Autogen Workaround?

[falcon409]

I was looking at redoing Tok Junction, but the tile server in SBuilderX will not let me do a hires image, only the very lowest, which is unacceptable. I had an idea though, that in order to place the autogen on the airport where it needs to be. . . .can I just use the map (photo) long enough to pull it up in the Annotator, place the autogen and then delete the low res shot and continue on with developing the rest of the airport or is the autogen somehow connected to the map?

 

[Meshman]

the .AGN files that the Annontator creates must reference to something, be it a default texture file or photo scenery work. So here is another of those "it should work" ideas, something I never got around to trying out. I wanted to try this on the island of Lana'i, in Hawai'i. Lana'i City is a company town, the island is owned by Dole Pineapple, nicely laid out in a little rectangle. But I'm not a photo guy, per se. But I wanted to grab a photo overlay, place the autogen to line up all neat and clean, then go back and add a completely black blendmask to the photo work. What *should* happen is I would end up with a totally transparent photo file where the autogen sits and nice and neat, with all the default style textures and roads showing through.

Yes, the package would have that big photo file sitting in it, doing 99% nothing, but that seems a reasonable tradeoff for accurate autogen.

 

[GaryGB]

Yes, the package would have that big photo file sitting in it, doing 99% nothing, but that seems a reasonable tradeoff for accurate autogen.

Hi Lance:

I think that with the compression offered by FSX SDK Resample for BGL-packaged imagery (including a custom "transparent" bitmap), the fact that the color attributes will all be (1) type of Hex value (Black="transparent"), that part of the file should compress rather nicely.

And if one does not ultimately intend to actually display the photoreal aerial imagery file (allowing underlying default scenery to display instead), the aerial imagery file too can be edited to be just (1) color (ex: white or some other appropriate color "ignored" by Resample ?) before written into the BGL package by FSX SDK Resample, with the assumption that it could be more efficiently compressed since it has only (1) color value for the entire bitmap. :iidea:

I'd forgotten about the fact that the new FSX methods allow transparent bitmaps and gradient blend masks to be used WITH custom photoreal imagery to allow underlying default scenery to show through without a conflict of land class filename values and display layer priorities.

Prior to FSX, this could only be done in FS2002 and FS2004 by using either SCASM methods or SBuilder 2.x's "VTP textured ground poly" methods to allow vector components (ex: roads, streams etc.) to overlay on photoreal texture quad tiles; I can't recall if one could fully blend in the underlying default scenery land class with that approach though.


I've not yet had a chance to tinker with this particular approach, and it would certainly be interesting to read how well this method actually works !


You guys are keeping me on the edge of my seat with all this progressive scenery innovation... keep up the great work ! :d

GaryGB