Textured / named VTP lines

General discussion about Scenery Design. Questions about SBuilder for Flight Simulator FS2004.
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Mick
Posts: 59
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:42 pm
Location: Germany

Textured / named VTP lines

Post by Mick » Thu May 15, 2008 10:42 pm

Hi everybody,

I hope someone will find this FS9 issue (and maybe my other ones) and help me getting forward with some advice. I also hope Luis is fine after his vacation - I'm getting worried since I don't see you around, man??

Today it's about textured VTP lines, after trying for many hours and reading the Terrain SDK again and again I'm still getting frustrated with the results.

Inspired from other scenery, I made textures for my streets like that:
[img]uploaded/mick/200851515273_MSStrasse_neu.jpg[/img]

I experimented with all the parameters I found - different sizes of the textures, square and non-square, Type 1/2 or 3, 8-bit and dtx1 - and even changed the size parameter in the scm-file (from 4m to 1m per pixel). What I got was something like this:

[img]uploaded/mick/2008515153314_TexVTPL.jpg[/img]
[img]uploaded/mick/200851515350_TexVTPL2.jpg[/img]

The funny thing is that obviously <u>a part of the street</u> (2nd pic) has a middle stripe, while the rest just seems somehow checkered. Having set a resolution of 1m per pixel (in the scm-file from the work folder, afterwards compiling again) I guess a huge 1-m-stripe might be the best result FS9 can give me (if I even manage to paint it only 1 pixel thin [:)])

Could anyone please give me some more information on the needed procedures, texture formats etc.? I'm doing a helicopter scenery, so I'd love to make it as real as possible, i.e. having clearer borders on the sides of the street etc. Do I expect too much from FS9 or SB?

Thanks for your advice
Mick

rhumbaflappy
Posts: 420
Joined: Sat Oct 16, 2004 10:11 pm

Post by rhumbaflappy » Sun May 18, 2008 6:21 pm

Hi Mick.

FS9 is limited to 4.8m/pixel for terrrain textures. A road, rail, or stream is going to look pretty rough. You're not going to get lines on the roads to show with any realism.

The BMP needs to be 256x256 pixels. Look at the default road textures for examples.

Dick

Mick
Posts: 59
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:42 pm
Location: Germany

Post by Mick » Mon May 19, 2008 11:47 am

Hi Dick,

thank you for letting me know about this limit. I had got inspired to experiment with them through the new helipack (from flightport), which uses similar textures... but having 460 clinics in the package, I didn't find our where these are used and how they actually look in FS9. I seem to have given a perfect example of wasting time here [xx(]

Do I understand you right that FS9 just refuses to show the results? I'm asking this because my changes seemed to work (i.e. scasm compiled 1 pix/m, nor errors with the textures, etc.) and "only" a visible result was always missing. Or might I have messed-up my bgls and had better re-do and recompile everything?

Thanks
Mick

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