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Nice work in enhancing the default scenery as shown in the screenshots Mathew. I am very interested in your development of this tool. We, The Freeflow Team, used GE extensively in the development of our latest release, the Bahamas, coming out in the next week or so. Not having time or talent to develop a tool such as yours we relied extensively on creating calbrated images in GE as documented on our forum at http://www.fs-freeflow.com/forum2/index.php?topic=1376.0.......<snipped>
I will upload a alpha of this tool over the next week or so. In the meantime here are a couple of screenshots showing before and after shots from the FSX beta 3 from South West Rocks (NSW, Australia).
Comments will be much appreciated.
Thanks
MS.
Hi, I tried to use the program with a very simple kml file. The file was loaded as a project and displayed correctly. With the build command I tried to produce the shape-file(s), the program told me that build was complete - but I could not locate the output, there seems to be none. So I wonder where I made a mistake.
Scott Gridley and I have talked extensively about the need for a tool exactly like the one you are working on here. We are still working in FS9 but will likely be porting our sceneries over to FSX in the future. A tool such as yours would have been fantastic but we are beginning to wrap up the Bahamas. I think it will be extremely useful in the future for refining our work.
Bob Brown http://www.fs-freeflow.com/
I've seen your work and its very nice!!!
I hope FSX_KML will encourage a lot of freeware scenery to be created and I will continue to enhance it.
I've been thinking about creating some type of global scenery project website. A place where a concerted development effort of free worldwide coast, river and landclass scenery using FSX_KML could be coordinated. If there were say 50 FSX_KML users working to plan think of how much accurate scenery could be created! Major rivers, highways, coastlines & beaches, cities, national parks etc. Could really pump up the realism in FSX.
http://www.fsdeveloper.com/wiki/index.php?title=Global_Scenery_Project
What do you think?
Would it be difficult to adapt the tool to FS9 or is it only feasible using the FSX SDK?
I think that is a very interesting idea. One could have a Google Map index where you could see the coverage for various geographic areas. It would take a lot of coordination but could be quite interesting. I hope people go to your Wiki and join in the discussion.
The FSX terrain SDK is much easier to use than the FS9 one and basically all I needed to do was make FSX KML generate the appropriate Shape Files and let Shp2Vec (FSX SDK tool) do the rest.
It would be quite difficult to make it work with the FS9 SDK. Unless you have any ideas?
I probably didn't express that properly. I should have said that if one has FSX and the FSX SDK that comes with it, then would it be possible to use the tool for FS9 work? I don't have a copy of FSX yet but is the structure of the data so fundamentally different that the tool could not work with FS9 assuming one possesses FSX and the FSX SDK?
Im not sure, but I dont think so. I think BGLs generated by the FSX SDK are slightly different to FS9 BGLs, and as such you can't use them in FS9.
However, I haven't actually tested it so I might be wrong.
I'm no scenery expert, there would be others here that know far more about it than me.
But of course Scott. Get them to shp files and that would do it. Sounds like that would involve just adding an option to produce shp files only. Good idea. I think Luis is adding a shape file import capability to the new Sbuilder.As you've already got the code working to make shp files, it should be pretty simple to convert from kml to a format that could imported by SBuilder (sbx,mp) and edited, or compiled by scasm directly. That would achieve FS9 compatibility.
However, there are additional problems that are in FSX and I don't see anyone addressing these issues.
These problems relate to the flatten and elevation.
The tool works perfectly when adding additional poly ground texture if a airport is close to sea level or does not have a lot of terrain elevation change.
My example would be Atlanta GA. The elevation of the airport is 1024 ft. They added a new runway south of the main Terminal and outside the flatten bounds of the default airport. The terrain is at 940 ft where the new runway will sit.
Once I add the new runway and all the taxiway's by default these will flatten the terrain up to 1024 ft once attached to the exsisting runway. Everything appears to look ok at this point until the grass texture/flatten/remove auto gen TAg is compiled from a KML file.
Now everything from the new runway back to the Atlanta airport default flatten looks like the Grand Canyon. It does not matter what tool I use to add a new texture for the airport border this occurs. Holes every where that go all the way down to 0 ft. from 1024 ft.
If I start moving the 3 scenery sliders to change the mesh and terrain it only amplifies the definition of the canyons.