Change of activity

I have eased up on scenery creation for a few weeks, mainly given radiotherapy & its effects. I have also switched over to mainly focusing on aircraft modeling for a few weeks. I will be switching between activities until I recover next year. I'm in a wee bit of pain at the moment.

I still intend to work on my scenery with new trees & textures. As for trees it's a matter of motivating myself to take a few photographs of trees (I'm surrounded by them) for the textures & I will composite ground textures from a variety of free sources including hand painting some of my own. For copyright reasons it is best NOT to use and mod FSX textures. It would be illegal to distribute such to others as not every CFS3 user owns FSX.

I will also be continuing work on my landclass system and integrating the above into it.

The problem with lines on water looks as if it will be difficult to get rid of. The CFS3 terrain SDK tools and CFS3 scenery engine was not designed with SRTM & SWBD data in mind. The terrain features a LOD system, unfortunately the water system doesn't. The lo-res terrain lods intersecting with the high-res SWBD data causes the water polys to bend where they intersect with with the terrain causing lines to appear. This can be seen occasionally in the CFS3 PTO Solomons theatre. I think the only way they can be reduced (not eliminated) is to use hand drawn coast line vectors, a massive task. If one takes a look at the coast lines in FSX they are all fairly lo-res coastlines.

I did start to create a terrain map for the Philippines, however creating the coastline vectors is a massive task.

In the meantime I hope to post a bit more on aircraft creation in the Biff Diaries in the next couple of weeks.

Rob