the sake of this explanation, say that the file that contains this picture is called PIC1.

But you have another picture called PIC2. You want, say, PIC1 to appear from January to July and PIC" from August to December. So you press the the Spring Season (the 2nd in the sheet) and browse your folders so that this box will point to PIC2. The first season is pointing to PIC1 as well as the 3rd 4th ... These boxes are read by SBuilderX from top to bottom. When a box points to a file already read, that season is ignored. So in the present case, SBuilderX will know that you only want season Summer (to be made from PIC1) and season Spring (to be made from PIC2).

Now you need to open your INI file and locate the part that looks like this:

Code: 
[Tiles]
CompressionQuality=100
HardWinterVariations=January
WinterVariations=December,February,March
FallVariations=October,November
SpringVariations=April,May,June
SummerVariations=July,August,September
ReprojectMercatorTiles=True
ActiveTileFolder=VirtualEarthSatellite

and you change it to this:

Code: 
[Tiles]
CompressionQuality=100
HardWinterVariations=
WinterVariations=
FallVariations=
SpringVariations=August,September,October,November,December
SummerVariations=January,February,March,April,May,June,July
ReprojectMercatorTiles=True
ActiveTileFolder=VirtualEarthSatellite

I think this will produce what you wanted in the first place. I am sorry if I am wrong. I also advise you to test/experiment and read the INF files that SBuilder produces (instead of going directly to FSX looking for the photo scenery) amd compare the INF files with the information that you find in the Terrain SDK document.

Good luck,

Luis
 
Thank you for your explanation. It is so wonderful for FSX. But I was wondering if I can do that in FS9? Or no way to do any modification at all for FS9.:confused:
 
jtanabodee said:
Thank you for your explanation. It is so wonderful for FSX. But I was wondering if I can do that in FS9? Or no way to do any modification at all for FS9.:confused:
Click to expand...

Ohps!, I forgot you were using FS9. In that case you need to create a seasons BGL file which will set the seasons that appear in a whole LOD5 quad. Please get a document from Christian Sock:

http://library.avsim.net/download.php?DLID=25267

Using that document I was able to make what you are looking for in Madeira Islands scenery (fs2002 and fs2004).

Regards,

Luis
 
Dear Luis,
I found that in my area there is no harsh winter. But how can I tell my Photoscenery Maker program that I'd like to make just only four seasons. Since the program doesn't accept anything less than six seasons plus night light. Can I just simply delete the texture with the seasons that I don't want?
Best Regards,
Jirayu Tanabodee
 
Hello,

In order to make the scenery with 2 seasons (without duplicating the textures) you need to follow that document by Christian Stock. May be there are simpler docs about the subject but, if they exist, I do not know them.

Therefore you need to make your own INF file and run the RESAMPLE tool by Microsoft. May be you can use your Scenery Maker program to generate some INF that you edit before delivering it (the INF) to the RESAMPLE. I do not think you can get the BGL "automatically".

Kind Regards, Luis
 
Thank you very much for your reply. I'll try to edit Inf file and see what happen.:wizard:
Best Regards
Jirayu Tanabodee
 
Dear Luis,
I've tried so many things. But it ended up with nothing. No way to go around this. For FS9, there has to be six seasons (+night light) or just summer (no night light either), period!:(.
Best Regards,
Jtanabodee
 
FS9 photo terrain textures, seasons

Hi, Jirayu

Did you manage to make your textures appear the way you wanted? I am replying a bit late but, if you are still trying, maybe I can tell you what I have learned a few months ago when doing exactly the same thing for my area.

Let us know if you found the answer.

Fern
 
I was able to get around the '6 seasons' by creating the textures in Hi-Res for 9Dragons. I only created a Summer and a Night texture.
 
I still get nothing from 2 season and one nightlight. I'm using FS9. But I did something tricky to make night light by using Gmax ground polygon for roads. But the 2-season-photoscenery, I gave up already. I was wondering how Clutch Cargo do that. Could you tell me how?
Best Regards,
Jirayu Tanabodee
 
jtanabodee,

In using SBuilder, when I was ready to compile my ground scenery I used the hi-res selection rather than the 4.8m selection. A simple process of checking and un-checking the desired boxes. Summer textures will be used for all seasons and, of course, the _Lm textures will be used for night.

Granted, there are other things to consider when using hi-res, but for your purpose of using just two seasons you can try it and see if looks good enough for your purposes.

I would not be so concerned with having the other seasons. PC's these days can easily handle all the extra season files. Simmers have pretty large hard drives these days and they are a lot faster than when FS9 first came out. As you are finding out it may be more trouble than what it's worth. ;)
 
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