Learning Ground2K

[kdriver]

Did you get the bitmap to show the right way round? It seems to always put the sand on the seaward side for me and I have to do it again.

 

[RWILLS]

Did you get the bitmap to show the right way round? It seems to always put the sand on the seaward side for me and I have to do it again.

I did get it the right way round eventually, but there seems to be some strange logic/interaction going on! I also found that the "suppress" tool is almost useless. Any files generated seem to include any suppressed features, so it seems a mistake to save anything until 100% verified that it is correct.

What I have worked out is that some locations seem to magically switch between land and water when I either create an island or a lake. In other locations, the new surface may look like land or water but is not, and then I have to go through several stages, in a specific order only, to get satisfactory results. I've also noticed that it's worth checking the textures for a few miles in all directions to make sure everything is ok.

FSSC is very nice and logical to use by comparison, and straightforward to go back and change/move just about any aspect, so it's possible to make a rough model, save it and gradually refine it without having to start over each time. I've also just realised that the steel mesh runway can be laid directly on top of the (wider) dirt runway, which can look nicer. I think that anyone who is already using Mission Builder, and needs to create a workable runway/airfield, would have no difficulty at all with FSSC, but Ground2K requires a lot more time/effort/patience.

 

[RWILLS]

Has anyone used grises50 - which seems/claims to be able to convert greyscale bitmaps into elevation mesh, and could be useful?

 

[kdriver]

If you are excluding an area and the resultant exclude BGL file is in the same folder as your other BGLs produced by G2K, you want the sim to read it first. I prefix the BGL file with an exclamation mark, e.g. !Zeebrugge_xcld.bgl

 

[Sarg Willy]

Qoute!
What I have worked out is that some locations seem to magically switch between land and water when I either create an island or a lake. In other locations, the new surface may look like land or water but is not,

And here I thought it was only me , M_R Christmas Island , Renders Ok in XP ,
but try as I may , not the same in Wind-7 --I bulldozed it 50 times , updated ,the newer version ,
still could not fix the land mass extra , that should be water --

 

[RWILLS]

Managed to create a few rivers/lakes connected to the ocean around Colombo/Ratmalana and China Bay.
Ground2K was surprisingly forgiving of me entering wrong co-ordinates for the bitmap (I missed out a digit). I was expecting to have to start again but was able to correct the co-ordinate and then Ground2K automatically stretched the existing polygon.

 

[kdriver]

I've found you can go beyond the map coordinate limits when adding rivers and roads.

 

[RWILLS]

I've found you can go beyond the map coordinate limits when adding rivers and roads.

I'll give that a try. CFS2 seems surprisingly robust (easily reversible) when it comes to Ground2K and FSSC, compared to how easily it and especially Mission Builder, can get messed up by having too many aircraft/ships/objects/gsl objects. I'm guessing/anticipating though that at some point CFS2 will decide it has reached a limit on the number of scenery folders/files.

 

[kdriver]

You can also edit the LWM file with Notepad to save redoing an entire road or river. Just fix the offending section and save with a different name. Copy and paste the new section into the original file, adjusting these numbers if you've added or subtracted coordinate points.

0100 3 2 11 Total for entire file
""
""
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
""
""
""
""
""
""
""
""
1 5 -9999 0 0 8002 64 2 0 8 0 0 0 135 7 0 0 1 16 1 0 0 1 1
"" Sub-total
""
""
""
""
""
986.641940688463 546.720118820401
959.509093459231 492.127522588091
933.030049777691 440.477042320396
909.166220286921 395.037695755779
885.302390796151 347.963840321931

 

[UncleTgt]

Hi John,

Well that's where it gets more interesting.

Note the layer call,

LayerCall( :L000020 24 )
Jump( : )
:L000020


I generally remove that too and only included it here for the benefit of people starting out in scenery design. The only time I use layercall is if there's more than one runway in close proximity but if there's only one runway you will notice a difference in the surface, it's slightly clearer textual wise and the aircraft sits on it better and doesn't sink into it as much. I figure too that MS used Area A for a reason so I've always used it in my work.

Cheers
aussie

Cheers Aussie, this little snippet seems to have a real impact.

I just tried it on some new runways & besides the effects you mention, I'll sear that the blended background bitmaps I made seem to load more smoothly & if I'm covering a large area, adjacent bitmaps sit nicely alongside each other, with no flickering or thin gap lines appearing in the sim. Great tip!

 

[aussie]

Cheers Aussie, this little snippet seems to have a real impact.

I just tried it on some new runways & besides the effects you mention, I'll sear that the blended background bitmaps I made seem to load more smoothly & if I'm covering a large area, adjacent bitmaps sit nicely alongside each other, with no flickering or thin gap lines appearing in the sim. Great tip!

Thanks UncleTgt,

Yes all blended ground textures should use Layer Call as it's sets them in the correct location in the layering hierarchy. I also looked into the Area A bit which CFS2 uses for runway surfaces and it refers to the visibility distance the object appears at.

Cheers
Aussie

 

[RWILLS]

I managed to make a bit more progress with FSSC, and also had a play with using Rhino6 to help with a few basic things that I find frustrating/painfully tedious to try to get paint/photo software to do!

(Ground2K doesn't seem to want to work at all on Windows 10 though?)

This attached effort at Coomalie Creek airfield still needs a lot of work/development but seems to be heading in the right direction.View attachment 88920

 

[kdriver]

Thanks for Coomalie Creek - it looks great as well as being historically accurate. Here is an AFD file and airbases.dat entry so you can find your way there.

 

[RWILLS]

Thanks for Coomalie Creek - it looks great as well as being historically accurate. Here is an AFD file and airbases.dat entry so you can find your way there.

I have noticed that when FSSC converted the visible background bitmap, it seemed to slightly shrink it by approx. 10 - 15% from what I expected. I'm not entirely sure yet exactly what's going on in terms of size/scale though, and whether this is only specific to the size/shape bitmap I started with, as I used a rectangular bitmap rather than square, to minimise the amount of flattening. Ideally I want to try using alpha channels with DXTbmp by Martin Wright, but haven't been able to download it yet as my network refuses it!!! Is it possible to get DXTbmp placed in the downloads section here??

 

[Captain Kurt]

I think a square bitmap is required, otherwise the image distorts which may be what you are seeing as shrinkage?

Anyway to answer whether we can upload DTX bitmap, I don't think so. As long as Martin Wright maintains his site it's his property and not abandoned ware, and would require his permission.

Since you've tried and can't get the downloads to work for you, if you PM me with your email I can send you the exe file and the required dll's privately.

 

[RWILLS]

I think a square bitmap is required, otherwise the image distorts which may be what you are seeing as shrinkage?

Anyway to answer whether we can upload DTX bitmap, I don't think so. As long as Martin Wright maintains his site it's his property and not abandoned ware, and would require his permission.

Since you've tried and can't get the downloads to work for you, if you PM me with your email I can send you the exe file and the required dll's privately.

I realised eventually that the overall size was ok, and it handled the rectangular bitmap well enough. I just forgot for a while that CFS was using nautical miles!

 

[RWILLS]

knocked this up in FSSC, with the intention of eventually refining it in G2K. - Has patches of "fake" land and water but it's something to build on, with the breakwater and basic outline of the harbour area reasonably accurate.View attachment Colombo_Port.zip

 

[RWILLS]

View attachment Colombo_Port_rev2.zip
Managed to add some coastline (successfully at last with G2K!!!) from Colombo, stretching south. improved the port area (removed the fake water but still have some fake land to improve later!) - have also improved Ratmalana and the Racecourse airfields

 

[RWILLS]

Managed to use G2K to do the sloping Wau airfield. Also the runway at Mobu using FSSC (both for the original CFS2 global mesh)View attachment Wau_and_Mubo.zip

 

[RWILLS]

I at last managed to get dxtbmp working and had a go with it, partly following the MR Tutorial.

Eventually I was able to create a reasonable looking airfield, using the DXT3 format, but noticed a couple of issues (that are probably the same thing?). It seems that FSSC creates a region extending to approx. 1 foot above the airfield where nothing gets rendered, so the aircraft looks like it's tyres are pushed to far into the ground, but actually it is just the bottom of the tyres not getting rendered. Similar happened to scenery objects such as revetments,with ground shadows showing, then a "gap" and then the revetment above, so it appeared to be floating. Additonally, any objects on the airfield would disappear completely and lose textures very quickly as the distance increased.

After a lot of experimenting I eventually hand edited the .sca file (output from FSSC), using some older MR sca files (extracted from the bgl) which seemed to use an earlier version of FSSC, possibly(?), and then remade the bgl file. (so the editing ended up being much more than what is in the MR tutorial), and this seems to have fixed the problem, although I've no idea which of the changes have made the difference!

The V1 and V2 changes seem significant, and the numbers after LoadBitmap?

Attached View attachment Coomalie_Creek_2023.zip is my first effort at using a basic mask and using the edited sca/bgl file.

The initial (edited following the MR tutorial) sca file from FSSC was;

; ************************************************************
; Scenery compiled by FS Scenery Creator 1.5.11 by Derek Leung
; Scenery compiled on 17/10/2023 16:40:49
; Scenery created by Me
; ************************************************************


Set( buf 100 )
Set( areamx 64 )
Set( linbuf 64 )
Set( ppperr 2000 )
UVar( $FSSCTEMP1 4 )


Header( 1 S12:57:56.7130 S13:03:20.6871 E131:10:35.7702 E131:05:03.2599 )


LatRange( S13:03:20.6871 S12:57:56.7130 )


Copyright( Copyright © 2022 by Me )


; background2
Area( B S13:00:34.4883 E131:07:52.3596 40 )
LayerCall( :lblLayer )
Jump( : )
:lblLayer
RefPoint( rel :lblReturn 1.00 S13:00:34.4883 E131:07:52.3596 V1= 0 V2= 0 )
Points( 0
-1677 0 1677
1677 0 1677
1677 0 -1677
-1677 0 -1677
)
LoadBitmap( 0 5 0 1 1 1 "coomalie_creek_1_bmp_256_dxt3a.bmp" )
Smoothing( 1 )
TexPoly( au 0 0 255 1 255 255 2 255 0 3 0 0 )
Smoothing( 0 )
:lblReturn
Return
EndA


; Runway 1
Area( 5 S13:00:42.6875 E131:07:50.0057 12 )
LayerCall( :lblLayer 24 )
Jump( : )
:lblLayer
Runway( S13:00:42.6875 E131:07:50.0057
Altitude 70.0
Heading 351.0
Length 5904
Width 105
ID 36
Surface 0x42
Markers 0
Threshold 0
Lights 0
)
Return
EndA


and I replaced it with;

; ************************************************************
; Scenery compiled by FS Scenery Creator 1.5.11 by Derek Leung
; Scenery compiled on 17/10/2023 16:40:49
; Scenery created by Me
; ************************************************************








Header( 1 S12:57:56.7130 S13:03:20.6871 E131:10:35.7702 E131:05:03.2599 )
LatRange( S13:03:20.6871 S12:57:56.7130 )


; background2
Area( B S13:00:34.4883 E131:07:52.3596 40 )
RefPoint( rel : 1.00 S13:00:34.4883 E131:07:52.3596
V1= -25936 V2= 3960 )
LoadBitmap( 0 5 00 0 0 0
coomalie_creek_1_bmp_256_dxt3a.bmp )
Smoothing( 1 )
ZBias( 1 )
Points( 0
-1677 0 -1677 ; 0
1677 0 -1677 ; 1
1677 0 1677 ; 2
-1677 0 1677 ; 3
)
TexPoly( m 0 32767 0 0
0 0 0 ; 0
3 0 255 ; 1
2 254 255 ; 2
1 254 0 ; 3
)
ZBias( 0 )
Smoothing( 0 )
EndA