Selecting textures with LWMViewer for LC

[JSMR]

I've been using the program for some custom made LC around some airports in fs9. Trying to match a little bit more the area - town/city/forest/fields etc - with the textures I have available. But I noticed when selecting textures I can use, not all textures in my World/texture folder are available when using the Landclass Editing (F4) box.

Is there anyway that I can use all my available textures? I've even heard that you can add more textures into the Texture folder and if renumbered to not overwrite other textures, even they can be used. Can anyone confirm this as well?

 

Any help appreciated.

Jon.

[Jim Robinson]

How do you know LWMViewer isn't using all the textures? What textures isn't it allowing you to use?

 

IIRC LWMViewer would allow you to place a custom texture at a given location but I think all it did was make a photoreal .bgl independent of the LC .bgl and your custom textures had to be named according to whatever the texture name for the given cell was, i.e. 001222322222122Su.bmp, 001222322222132Su.bmp, etc. To obtain the texture name you could slew over the area in the sim and use Tcalc 2004 to report that, maybe the name was available in LWMViewer too, I can't remember. IMHO it was much easier to just obtain a chunk of actual imagery and use resample.exe to sort out the filenames and generate the photoreal .bgl than it was to do it with LWMViewer.

 

Lots of info on the LC system in the FS9 Terrain SDK which you can download from the "resources" section over at fsdeveloper.

[JSMR]

I have in my scenery/texture folder particular fields that are used in England mostly. I haven't seen these at all in the pull down list in the Landclass Editing box. Also I added from VOZ some mangrove textures replacing the previous textures but these also aren't available to use.

I noticed that many textures are repeated in the list, such as the desert options under Bare or in the Field list.

 

For some reason it doesn't seem to populate the list with all available textures in my scenery/texture folder. Perhaps I've missed a step somewhere. I'll check out the info in the Terrain SDK.

 

Thanks.

[Jim Robinson]

In the terrain SDK is a document named "TerrainTextureNames.doc" which tells you which textures get used with a given landclass, for example if you use "Medium City Urban Non Grid Wet" that's texture #35 which means any of the following textures would be randomly used:

 

035b2su1.bmp

035b2su2.bmp

035b2su3.bmp

035b2su4.bmp

035b2su5.bmp

035B2Su6.bmp

035B2Su7.bmp

 

(and of course their sp, fa, wi, and hw variations)

 

The "b" is a region code, so theroetically 035b2Su*.bmp would be used for that LC value in N. America while in europe the texture should be 035a2Su*.bmp. I've found MS shorted that process a little though, "b" must be a fallback that's used wherever a region specific texture wasn't applied, there isn't a 035a2Su*.bmp so europe uses the same texture for "Medium City Urban Non Grid Wet" that NA does. IIRC I've tried adding an "a" variation to some which were missing and they were ignored so I'm not sure if adding custom textures actually works.

[JSMR]

Ah ok. I was trying to create some LC for certain areas of Australia. So various textures aren't available in that region I gather even for a landclass. I noticed those fields etc are available when I moved to England of course.

Ok, that explains it. I have a texture folder that I'm doing just for Australia so I may have to do a bit of renumbering of some to swap out the textures that don't fit.

 

Thanks for the help.

[Jim Robinson]

I think it is possible to make a small regions modification .bgl where for example you could declare part of AU "Europe" to make the sim use the textures you see in England. The regions classifications are stored in Scenery\BASE\Scenery\regions.bgl BTW, you can open that with TMFViewer and jump to your lat/lon to check it out if need be for any reason. I think your method of just renaming the textures is a cleaner approach though when you're working inside your own custom LC/texture folder.

[JSMR]

Ok cool thanks.