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Ground polygons again...

Maybe a new scope for this issue?

I am currently designing the ground polygons for my Salzburg/Austria Project and I am more than happy that I was able to solve the problems with the shadows. For the time being I only use the KILL-SHADOW-TWEAK method for FS2004. The airport is a small one and rather narrow with only one runway. I decided then to use orthophotos with a quite high resolution. According to the tutorials in this forum I constructed squared planes and attached the bitmaps by the UVW method. Everything worked fine (despite the issue with the seams which I was not able to fix yet)!

1) Well, only for testing purposes I cloned ONE plane which is situated on one corner. After attaching a platform and after tweaking the asm file I fired up FS9. Surprise: ALL of the planes are showing shadows but do not cast shadows (the bitmaps are in DTX3-format)! :)

2) I am using zbias-prefixes with the materials whereas the photos use zbias_1_xxx and the runways and then the taxilines which are painted on top of these polygons have higher zbias-layers. And funny thing: it is not necessary to attach platforms to these "higher"-polygons to achieve the desired results. This was really a surprise because I was convinced that it would have been necessary to clone and attach platforms to EVERY plane. No, obviously this is not true. :) :)

3) But one thing is not clear to me: my plan was to set one layer of ground polygons over the other (see above: taxilines above taxiways above "surface" planes). Yesterday evening I tested this for the first time with one taxiway-plane and everything went fine until I loaded the BGL and the textures into the scenery-directory within FS2004: the plane on which the taxiway-poly is situated is being rotated along the x-axes. The taxiway-poly itself is situated correctly. Funny thing. I have now idea what causes this rotation and I would appreciate if somebody has a hint for me concerning this matter.

But for the time being I found a workaround. The rotation of the "underlying" poly will happen everytime when the origin (the center coordinate) of the "higher" poly has any contact to the "underlying". Overlapping seems not to be the reason for the rotation. So I cut a little bit of the "underlying" poly and locate the center of the "higher" poly in this hole. :confused: :)

Greetings from Austria
Gianni
 
=> 2)
You are using zbias_ prefixes, but we have also tried that approach. At first sight, it looks very nice. BUT have you tried to takeoff from your airport? Because when our aircraft climbed, the ground climbs with it when you are at about 300ft or higher. Maybe you cannot see it yet, but let some AI aircraft taxi over your taxiways and then climb, maybe then you'll see that your AI aircraft will dissappear into the ground...

Don't know a solution for your problem though :scratchch
Maybe I'm too sleepy at the moment :p

Thomas
 
Hi Thomas,

:yikes:

I am not sure whether I understood your reply. Do you mean, that in any case the usage of the zbias-approach will cause the described horrible things? Or will that be only the case when I mix different layers in one gmax-model together?

This is (or better was up to now) the concept corncerning the layers (in one model for the ground, which at the end of the day then should be tweaked with the KILL-SHADOW-tweak described in this thread):

photos.... zbias_1_material
taxiways...zbias_2_material
aprons... zbias_2_material
taxiway-lines...zbias_3_material
other markings...zbias_4_material

Please let me know your point of view.

Greetings from Austria
Gianni
 
We have tried different appraoches to this problem, but we always had the problem of the 'rising-ground', no matter what or how many zbias layers we used. Just try it for yourself, when you climb with your aircraft and you look at the ground, you should see it rising and the buildings/autogen scenery/ai traffic etc... will dissappear into the ground. If this is not the case with you, then you would have found a total new solution for the ground polygons...

Because we could not find a solution with the zbias layers, we had to switch to the fs2002 technique, so by adapting the asm files with the ADDCAT command... Then our approach is practically the same as yours, so every ground object in another layer (photo at the bottom, then taxiways, approns, runways, lines,...)

Thomas
 
OK, Thomas, I'm sorry to say that you are right. I didn't know the rising ground effect in this context. The hangars that are located in a separate bgl-file disappear when I rise the point of view. That is not good news for me.

So I have to use the fs2002 method which I don't know. :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

Thx anyway.

Greetings from Austria
Gianni
 
I still think the Fs2002 method is even easier than all the tweaks needed for the Fs2004 gamepack. Just one line of code needs to be changed to give the correct LayerCall (ADDCAT) to your ground polygons.

To get best result you can better export each layer as a separate BGL file (so one file for the photos, one for the lines, etc). In each ADDCAT command you then set a different layer number (4, 8, 12, etc).
 
Thx again to you, folks. After setting up the fs2002 package I have rebuilt the ground and finished the design yesterday. Aside from the bad texture effect (the damned lines between the tiles) which are discussed somewhere else here in the forum everything worked fine. To be honest it really is easier to adjust the textures to fit into the landscape than with the fs2004 method. :cool:

Another question: I'm still a little bit confused with the ZBIAS-issue. Has ZBIAS any effect when I use it in the fs2002 style? I mean, does ZBIAS trigger the flickering of the textures in the fs2002 style?

Greetings from Austria
Gianni
 
You can use zbias in the fs2002 code as well, because it also gets exported by the fs2002 MakeMDL. But I don't see the point of using zbias and addcat in the same files. Zbias will still give the 'rising ground' problem. So I think it's better that you only use the ADDCAT command...

Thomas
 
I think the only useful way to use the zbias command is if you have made a building and want to place another polygon with a logo or so on top of that buildng. If you don't use a zbias in that case you will get flickering.

But for ground polygons the reason of the flickering is that the code GMax makes is simply not for ground polygons, it is for 3D objects.
 
Hi

I have a problem witch adding phototextures to FS2004. I make in gmax ground polygon and i export them by makemdl (SDK from fs2002), and i have my file *.asm. I do like in tutorial of Arno
http://www.scenerydesign.org/forum/showthread.php?t=92
and i thet steps i have problem. How to make now bgl? When i use bglcompiler for FS2002 and make bgl then FS2004 crash. If i use bglcompiler for FS2004 i make mdl file and i dont know how to make bgl now, becouse i dont have XML file.

Sorry for english.
 
Hi,

You will need BGLC to compile it. You can either use the BGLC version for Fs2002 that you can download from MS or BGLC_9 that can be downloaded from the "BGLC Editing forum".

After that you need to compile your myfile.asm file into a new BGL file (not the file called myfile_0.asm).
 
Thx Arno for reply, but that i know :) . I want to know how make bgl by BGLC_9? I know how to make MDL by BGLC_9 but how to make BGL from MDL without XML file.

Sorry for bad english.
 
Hi,

Just drop the ASM file on BGLC_9 and you will get a BGL file in return. BGLC_9 is NOT the same as BGLComp. BGLComp is used to convert a XML file into a BGL file.
 
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