GPoly requirements

This Wiki page gives an overview of the issues when working with ground polygons and the requirements and functionality that a tool to assist with making them should have. As such it is a summary of the discussion in the gPoly forum.

Issues

This is a list of the problems when designing ground polygons (with GMax):

• Requirement to use FS2002 gamepack, which not all developers have access to nowadays
• Need to tweak intermediate ASM source files to get properly working ground polygons
• Autogen exclusion caused by the polygons
• Having night textures on the ground polygons gives trouble in DX10 mode of FSX
• Difficult to align background images
• Need to cut polygons in to smaller parts due to FSX earth curvation

Functionalities

This is a list of the possible functionalities that gPoly could get:

• Ability to read ground polygons from FS2004/FSX MDL files. gPoly will then create FS2002 style output automatically.
• Automatically clip polygons to prevent trouble with FSX earth curvation.
• Import ASM file and do the tweaking with a few mouse clicks
• Ability to easily draw polygons in a GUI (no need for GMax), for example if you just want to place some ground markings (text) at a certain location.
• Ability to import source data from other formats (shapefile, autocad, ...).
• Ability to deal with different projections in data and reproject automatically so that it ends up at the right location in the FS world.
• Creating of light pool polygons using transparent textures and conditional display.
• Import GeoTIFF background images
• Make background images geo references by providing coordinates of control points