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Question for programmer

Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2015 7:32 am
by DavidTwitter
Hi, I admire the programmer who made this program. I know it is not simple to build program like this. I am also interested in programming and so want to ask you how does X-builder read ground textures from bgl files and how does it save? Does it just use resample.exe or it uses some library static or dynamic developed by MS? Or maybe they include some library for Visual Studio which can be included to create my own library to read and write ground textures into bgl. Actually I am very interested about the format in which the ground textures are saved, as far as I know resample.exe uses some kind of resampling and "dithering" but I would like to know how one can use it in one's own program. I would prefer to do such program (source open) if possible to load images from JPEG and then export it to bgl so no bitmaps would cost disk space. Also I would prefer to such feature into my program that I would not need to create the inf files, but I would calculated the parameters directly from the file name.

Re: Question for programmer

Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2015 3:33 pm
by luisfeliztirado
Hello,

There are a lot of questions here. :D

First, Luis Sá, the creator of SBuilder is a bit busy and may not be able to answer at the moment. Sorry.

But, in short, SBuilder calls the official FS tools from the SDK for compiling source data. So, once SBuilder has prepared the data, including images and control documents, it simply invokes Resample.exe, and the other SDK tools, in order to produce the bgl.

I assume when you write ground texture that you mean custom (photo-real) ground textures and not the default land class textures.

Your comments about creating your own tool were interesting. For information, Resample takes the source image and incorporates it within the bgl, for FSX anyway. Previously, the image was sliced into ground textures and placed in a Texture directory, but not in FSX, for performance reasons. Only autogen annotations will be inside the Texture folder.

As far as I know, nobody has bothered to create a tool to extract images from bgls; it is easy enough to create high-resolution custom ground without going to that trouble.

Best regards.
Luis