• 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.

shp2vec hydro poly problems

S

scott967

Messages
1,268
Country
us-hawaii
Help. I've been having some shp2vec problems. I'm trying to replace an island. My source data has 2 main islands and a number of islets offshore of the main island.

My first naive attempt was to create a HPX shapefile with a single poly feature containing holes for all the islands. shp2vec created a bgl that in tmfviewer drew correctly in some areas and in others had land/water reversals.

So I started playing with the source data in SbuilderX. I found some other strange behaviour, such as some islets might display as holes and others covered with water. Doing a mod in one area might cause a different set of islets to appear in tmfviewer.

Now it just so happened that the main islands overlap 4 QMID 11 cells, so I thought maybe that could be a problem. I went back and reworked my data into multiple polygons, each polygon covering a single QMID 11 or less. In this version the main islands were no longer holes, just the islets. Worked much better (the main islands displayed correctly) but still having problems with the islets showing up. From many experiments (mainly using tmfviewer for speed) it seemed like having a hole overlap a QMID 15 boundary contributed to the problem. Eventually with enough tweaking I got it to display.

Then I found problems with the source data so I started from scratch using different data set. As a test I tried once again to do it as a single poly and this time it looked a lot better. I think the detail of the data is less in this second data set, so maybe that makes a difference. It took some tweaking to get all the islands to show in tmfviewer, but eventually I did. In this try I had the main islands in a single poly, and most of the islets in other polys. But when I looked at it in FSX, only one of about 12 islets showed up. So besides my shp2vec problems, tmfviewer seems to be not perfect either.

I guess I am back to splitting up the main islands into QMID 11 cells and trying again :(

scott s.
.
 
Hi Scott.

Shp2Vec doesn't have problems... but if bad data goes in, bad data comes out.

SBuilderX may have some problems, but only because it is having difficulty translating your original data. Again, if the data is bad the output will be bad.

I'm guessing you are using 3rd party vector data. I have found no 100% reliable source data for real-world hydropolys. Some small subsets of data may be error free, but for the most part, there will be vector problems. As you are finding, it takes a bit of work to get them displaying properly in the sim.


Dick
 
I try looking at the shapefiles that SBuilderX creates in Global Mapper and can't see a problem, but maybe I'm not looking closely enough. I know in FS9 SBuilder would create lwm polys that could cause fits.

I had one potential problem in that I imported lines into SBuilderX and used the make poly command. Due to the source data (lines start/end at same point) that created a duplicate point at the beginning/end vertex of the poly which I manually removed.

I do have a bgl that displays correctly in tmfviewer and not in the sim.

BTW it also seems like GM ver 10 will now support 3d polygonZ shapefiles, so I am considering upgrading and doing some direct creation of shp2vec compatible HPX shapefiles.

scott s.
.
 
Hi Folks

Scott -
If not done already.

Check your poly's rotation directions.

Ensure they're all as per your working islands.

HTH
ATB
Paul
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top