How to create photoreal scenery for FSX

[Zoandar]

I'd like to make a comment here for those who are just getting into this tutorial. I'm learning the hard way that selecting the map size of the area you are going to render, when you first capture it from the satellite server, is something to seriously consider. I have areas of various sizes, most of which are either LOD15 or 14 (I was never successful in trying to capture LOD 16 imagery - the server always died before I got the image). Sizes of these areas, as seen by their number of "cells" mentioned at the bottom edge of the resample.exe compiler window, will vary from 500 to over 5000 cells.

 

Those ones which are nearly 6000 cells take a long time to resample, but worse than that, GIMP sometimes chokes and dies on them, most often when trying to use the Fuzzy Select tool. I would guess the reason being there are simply a huge number of adjoining pixels to look at when it decides which ones to include. Working as I do, I may have half a dozen or more layers in the image as I am polishing it, adding things like marinas to the blendmask in a later editing session, adding a layer of transparent green to the red areas to colorize them, etc. The one I just worked on today is 5600 cells and the total file size for GIMP's xcf file is over 800MB. It is slow to respond compared to other areas I have worked on, and I regret that I made this map such a large area. I should have broken it down into smaller segments.

 

Note when you are adding a map from the background image in SBuilderX (SBX) there are a series of grid squares covering the Add Map selection area. I use those to help align adjacent area selections, although FSX will overlap them to some degree for a seamless transition. I've found that trying to utilize perhaps 2/3 of these grid squares is what leaves me with 5000 cell maps at LOD15. Using no more than 9 of the contiguous squares makes the resulting file smaller and easier to work with as you build the BGL file for your scenery. You get a feel for how big to make them as you repeat the procedure. :)

[Zoandar]

I wanted to try staining the FSX-created water flowing from a river into the lake to look as a muddy river might look as the water gets diluted in the clean lake water. Here's where I am at the moment, having experimented with different colors and opacity. The color numbers here are "HTML notation" numbers from the GIMP Change Foreground Color dock.

 

Through experimentation I have found I prefer to put 273d2d as a base color under all the water FSX will render. So that lies under this river, on its own green mask layer when the bitmap gets exported. The brown is 3d2b01 which gets applied to an empty new transparent layer, and ranges from 100% opaque to having feathered out and blurred a bit with the airbrush and blur tool. Then the entire layer for this brown coloration is set to 60% opacity.

 

Here's how it looks in GIMP. I had to make the coloration a LOT darker than the photo water on the up river side of the bridge, in order to get it to render even close to the same once FSX puts water on top of the brown coloration.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140790[/ATTACH]

 

Once exported in a layer along with everything else that makes up the base image BMP, here is how it looks after being complied and loaded into FSX.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140791[/ATTACH]

[archfer]

Hi Chaps

 

@Jim, I think I'll have a go at replacing the bridges but will forget about the roads and railway.

 

@Zoandar, the clouds around the pontoons is water spray. I cheated and did those shots in slew mode so the plane thinks it is still on the water. That is a really nice effect with the river flowing into the lake BTW.

 

Cheers

 

Archie

[Thunderchicken]

When trying to open the Annotator tool i get an error message.

 

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140895[/ATTACH]

[Zoandar]

Hi Chaps

 

 

 

@Zoandar, the clouds around the pontoons is water spray. I cheated and did those shots in slew mode so the plane thinks it is still on the water. That is a really nice effect with the river flowing into the lake BTW.

 

Cheers

 

Archie

 

Thanks! I spent several more hours yesterday working on improving the technique, by experimenting with how underlying colors, or the lack of any colors, (stripped down to the Alpha Channel to start) affect the appearance of FSX rendered water. Often the "up-river" segment of a river looks good to me on the base image, so I leave that alone. But I don't like the abrupt boundary "photo water" has in appearance when it switches to FSX rendered water at the mouth of the river. It seems tricky to try to get the two colorations to look anywhere near similar, but I found a compromise I like late last night. I'll post a shot of it later. GIMPs transparent layers sure open a lot of coloring options! :)

 

I use slew mode too when working on scenery. There's nothing quite like slewing along at 2200 knots to cover short distances in a hurry, or 44000 knots in global view (astroid impact, anyone?) lol. But I have had the misfortune of accidentally canceling slew mode right in the middle of some precision work, especially placing 3D objects with Instant Scenery 2, and had the aircraft I was using blast off across the area, even while sitting at ground level, making it a nuisance to have to move back to the same area once again. So I found that the Ultralight, with its engine shut down, makes a good slew aircraft. Even if it fires up by accidentally canceling slew, it is so slow that it won't scream off into the sunset like fast aircraft will do.

 

Of course there is also the Crosshair tool "aircraft" to use instead. I don't recall which website I found it on, but it works very well during extreme precision placements like placing lights on towers. And with no engine, it can't jet away on its own. :) So when using it, I can cancel slew mode to observe animated scenery objects, without losing my position.

[Zoandar]

Here's a shot of my color staining attempts in FSX generated water to get it to try to match up with the coloration of a river which is part of the photo-realistic scenery. The observed angle in FSX moves the "sunlight" around and makes water change colors quite a bit, so I tried to put the plane off on an angle to show the best coloration. As the sun gets low in the sky, and little of it is hitting the water here, the colors almost make a perfect match. :)

 

I worked for hours trying to accomplish this and was not having any luck trying shades of green, brown, and white, until it finally hit me that to make FSX's blue water look more green I had to add yellow! But to get the "dirty green" color it had to be not a pure yellow, but more of a gold (I noted the HTML colors in GIMP so I can repeat the procedure) and also has 4 layers of different colors going on to make the transition. So the layers added to the base image to accomplish this look really weird, but viewed 'through' the blue FSX water it turns out as you see it here. The river south of the bridge crossing it is part of the photo. North of the bridge is all stained water generated by FSX.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140944[/ATTACH]

 

 

Here is what the area looks like from GIMP's point of view:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140945[/ATTACH]

[snake36bravo]

I wanted to try staining the FSX-created water flowing from a river into the lake to look as a muddy river might look as the water gets diluted in the clean lake water. Here's where I am at the moment, having experimented with different colors and opacity. The color numbers here are "HTML notation" numbers from the GIMP Change Foreground Color dock.

 

Through experimentation I have found I prefer to put 273d2d as a base color under all the water FSX will render. So that lies under this river, on its own green mask layer when the bitmap gets exported. The brown is 3d2b01 which gets applied to an empty new transparent layer, and ranges from 100% opaque to having feathered out and blurred a bit with the airbrush and blur tool. Then the entire layer for this brown coloration is set to 60% opacity.

 

Here's how it looks in GIMP. I had to make the coloration a LOT darker than the photo water on the up river side of the bridge, in order to get it to render even close to the same once FSX puts water on top of the brown coloration.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140790[/ATTACH]

 

Once exported in a layer along with everything else that makes up the base image BMP, here is how it looks after being complied and loaded into FSX.

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]140791[/ATTACH]

 

This is great!!! I cannot stand the Delta regions in Asia and am looking to do the same thing with those textures. Thanks for those tips. The last time I tried I crashed the sim.

[archfer]

I have the same problem as Thunderchicken. I can't open Annotator.exe either. Actually I'm having a bit of a 'mare at the moment. I have colourised my underwater scenery and recompiled the .BGL but now I can't see it in TMFViewer. I have created two exclusion poly's but when I try to compile the .BGL file I get an error to the effect that it could not produce the file (see screenshot).

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]141066[/ATTACH]

 

And to top it off, I've put objects in my scenery and compiled the .BGL file without problems but they don't show up in FSX.

 

TiberiusK made it seem so easy but obviously there is more to it than meets the eye. If anybody has any ideas what I might be doing wrong, please let me know.

 

Regards, Archie

[Jim Robinson]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]141066[/ATTACH]

 

Let's try this, start Notepad and paste the following lines, save it on your desktop as "test_bglcomp.bat".

 

 

"D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools\bglcomp.exe" "D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools\Work\000_Poole_Harbour.xml" > bglcomp_error.txt
notepad bglcomp_error.txt

 

 

Close, go to the desktop and double click "test_bglcomp.bat". The .bat file will do basically what the SBX error dialog is telling you to do. It will create a .txt file on the desktop containing the error and then open the .txt file in Notepad when it finishes. Copy the contents of the error report and post it here. From that hopefully we can determine what the problem is.

 

Jim

[archfer]

Let's try this, start Notepad and paste the following lines, save it on your desktop as "test_bglcomp.bat".

 

 

"D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools\bglcomp.exe" "D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools\Work\000_Poole_Harbour.xml" > bglcomp_error.txt
notepad bglcomp_error.txt

 

 

Close, go to the desktop and double click "test_bglcomp.bat". The .bat file will do basically what the SBX error dialog is telling you to do. It will create a .txt file on the desktop containing the error and then open the .txt file in Notepad when it finishes. Copy the contents of the error report and post it here. From that hopefully we can determine what the problem is.

 

Jim

 

Hi Jim

 

I have run the batch file and the results are:

 

Parsing document: D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools\Work\000_Poole_Harbour.xml

 

INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR: #C2033: XML Parse Error (line, column, error)

 

ERROR: 19, 37, The attribute 'excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects' on this element is not defined in the DTD/Schema.

 

INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR: #C2033: XML Parse Error (line, column, error)

 

ERROR: 33, 37, The attribute 'excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects' on this element is not defined in the DTD/Schema.

 

INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR: #C2606: Schema errors detected, compilation failed!

 

Parse complete!

 

Maybe they didn't include excluding extrusion bridges in the compiler?

 

Regards, Archie

[Zoandar]

This is great!!! I cannot stand the Delta regions in Asia and am looking to do the same thing with those textures. Thanks for those tips. The last time I tried I crashed the sim.

 

Are you running FSX from Windows 7? If you are, there is a known issue called the "crash to desktop" issue, and there is a patch available that helps a lot. However, FSX is not entirely stable anyway. Considering its age, we are very lucky it still runs at all. ;) I have to deal with FSX having "stopped responding" all too often, even with the patch. Before the patch it was a definite event on which I could rely seeing several times per day. Since I put the patch in place, it is much better, although certain things I do can still trigger a "hang", such as playing with the Simulation Rate.

 

I was recreating an AI ferry route last night after learning how to use AIBTC (AI Boat Traffic Compiler), and the route for this ferry is about 25km. I didn't want to wait an hour each time I adjusted the route to see it work, so I would use a 4X sim rate most of the time supplemented with short burts of 64X to whisk the ferry boat through the middle sections of its path. (Any sim rate above 4X hides the ferry, but it reappears in the new location after the "hyperjump". :) I had FSX crash 3 times, most often just as I was about to see if the ferry aligned with its 2D dock slip on my scenery. You can probably find the patch by Googling for FSX CTD or FSX Crash to Desktop. If not, I can dig up info on where I found it.

 

Edit - here is the patch I am using. Scroll down until you see a stepladder picture.

 

http://www.simviation.com/simviation/?ID=69&page=13&mark=7483

[Jim Robinson]

Hi Jim

 

I have run the batch file and the results are:

 

Parsing document: D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools\Work\000_Poole_Harbour.xml

 

INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR: #C2033: XML Parse Error (line, column, error)

 

ERROR: 19, 37, The attribute 'excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects' on this element is not defined in the DTD/Schema.

 

INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR: #C2033: XML Parse Error (line, column, error)

 

ERROR: 33, 37, The attribute 'excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects' on this element is not defined in the DTD/Schema.

 

INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR: #C2606: Schema errors detected, compilation failed!

 

Parse complete!

 

Maybe they didn't include excluding extrusion bridges in the compiler?

 

Regards, Archie

 

 

Hi Archie,

 

First can you check your D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools folder and make sure "bglcomp.xsd" is present there?

 

Secondly, go into Control Panel > Programs & Features and check that you have an entry for MSXML 4, it should look something like this:

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/msxml4.jpg

 

 

Finally, what version of FSX are you using (i.e. SP2, Acceleration, etc), and do you have the SDK installed?

 

Jim

[archfer]

Hi Jim

 

Check and check to the first two points and I am running FSX Acceleration and have the SDK installed.

 

Regards, Archie

[Jim Robinson]

Hi Archie, I can't imagine why it wouldn't work, is there a chance you have an early version of SBuilder installed? I'm wondering if the bglcomp.exe and bglcomp.xsd in your Tools folder are from an earlier version of the SDK (i.e. SP1a or something)? Check the file date/time on both of those files and see if they match mine:

 

bglcomp.exe

Modified: Monday, ‎December ‎10, ‎2007, ‏‎8:38:52 PM

Size: 312 KB (320,064 bytes)

 

bglcomp.xsd

Modified: Monday, ‎November ‎19, ‎2007, ‏‎11:42:54 AM

Size: 85.8 KB (87,930 bytes)

 

 

Also, start Notepad and drag bglcomp.xsd into the Notepad window. Use Edit > Find and search for "excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects" (without the quotes). You should find it within a group of other items associated with "ExclusionRectangle", i.e. excludeAllObjects, excludeBeaconObjects, excludeEffectObjects, etc. I suspect excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects might be missing.

 

 

In the batch file you made earlier, try substituting the bglcomp.exe path so that you're using the SDK supplied copy of bglcomp. I don't know where you have your SDK installed so I can't give you the exact path, but using my path as an example the new batch file would look like this:

 

"C:\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X SDK\SDK\Environment Kit\BGL Compiler SDK\bglcomp.exe" "D:\Program Files (x86)\SBuilderX313\Tools\Work\000_Poole_Harbour.xml" > bglcomp_error.txt
notepad bglcomp_error.txt

 

(if you still have the first batch file on your desktop you can right click it and choose "Edit" to open it back up in Notepad, then just change the bglcomp.exe path so it points to the one in your SDK installation, save.) Run the batch file again and see if it produces a 000_Poole_Harbour.bgl in the "SBuilderX313\Tools\Work" folder.

 

I guess if all the above fails, post the contents of "SBuilderX313\Tools\Work\000_Poole_Harbour.xml" and I'll see if I can get it to compile on my machine.

 

Jim

[Zoandar]

Is it possible to edit one of the FSX default terrain files (one of those we previously discussed having been deleted)? I have an issue where Kellys Island in Lake Erie was so incorrectly rendered by FSX that they had added a huge amount of land to its east coast, and then incorrectly moved the airstrip runway out onto their fictitious land. Once the satellite image is made and the airport is aligned with reality, there is a "cliff" in the water where the end of their runway flatten would have been. Since the lake is at 173 meters elevation, and the island itself has changes in elevation on its land, so nothing is at sea level here, I have found no way to get rid of this "cliff", which apparently had reappeared when I restored FSX's /0302/CVX2517.BGL file after our discussion on the merits of having those files in place. I had not noticed it until last night.

 

I've spent hours trying to fix it with adjustments to the files I made with ADE and with SBX, but nothing helps. If I remove my own Kellys Island files, and leave the default island showing, there is land at the elevation of their "cliff", so it doesn't show up.

 

One possible fix might be to actually terraform Kellys Island to match their incorrect rendition, by moving water masks and some GIMP imagery magic. But I am looking to keep the realistic island appearance if possible. Hmm. Can I put a Flatten polygon in the water at the "real" island's shoreline, using SBX? That might fix it. I would have to trace the shoreline and then extend it past their cliff boundary. Would that work?

[Jim Robinson]

So you've completely moved the airport away from this flatten? Like how far?

 

If you're completely away from it you should be able to make an exclude poly for the old airport flatten. Tag it with "Exclude_All_Airport_Boundaries", and then if you need to make a new flatten for the airport in the current location make another poly and tag it with "AB_Flatten". You'll need to set the altitude of the flatten in meters. You can also use AB_Flattens to reconstruct the mesh somewhat if needed, just set the altitude of each individual point of the flatten and it'll (sort of) conform to whatever you need.

 

At KBHB I had a problem where the runway was simply too close and too high above the water. I couldn't get any flattens to work without hideous "shark's teeth" and texture smearing so I copied/pasted a piece of imagery over the water and effectively moved the shoreline out 20 yds or so. This allowed me to use a less steeply sloped AB_Flatten poly and got rid of most of the texture smearing. The rest I covered up with autogen trees. Of course you need to adjust your water mask to match. You'll never be completely happy with the results of your flattening efforts (you'll find the sim has a mind of it's own) but usually after fudging this and fudging that you can come up with something acceptable.

 

Repost of a before/after comparison I posted in another thread, all done in SBX with AB_Flattens:

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/north_hill_before_n_after.jpg

 

Jim

[Zoandar]

Nice work on the roadway, Jim!

 

Well, I was able to fix the problem creating a poly with SBX along the coastline and tagging it to remove all terrain. :)

 

To answer your questions, the runway is only moved maybe 2-300 feet to be on the actual satellite imagery. FSX's "shelf" in the water was relatively small, and only an elevation difference of maybe 6 feet, but it bugged me to see it.

 

Before:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]141139[/ATTACH]

 

After:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]141140[/ATTACH]

 

FSX had rendered this island as:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]141141[/ATTACH]

 

With a lot more land between the airport and the lake. But in reality it looks like this:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]141142[/ATTACH]

 

which has the same effect as if someone moved the runway closer to the coast. That is why their flatten for the runway ends up overlapping into the water. So not so much an issue of moving the runway, as it is of removing a lot of false island. I have every reason to believe things such as the GPS will still work OK, because I only had to reposition the runway a little with ADE to line it up on its satellite image, and I was careful to move the navigation points as per the tutorial here.

 

Thanks for the advice. :)

[Zoandar]

Hey, some of you may already know this, but I just learned something cool. You can add more than one map "from disk" into what you are viewing in SBuilderX when you are creating, for example, a hydro-poly. Why would I want to do this? Well, when working with an area that has both islands and a coastline, trying to decide how big a hydro-poly to make around an island can be tricky, because all you would normally see is the island map you added. It is possible to make the hydro-poly large enough that it overlaps onto the land beyond the coastline, especially if that distance across the water isn't very far. When that happens, the land beyond gets set to the same elevation as the hydro-poly. If your land surrounding the coast has elevation changes, it creates a depression shaped like the hydro-poly into the terrain.

 

So, I wondered, since I can drag multiple CVX.BGL files to TMFViewer to see them (thanks Jim, it works great!) and determine how they line up, maybe I could also add additional 'maps from disk' into SBuilderX to get the 'lay of the land' and avoid putting my polygons where they might overlap undesired places. It works! And when I am ready to compile and save the project, it is easy to simply draw a box around the added maps, which outlines them in red and highlights their corner nodes, then press the DEL key to delete them, so only the desired map gets saved in the project file. The more I learn about these tools the cooler they seem! :)

[archfer]

Hi Archie, I can't imagine why it wouldn't work, is there a chance you have an early version of SBuilder installed? I'm wondering if the bglcomp.exe and bglcomp.xsd in your Tools folder are from an earlier version of the SDK (i.e. SP1a or something)? Check the file date/time on both of those files and see if they match mine:

 

bglcomp.exe

Modified: Monday, ‎December ‎10, ‎2007, ‏‎8:38:52 PM

Size: 312 KB (320,064 bytes)

 

bglcomp.xsd

Modified: Monday, ‎November ‎19, ‎2007, ‏‎11:42:54 AM

Size: 85.8 KB (87,930 bytes)

 

 

Also, start Notepad and drag bglcomp.xsd into the Notepad window. Use Edit > Find and search for "excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects" (without the quotes). You should find it within a group of other items associated with "ExclusionRectangle", i.e. excludeAllObjects, excludeBeaconObjects, excludeEffectObjects, etc. I suspect excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects might be missing.

 

Jim

 

Hi Jim

 

You're the man! My files are from 2006 and the excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects string doesn't exist in the .xsd file. Where's the best place to get the latest version from? There are several sites hosting it but they all say SbuilderX313 like my version.

 

Regards

 

Archie

[Jim Robinson]

Hi Archie,

 

I believe I downloaded my copy from Avsim but I would check this thread at FSDeveloper:

 

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5596

 

For the time being I'm guessing you could just copy bglcomp.exe and bglcomp.xsd from your "Microsoft Flight Simulator X SDK\SDK\Environment Kit\BGL Compiler SDK" folder into the "SBuilderX313\Tools" folder and compile your .bgl. Probably best to update SBX to the latest version anyway though.

 

Jim

[Zoandar]

FWIW, I downloaded all these tools used in the tutorial from the source links in post # 2 of this thread, and they have all worked for me so far in anything I have tried to do. :) I just did some Googling and I did not find a newer version of SBX than version 313.

[Jim Robinson]

Obviously there are different revisions of "version 313" since Archie's bglcomp.xsd didn't have provisions for excluding extrusion bridges and mine does. I'm guessing yours does too since the link in post 2 points to the PTSim site. That is the official SBuilder site (and is one of the two download options available from the sticky thread I linked in my last post). The SDK itself (where these tools originally came from) has been through 3 revisions that I know of, I wasn't aware of the "excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects" problem, but I know the original RTM bglcomp had problems with airport boundary fences that were fixed in later revisions of the SDK.

 

Bglcomp.exe, resample.exe, shp2vec.exe, etc are not intrinsically part of the SBuilder program, they were simply bundled with SBX for folks who don't have the SDK installed. They originated from MS as part of the SDK and all of this stuff that we're using SBuilder for can be done by writing code and processing it with the SDK supplied tools. SBX basically is a (brilliant and powerful) graphical interface that ultimately writes the code for us so we don't have to do it manually. When you click the "compile" button, the code is written to an XML document (or an .inf in the case of photoscenery, landclass, etc) and that source XML/.inf is processed through the appropriate SDK supplied tool to produce a .bgl.

 

Jim

[archfer]

Hi Jim

 

Wits and End describe where I am at right now. I have downloaded the SBuilderX313.zip file from three different sources and the .exe and .xsd are all last modified in 2006 and there is no "excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects" in any of the .xsd files. That also goes for the ones in the SDK which I installed from the original FSX discs. It must be there somewhere or else why have a function that uses it?

 

Here is the contents of 000_Poole_Harbour.xml:

 

version="9.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd">

latitudeMinimum=" 50.7279661666667"

latitudeMaximum=" 50.7300475555556"

longitudeMinimum="-2.01257444444444"

longitudeMaximum="-1.99150641666667"

excludeAllObjects="FALSE"

excludeBeaconObjects="FALSE"

excludeEffectObjects="FALSE"

excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects="TRUE"

excludeGenericBuildingObjects="FALSE"

excludeLibraryObjects="FALSE"

excludeTaxiwaySignObjects="FALSE"

excludeTriggerObjects="FALSE"

excludeWindsockObjects="FALSE" />

latitudeMinimum=" 50.7184512470476"

latitudeMaximum=" 50.7214124209482"

longitudeMinimum="-2.0457463772057"

longitudeMaximum="-2.03713684493263"

excludeAllObjects="FALSE"

excludeBeaconObjects="FALSE"

excludeEffectObjects="FALSE"

excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects="TRUE"

excludeGenericBuildingObjects="FALSE"

excludeLibraryObjects="FALSE"

excludeTaxiwaySignObjects="FALSE"

excludeTriggerObjects="FALSE"

excludeWindsockObjects="FALSE" />

 

Thanks again for your assistance, it is greatly appreciated.

 

Regards, Archie

[Jim Robinson]

Hmmm, are you sure you have the Acceleration SDK installed? If you go into Control Panel > Programs & Features do you see specifically "Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Acceleration SDK" listed? I'm grasping at straws here, but if you had a lesser version of the SDK installed, I'm wondering if possibly the SBX installer would detect that and install an appropriate version of bglcomp.xsd rather than the latest one which has provisions for excluding extrusion bridges? I don't know, did you install the SDK 3 times, once from FSX disk1 and twice from the Acceleration disk? You have to install first the RTM SDK from disk 1, then you have to upgrade that to the SP1a SDK from the Accel disk, and finally you have to upgrade to the Accel SDK also from the Acceleration disk. Does that sound like the process you went through?

 

I just checked my SDK-installed copy of bglcomp.xsd and "excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects" is definitely there. I haven't modified anything in my SDK folder, and I also checked a read-only backup of the SDK installation I made about 10 minutes after installing the SDK and excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects is present there too. If you're not finding it in yours it must mean that your SDK is not the most current version, I can't think of any other reason it wouldn't be there. If that's the case I think I'd try bringing the SDK up to date and then reinstalling SBX - hopefully that would convince the SBX installer to install the needed version of bglcomp.xsd. Let us know how that goes, if it doesn't work I'll .zip up my copies and post a link.

 

 

At any rate here is a .bgl I generated from your code:

 

http://www.cat-tamer.com/flightsim/atchmnts/000_Poole_Harbour.zip

 

Jim

[Zoandar]

Obviously there are different revisions of "version 313" since Archie's bglcomp.xsd didn't have provisions for excluding extrusion bridges and mine does. I'm guessing yours does too since the link in post 2 points to the PTSim site. That is the official SBuilder site (and is one of the two download options available from the sticky thread I linked in my last post). The SDK itself (where these tools originally came from) has been through 3 revisions that I know of, I wasn't aware of the "excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects" problem, but I know the original RTM bglcomp had problems with airport boundary fences that were fixed in later revisions of the SDK.

 

Bglcomp.exe, resample.exe, shp2vec.exe, etc are not intrinsically part of the SBuilder program, they were simply bundled with SBX for folks who don't have the SDK installed. They originated from MS as part of the SDK and all of this stuff that we're using SBuilder for can be done by writing code and processing it with the SDK supplied tools. SBX basically is a (brilliant and powerful) graphical interface that ultimately writes the code for us so we don't have to do it manually. When you click the "compile" button, the code is written to an XML document (or an .inf in the case of photoscenery, landclass, etc) and that source XML/.inf is processed through the appropriate SDK supplied tool to produce a .bgl.

 

Jim

 

Saying that I really appreciate the fine tools our predecessors have designed to make scenery creation much easier would be a huge understatement. I imagine if I had to write code to do it I would probably never have undertaken such a project.

 

I wish I knew more about this stuff so I could help, archfer. But perhaps if I better understood what it is you are trying to do, I could look into it and compare our experiences in the attempt. Looking at your post, you mentioned there are no "excludeExtrusionBridgeObjects" in any of your .xsd files. I have all of my utilities relating to FSX installed on an SSD along with FSX, in my PC. So I searched the whole SSD and did not find anything with a name of "extrudeExclusionBridge" either. And when I searched for "*.xsd" I only found 4 listings for bglcomp.xsd and one bglcom9.xsd. It appears whatever you are looking for is not supplied in the FSXA SDK or SBuilderX313 or ADE or RWY12 Object Placer (all of which I have installed).