Shorelines - attributes? FSX/SBX

General discussion about Scenery Design. Questions about SBuilder for Flight Simulator FS2004.
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boleyd
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Shorelines - attributes? FSX/SBX

Post by boleyd » Thu May 17, 2007 6:10 pm

I cannot get a shoreline to appear. If I give the same line segment a road type property it appears ok. Is there some special attribute of shorelines, other than the clockwise wave effect, that would cause it to not appear? All the SDK seems to mention is the waves.



Dick Boley near 5G8

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luisfeliztirado
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Post by luisfeliztirado » Fri May 18, 2007 12:46 am

Are you trying to use one of the old FS 9 shorelines, Dick? And, if so, have you installed the modified terrain.cfg file that Dick Ludowise and I put together? Because that is the only way to get them to display.

The SBuilder installer should probably include a readme file with this, and other, information.

Best regards.

Luis

boleyd
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Post by boleyd » Fri May 18, 2007 10:41 am

No, did not try the legacy FS9 shoreline. Tried the FSX Ocean, River, Lake, and Default. I thought that Microsoft would have modified the Terrain.cfg with the patch but mine has your original opening information. I asked the question since I assumed that the shore has all of the same characteristics as a road plus waves. I need to check the Terrain.Cfg to make sure that nothing goofy happened to the shorelines and also try the FS9 shorelines.


Dick Boley near 5G8

igallacher
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Post by igallacher » Fri May 18, 2007 11:43 am

Hi Dick

I have found the 'Shorelines Generic Lake/River/Ocean/Harbour/Canal'

will display in FSX and the ocean setting will have waves. None of the others in the SBuilderX list seem to display.

Iain
Scotflight Scenery

boleyd
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Post by boleyd » Fri May 18, 2007 3:16 pm

My experience has been the opposite. I tried the FS9 selections and they display ok. But the Shorelines xxxxx do not. I doubt that it is an SBX issue. Microsoft really messes things up when they become ever more clever by changing the ground rules for element management addons such as SBX. There is some secret switch, or value, that is my problem which I will ignore since the legacy stuff works ok for me. Of course some future reload or update will turn things into the opposite state grrrr.... I really miss not having the code in front of me so I can install breakpoints and do compiles.



Dick Boley near 5G8

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luisfeliztirado
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Post by luisfeliztirado » Fri May 18, 2007 3:32 pm

Hello Iain,

All the shorelines will work correctly. Here is a test of a few of them:

Image



As can be seen, they display without problem.

Flight Simulator X only has 6 default shorelines:

- Shorelines Default
- Shorelines Generic Bay Harbor
- Shorelines Generic Lake
- Shorelines Generic River
- Shorelines Generic Ocean (with wave effect)
- Shorelines Generic Canal Channel

They all display either the tan sand or the tan rock texture, and only the ocean shoreline has a wave effect.

If you have installed the FSX_modified_terrain_cfg.zip file (available in the Avsim library),

http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?Ca ... DLID=93289

then you can also draw any of the old FS 9 shorelines, with their much greater variety.


This is the only way to get the old FS 9 shorelines to display. Without installing the modified terrain.cfg file, those shorelines cannot appear in the game.

Luis was kind enough to include the FS 9 shorelines in the list of available shorelines in SBuilder for FSX, but SBuilder alone cannot make them display. The only way to do this is to install the modified terrain.cfg file.

Without a doubt, SBuilder should include a note indicating the necessary steps for correct installation. But, this is only a preliminary version of the program and Luis has not yet gotten around to those small details.

For more information concerning the use of SBuilder for FS X, please see:

Terrain Design for Flight Simulator X

http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?Ca ... LID=100997


Best regards.

Luis

igallacher
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Post by igallacher » Fri May 18, 2007 4:23 pm

Hi Luis

I have your 'Terrain Design for Flight Simulator X' download and I thank you for taking the time to compile this very helpful document.

However if you are producing scenery for distribution for FSX you can not be sure if all the propective users have your replacement terrain.cfg file installed and if you include FS9 style shorelines then users without the replacement file will not have the old style shorelines appearing in FSX. Am I correct in my assumption?

What I was really saying was that only the 'Shorelines Genetic' from the SBuilderX list are guaranteed to appear for everyone in FSX.

Iain
Scotflight Scenery

boleyd
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Post by boleyd » Fri May 18, 2007 6:28 pm

I can get the old FS9 shore to appear ok. New (smaller selection) do not. For now I do not care, just so I have some.

I am shocked that the FSX patch did not include a new terrain.cfg. Is there a reason that this will haunt us until the next release in a few years


Dick Boley near 5G8

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luisfeliztirado
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Post by luisfeliztirado » Sat May 19, 2007 12:48 am

Hello Iain,

Very sorry if I misunderstood your comments. As I mentioned in that document:

IMPORTANT: Please remember that if you have installed the FSX_modified_terrain_cfg.zip, and created terrain with some of the additional terrain features in that file that are not available in the default terrain.cfg file, then your users must also have installed the modified file in order to display them. Therefore, you should instruct your users to install the file.


And Dick Ludowise and I believe that everybody should install the file, as you can imagine.

It is an easy installation and does not break anything in FS X, so really if some scenery designer wishes to use these FS 9 shorelines, then he should either include the modified terrain.cfg file with his scenery, or tell users how to get it.

Dick, the guys in Redmond have been supremely busy over the last few years, and quite frantic for the last 8 or 10 months. They have made a lot of feature upgrades, fantastic stuff like the round earth that was released with FS X in October, and then fixing this for the Service Pack so that previous scenery packages are compatible with it. And lots of other stuff.

So, they have not had much time (or sleep, for that matter) and have left the small and insignificant details to us.

Dick Ludowise and I made our small contribution with the corrections to the terrain.cfg file, and everybody should install it without waiting for a corrected file directly from Microsoft.

As for the generic shorelines, they display well for me, but please remember that the width is fixed in the terrain.cfg file and it is very narrow and not extremely visible. So, perhaps this is why you are not seeing them.

I made the widths of the FS 9 shorelines greater so that they would be more visible, but did not touch the FS X shorelines. And, really, with the availability of the FS 9 shorelines, there is not a good reason for using the generic FS X shorelines.

Best regards.

Luis

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Post by rhumbaflappy » Sat May 19, 2007 2:38 am

Hi all.

To add to what Luis explained:

The only reason we published the modified terrain.cfg was that we hoped there would not be 50 different versions floating around. At least now we have <b>one</b> version that can display polys without some of the problems of the default terrain.cfg ( No support for VTP2 photoreal, rocks clogging the rivers, etc... ).

Now that the SP1 is delivered, Luis and I will most likely look again at the modded terrain.cfg, and see if it needs any more changes, as none were delivered by the Aces team.

There will undoubtably be more versions in the future, as addon packages develop ( Holger Sandmann was developing such a package ). We hope they include our changes, with the appropriate GUIDs, in their new addons.

Hopefully, in FS11 there will be the ability to have 'local' terrain configurations that can be specific to the Scenery Library folders. That solves a lot of problems. [:)]

Dick

boleyd
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Post by boleyd » Sat May 19, 2007 12:46 pm

<font size="4">Solved</font id="size4">

The hint that I might not be seeing the small width FSX shorelines was my problem. I changed the FSX default to 100 meters and there it was. Maybe in your next iteration of the terrain.cfg you could make the beaches wider.

THANKS
Dick Boley near 5G8

igallacher
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Post by igallacher » Sat May 19, 2007 6:13 pm

Hi Luis & Dick

I have now re-installed your modified terrain.cfg to work with SP1 and so far everything seems okay. I would in turn be looking to include your file in the scenery package I am about to release as you have suggested.
However I am now getting feedback which is suggesting that the modified file should not be used with the SP1 update installed. In one case a user could not get FSX to run after installing the modified file.
Can you advise what the situation is as you see it please.

Iain
Scotflight Scenery

rhumbaflappy
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Post by rhumbaflappy » Sat May 19, 2007 8:06 pm

Hi Iain.

I've been using the modified terrain.cfg since we first released it. I have both the FSX SP1 and the SDK SP1a installed. It doesn't cause crashes. There is nothing the SP1 that would cause a crash.

Whatever feedback you got is quite suspicious. Odd they haven't contacted Luis or me about it... we're always around.

Dick

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Post by igallacher » Sun May 20, 2007 1:06 am

Hi Dick

Many thanks for your quick response and your clarafication
Your modified file is certainly not causing any problems at my end and from a design point of view the much wider choice of shorelines for use in FSX is a real bonus.

Iain
Scotflight Scenery

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