New Landclasses.xml

D

Daiwilletti

Charter Member
What the? I've found a small edit to the towns and cities landclasses which mean that the scenery objects line up with the street textures in stock cfs3. This has always been a bit of a bugbear, the houses a bit higgledy-piggldey with the street textures. Now mos files and lso (landscape scenery objects) files match in the landclasses.xml. Available here at SOH under Other-Scenery.
Landclasses stocksm.jpg
https://www.mediafire.com/view/l3tcg19fmcz0h1o/Landclasses_stock.jpg/file
 
Magnificent!! How on earth did you find that David? This could open the way to new, higher res ground textures. 😃
 
Thanks, Clive. We are looking at the town and city areas, with an underlying streetscape with apartments, churches etc on top. Its not easy to get the scenery objects (defined in the lso files) to look natural on the texture sheets. I'm no paint guru but if this winter rain keeps up I might experiment with getting a higher resolution streetscape to underly the stock mos and lso files. The new texture needs to match the layout of the original .dds file, which was a 342kb file.

IIRC MajorMagee found an app which "upscales"and sharpens an image. That would be easiest but maybe not up to the standard of Jono's textures.
 
New Landclass.xml for CFS3

123016546620232585.jpg

A new entry has been added to Add-Ons Library, category CFS 3 Other Add-Ons - Scenery

Description: This will make houses align with the underlying street textures better in cities, towns and small towns.

Simply add the landclasses.xml file to the Assets folder of your stock install. Works in Daiwillettis modified Stock installs as well. Not for ETO.

To check it out, rate it or add comments, visit New Landclass.xml for CFS3
The comments you make there will appear in the posts below.
 
Great work getting the scale to match, does look much better. I might be wrong, but doesn't the ETO scenery still use the stock city buildings and textures? In that case it would work for ETO too, right?

Pat Pattle said:
Magnificent!! How on earth did you find that David? This could open the way to new, higher res ground textures. 
Click to expand...

Clive, do the tools exist to create new scenery objects?
 
gecko said:
Clive, do the tools exist to create new scenery objects?
Click to expand...

Hi Daniel, all I have is this folder which a chap called Kerry gave to me years ago. I could never get it to work but he did. Unfortunately I've lost the original emails with the screenshots etc. If anyone wants to have ago feel free!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9bztsnabw7tszt/SM%20testing.zip?dl=0

A while back I did start to look at upgrading the stock / ETO city textures. I started to test the idea by tracing the roads as best I could with a view to changing the .dds in the .mos files. I don't think I got very far as the image is tiled 4 times within the rgn so it didn't line up. Next time I have a few hours spare I'll give it another go.

This is the test image for the "a_largecitytrees01" texture. Looks awful doesn't it! :173go1:

KLMcSO9.jpg
 
Hi guys, there are two things I would like to respond to.

Clive, I have two zip files about making sm models, including exes, bat files and how to documentation. All dated around 2011.
One called smExample.zip, the other MkSMTest Folder.zip. Between them I would think comprehensive tools for converting m3d models to .sm models. Very happy to upload these to mediafire and share.

Back to the landclasses.xml, the simple change I made was to point the various city landclasses (ID 31,34 and 47) to a correct lso file. Where entries were 034summer2.mos and 034winter2.mos, they incorrectly pointed to 034summer1.lso. I changed the entries to 034summer2.lso.

Going to the mos file, the textures referred to in 034summer2.mos are:
a_034summer2roads.dds and
a_034b2su2_trees.dds.

These two texture files look like this:
a_034summer2_roads.jpga_034b2su2_trees.jpg

These two texture files can be found in the terrains folder of CFS3, in the lcmosaic.zip file.

What I would like to do is to sharpen up the roads texture sheet - 034summer2roads.dds. I have no idea whether this will turn out to be a good idea or not.

@MajorMagee, would you like to take a look at that dds file and see what could be done to sharpen it up? Presumably the file will need to be larger. It can be tested by throwing the file into the assets folder where it will be used in preference to the original.


As far as new scenerymodels go, I'm a bit vague about how they get included in the autogen system of object placement. Do they need to be included in lso files?
To me, working on lso files looks like a fiddly and slow job. The scenery improvement I've posted about here was quick and easy by comparison.
 
That's really interesting David. Did you find any other places where the wrong file was pointed to?

I'd certainly be interested to see those sm file tools too!
 
Clive, I have two zip files about making sm models, including exes, bat files and how to documentation. All dated around 2011.
One called smExample.zip, the other MkSMTest Folder.zip. Between them I would think comprehensive tools for converting m3d models to .sm models. Very happy to upload these to mediafire and share.
Click to expand...

Yes please David! I think I had those at one time, would like to try again. Where are you flying from in that screenie?

As far as new scenerymodels go, I'm a bit vague about how they get included in the autogen system of object placement. Do they need to be included in lso files?
To me, working on lso files looks like a fiddly and slow job. The scenery improvement I've posted about here was quick and easy by comparison.
Click to expand...

SM models are added via the .lso files. You have a black layer in the mos file onto which you add a white dot for each building. These are added in sets so you would do all the churches, then the apartments etc. etc. The difficult bit is rotating them, it has to be done individually so is a lot of work. I did this for the original BoB install as it had the new ground textures. They were removed in the update as I wasn't happy with them. In Johnno's ETO scenery he used the existing city textures but Anglicised some of the buildings.

There's lots of scope here.
 
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OK I'll upload all the sm stuff here at SOH.

Thanks very much MajorMagee. I may use a painstaking method to add detail to the roads. I use a bmp of the image and use good old MS Paint. I blow the image up to the max and use the paintbrush and fill options to define the roads a bit better at high magnification. I think a light slate grey colour would be better than a quick first attempt which just used white pixels.
 
I've just realised I have made tweaks to the scales of some landclasses (eg Coniferous Forest) and also their priorities. CFS3 blends the boundaries of the landclasses in quite a neat way. The boundaries are defined in the .lcf file in the terrains folder. Therefore you will see a slightly different version of scenery unless you try my landclasses.xml by putting it in your Assets folder.

I will hop onto my CFS3 computer later, and upload the landclasses.xml for those who wish to try it.
 
Doh! Why did I say that? The landclasses.xml that I already uploaded will have the changes to landclass dimensions and priorities. I was thinking that you would be using the original landclasses file :dizzy:
 
Yes now that everything is lining up its screaming out for higher res or completely re-made ground textures. Great work David.
 
mongoose said:
So is this only for stock based scenery, or also relevant for ETO?
Click to expand...

Hi James, you were right. The same roads fields and trees textures are mentioned in the urban landclasses for ETO. I edited the 034 series in the landclasses.xml for ETO to include the correct lso files, just as I described above. The scenery objects look better of course in ETO with a nice crisp scenerysheet, but as Clive says we could do with some nice high res textures for the ground layer.
 
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