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Anyone experimented with Autogen XML codes?

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unitedstates
I'm wondering if anyone has experimented with autogen XML codes to see if they can code XML objects based on country, state or cities instead of on region code?

I'm hoping to be able to create autogen kangaroos that will show up in Australia and Central Australia but not NZ and the SW USA... Likewise Elephants that show up in SE Asia but not in the Carribbean...

Right now the Autogen XML Coding is based on region codes, I'm wondering if there may be a country coding format that can be used instead, or if the Autogen XML coding is locked in to region codes only...
 
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arno

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Hi,

As far as I know the entire world is split into 6 regions now, so there is no way to check which country you are in.

But how do you want to place them as autogen? Are you adding them to an already existing class or do you want to add your own class for them? In that case you have control over them, as they only appear where you use that class in the agn files.
 
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unitedstates
I've currently just added autogen elephants to an existing class just to make sure they worked. Unfortunately the wilderness textures that are used have no Autogen AGN files attached to them...

I'm planning on creating new classes for wildlife based on regions (or countries if possible, lat/lon if necessary), and create herds of animals like elephants etc...

Problem is the region code for SE Asia is "Tropical", if I create AGNS for the wilderness textures for the "Tropical" region, the elephants will also show up in the Caribbean and Central America....

From what I understand from my experience with AI development, country code might just be possible to use in XML but if it is I haven't read anything on how to format it...
 

arno

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I think country in the XML is just not possible at the moment. It seems all landclass and autogen is divided in these 6 regions.

But I do have another idea. Some libraries are locked to a certain location (most city specific buildings in the default scenery can not be used at the other side of the world for example). Last week we had a discussion about this on the AvSim forum and we still need to figure out how big the range for this locking is. But maybe you can use this locking of the library to make sure that they only appear in certain parts of the world.
 
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unitedstates
Ahhhh, now that would do the trick... Great thinking...

I've also been mulling over how to create autogen shipping... There's many ocean class textures in FS, but how to you make it so that only one ship shows up on an endless ocean here or there?

Simple... Create a class for shipping and also create a blank MDL (as per the one in the FSConv folder in your Aircraft Folder, but as a scenery MDL instead)....

Create say 60 blank MDL guids and one or two Ship MDL guids into the default.xml class...

Using the annotate tool, place one "ship class" square on each of the deep ocean textures.

What should happen in theory is that instead of getting tiles of XXX plus numbers of ships, you'd see a random ship somewhere out in the middle of the ocean from time to time... It'd take a little experimentation to optimise it, but if my theory holds up it shoud be a possibility...

BTW I have busted a region lock for scenery before by decompiling the BGL that contains the Nimitz class aircraft carrier and extracting the MDL from the decompiled scenery... So I don't think the lock is in the MDL...

But it was that area locking function in the scenery XML source code that got me thinking along the lines of Country wide autogen instead of region wide...

BTW all the AFD data is broken down into country, state, city codes, which is why I am thinking of experimenting in the autogen XML codes...
 
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