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replacing textures for non-B region

F

fergusdog

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9
Country
australia
Ok, I got fed up with how poor the FSX textures look in NZ and got cracking - and faced my first problem.

I'm trying to replace the texture 007b2su0. According to the regions I should be able to add a 007z2su0 and this should show, however it doesn't. (BTW if I simply replace 007b2su0 the texture does show). For some reason this isn't as easy as I thought. When I played with this in FS2002 it worked fine as far as I remember (good old times).

Any idea what's amiss? Do I need to replace all 007 variants for the z region to show?

Cheers,
Christian
 
Hello Christian,

unfortunately, we cannot add custom texture sets to specific regions. The use of sets and regions is defined in the lclookup.bgl and is fixed (unless you hack into it with a hex editor). This was the same in FS9 and, I believe, FS2002.

The work-around is to create a land class file that calls the 007b2 series in the locations you'd like them to be, place that in an add-on scenery folder and then place your custom textures in a parallel texture subfolder. The advantage is that you can also make your own autogen definitions (agn files) for that set and it will be used instead of the default agn files.

Cheers, Holger
 
Hi Holger

We must be missing some info here, because the lclookup doesn't refer to regions per se. The way this worked in FS2002 and FS2004 was that for each region you had a table, but this table only refers to the texture number. Ie the structure for 3 textures (landclass 1,2,3), to simplify, would look like this:

00 37 00 12 00 06 (region A maps 1->37, 2->12, 3->6)
00 37 00 12 00 06 (region B maps 1->37, 2->12, 3->6)
00 37 00 14 00 06 (region C maps 1->37, 2->14, 3->6)

As you can see this was done to allow region C to map land class 02 to a different number. So in theory, if there is only a 037b2 set all you need to do is add a 037a2 and 037c2 set and they should show. Having said that, this doesn't seem to work, so I must be missing something... It doesn't make sense that MS would have an extra entry activating and deactivating regions on a texture to texture basis...

The format in FSX changed unfortunately, so I can't verify this still works like this in FSX.

Cheers,
Christian
 
Sorry Holger

All taken back. My explorations into the old lclookups led me to believe that it's as easy as adding new textures and FS would recognise them. As I wrote the old system used the lc values directly. I guess there probably was more in the parts I never decompiled.

I had a look through the FSX lclookup today and only took me a few hours to understand it. It's pretty straight forward, the only thing I haven't yet figured out is every single value of each texture/landclass value, but I know enough now to see how it works. The regional textures are indeed hardcoded into the lclookup. Unbelievable. This really takes away a lot of customisation power. Well, I guess the time for hacking the lclookup has come. The solution of local scenery textures only works when you stay within a region, but say you want to have 3 custom texture sets in Europe or Australia and change regions within a flight, this solution doesn't work. Hmm maybe it does with local landclasses. Still, I don't like this approach, nor the thought of what it does in terms of internal memory keeping. With texture sets appearing more frequently these days, I think modding the lclookup will be inevitable. Let's hope someone writes a nice frontend to dump new info into the lclookup.

For now there's more playing to be done...

Cheers,
Christian
 
Hi Christian,

you might want to get in touch with Arnaud Clere; he's been working on an updated lclookup.bgl for a while now: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3404

I agree, though, that any changes to lclookup.bgl should happen through a GUI interface. I noticed that the new SceneryTech FSX land class product includes a hacked lclookup.bgl but only a manual method for installing/uninstalling. That's really not helpful and, in fact, "downloads" potential support issues into the laps of other developers, freeware or payware.

Cheers, Holger
 
Thanks Holger

I actually came across Arnaud's thread already...

One extra thought, since the new lclookup format is following the new FS9 format, there are actually region definitions in the file. I wonder if local lclookups are possible now (this was indicated by the FS team in the early stages of FS development). The lclookup table was also very obviously made by a bglcomp version. Doesn't seem like the SDK version allows building new lclookups though :(

Anyway, still early days, more testing to be done...

Cheers,
Christian
 
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