Forests
Forests 'work' like tree lines, except that they are closed and covered with 3 layers of forest texture. Since these forests are not filled with single trees, they should only be used around the airport. In other words, place them away from taxiways and the tarmac. If the viewer must get close to trees, use tree macros instead... The forest tool is ideal for woods surrounding the airport. Forests will add 3-D realism to the landscape in the airport vicinity.
Night and seosonal effects can be enabled.
Notes on drawing forests
Forest outlines must be convex. Depending on GroundMaker's rendering mode, a concave forests will be drawn hatched or pink. To make a forest convex, select it and go into EDIT POINTS (Ctrl+E) mode. Drag points until the inside changes to normal (transparent or green forest texture). The forest surface does not 'follow' the terrain mesh. In other words, only place them where the scenery has been flattened. If you want to make large forests, split them into small forests and use slightly different heights for each one. This will greatly improve realism.
Setting forest properties
In order to access the settings dialog, make sure only one tree line is selected. Double-click anywhere on the map to open the dialog. You can also access the settings through the SELECTION\ PROPERTIES... menu item or by left-clicking the polygon handle.
Enter a comment in the COMMENT box. Comments are only there to help you identifying shapes. They appear in the SCASM source file. This is useful in case some hand coding is needed.
Enter the the forest's height in the TREE HEIGHT input box.
You must select specially formatted textures for forest. Use grm_forest1.bmp for example.
The VISIBILITY settings influence the shape's appearance. The most important option is the visual RANGE. Is the viewer's distance to the shape's center greater than the value set here, the shape will be not drawn. You should pay great attention to those values, since setting too large ranges for all shapes will lead to a bad performance of FS. The bottom line is: the less FS has to draw, the higher frame-rates. Small details cannot be seen from far away anyway, so use short ranges for such. Large forests should have a visual range of 15,000 to 20,000 meters.
If you are not confident with the metric system, simply use the CONVERTER to convert miles, feet, ... to meters.
Sometimes it is necessary to hide a shape at certain times of day. Push any of the the three buttons (DAY, NIGHT, DUSK/DAWN) to make the shape visible at the chosen time of day. For example, releasing the DAY button will make the shape invisible at daytime.