• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

Beach vectors

crushnik

crushnik

Messages
539
Country
us-missouri
Do any of you salty scenery veterans know if data exists that shows different types of coastlines? Seems like something scientists would be all over since the USGS is very focused on eroding coastlines, and I'm surprised I haven't yet found a map of the different classes of beaches. The gigantic USGS land class map does a decent job, and I suppose one could somehow convert the raster data to vector polygons, but all the red 'developed' areas kind of crowds out the beaches in many locations.

I would just like to enjoy something better than farm or city tiles butting right up to the coast with a tiny little default shoreline. Something that flows more realistically - wider in spots and varying textures in different areas - would be a lot more visually pleasing.
 
I'm not sure about world wide datasets (possibly OSM?) but in New Zealand I used a landclass polygon dataset which had beaches. I did some further classification of those based on local knowledge: For example, on New Zealands west coast, we have a lot of black sand beaches seeded from inland volcanic activity whereas on the east coast, they tend to be white sand. I then used those polygons to select the associated shorelines and assign the GUID appropriately.
So, it's a GIS exercise really- You may be able to use other coarse datasources like the one you mentioned just to select the more accurate beach/sand polygons of different types.
 
I use USGS state shapefiles to exclude streamlines, shorelines, and water polys for an entire state at once before replacing them with my own files. The problem I run into with states that border oceans or the Gulf of Mexico is that the shapefile extends to our national boundary, which I think is six miles. This exclusion causes gigantic -- I'm guessing a million feet high or so -- cones of water where the exclude shapefile ends. This appears to make the entire ocean disappear in spots and have blocks of farmland in others. I have searched for shapefiles that won't end up excluding oceans, but I'm coming up empty.

Does anyone have a fix for this?

2020-8-24_8-9-10-281.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top