Zoandar

My solution was not quite so elegant. Since resample.exe is small, I simply put a copy of it in every project folder for every area I worked on. All 75 of them. :D But I like your idea better. :) However, it seems to me there was more to it than that, but perhaps I don't remember the details. That was back in October that I set all this up and started the project. Where was it we were told to install the SDK progressively 3 times? I was thinking that was in this tutorial, but it is not. Ah, yes. I remember it now. Please see my post #38. The issue was that the link for the "SDK" at the beginning of this tutorial is in fact NOT a link to the SDK at all. It goes to SP2 for FSX. I found a link at the bottom of THAT page on the MS site that led me to the SDK and where I learned about needing to install 3 versions in succession. If archfer did not have the same realization when he was setting this up, then I'll bet he does not have the SDK installed correctly. Tiberius, could you please fix that link to the SDK way back at the beginning of the tutorial?

I just re-read your post here, and it triggered the memory that, while setting up to do this tutorial, I believe it had me copy certain files from the SDK and put them together with other files in strategic places, and said it would not work if I did not do that. Something else to double-check, that you have all these files where they need to be.

Well, I went back and re-read archfer's posts to clarify what it is he wants to do, then decided to try something similar on my setup. So I opened the last SBX project file I had been working on. I selected the Exclude ( "X" ) tool and drew a rectangle off in the lake somewhere, just so I wouldn't make any mistakes with my own scenery somehow. As soon as I did, it opened the window allowing me to check the Exclude Extrusion Bridges checkbox. Once drawn, I Selected All Excludes, and the rectangle turned green. Then clicked Compile. It created a BGL file instantly in the Scenery folder for the project area. The file started with "000". Not actually wanting this file, I then deleted it and closed SBX without saving the changes. But this shows the process does work on my installation. I definitely DO remember the (seemed like a silly hassle at the time) procedure of having to install the SDK 3 times. So maybe that is where the problem lies for archfer. I agree with Jim's suggestion to try re-running the SDK installation/upgrade procedure and then re-install SBX. It definitely should work. For whatever it is worth, I have a vague recollection of seeing that exact same error about not being able to compile and telling me to run SBX in a DOS window to see the error message. Since I don't know how to run SBX in a DOS window, I never tried it. But all I can recall from that event is that somehow I figured out I had been doing something wrong, and once I got it right the compile worked OK. If all else fails, never hesitate to shut down and restart SBX. Even Tiberius K. mentioned that it is not always stable in the beginning of this tutorial thread. I've had it get ornery on me a few times, and had to restart it. Then it ran OK and did what it was supposed to be doing.

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).

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.

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! :)

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. :)

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?

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

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]

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.

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]

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. :)

I agree. This relates to my mentioning the underlying color for FSX water makes a lot of difference. In that ugly stock Long Point image, FSX rendered the near shore water as "electric blue" due to the silver coloration in the bitmap image. I think you could probably experiment with different shades of color, (I've learned that dark greens seem to work the best to match up with FSX water in other areas - I prefer to paint the water in most of my scenery with 273d2d Hex notation in GIMP (its a dark green) and it gives the colors you see in my second Long Point shot. But you could paint areas of lighter and darker shades and get effect just like the real aerial imagery you can see online for the water in areas like Long Point, Ontario and Erie, Pennsylvania. I left some of the actual satellite image coloration in those areas under the water to help get that effect.

I just did some Googling for AI trains in FSX and read a bunch of discussion which, distilled, comes down to the reason the developers originally intended to have them, then scrapped the idea. They could not get the train to move correctly on a curve. Several forum threads mention people subsequently trying on their own to model one, but always running into this problem. Also, there were rumors that FSX integration would be included in MS Train Simulator when version 2 released, but the killing off of the MS development team caused said version 2 never to be developed. So as nice as the idea seems, I guess it would be really hard to do.

Hey Archfer, what are those clouds coming off the pontoons on your plane?

I have to credit my son, who was home on a Christmas visit, for a lot of the work going into my gradient Blendmask procedure. I was showing him what I had done with the custom scenery, and he asked why there wasn't some way to make the defined edges of the shallow water look less defined. He has some Photoshop experience, so he asked me what went into making the Blendmask and Watermask. Once I showed him how that is done, we tried several methods of getting a gradient, but it was a lot of manual blurring and such. What I wanted was something I could essentially "spray on", with no more than a pass or two, instead of all the recursive brushing we were doing. After some time I arrived at my technique described above. Now and then I do have to give in to hiring someone to do a project here that is beyond our means and skill set. But not often. Never giving up is baked into my constitution. ;) One of the up sides to a lack of patience I have cultivated all my life. There is a difference to me between "patience" and "putting a lot of detail work for hours into a project". For me, patience means waiting for something or someone else to act. I'm not into that. :) One very major aspect in dealing with water masking in FSX, which I learned the hard way, is the importance of an underlying color being right, and being uniform if you want the water to look the same all over the place. All it takes as a terribly off color area like Long Point, Ontario to bring this to light, which was where I made the decision I needed a way out. Here is what it looked like before I started to work on it: [ATTACH=CONFIG]140762[/ATTACH] And here is what it looks like after I worked on it (MANY times over): (zoomed in somewhat) [ATTACH=CONFIG]140763[/ATTACH] This image is one of those I was preparing to post regarding the aforementioned "mystery line" that eventually disappeared on its own. The red arrows are pointing to it. But for this post I am just referring to what some attention to coloration can do. :) It puzzles me that these images come from the satellite servers looking so ugly. Their websites using these images never look this bad. I can't imagine they spend the hours we do putting refinements into each image before they are displayed, especially given they are doing the whole Earth! What's sad is that by default, FSX pretty much treats this beautiful 'sand spit' rich in history and tourism as if it doesn't even exist. I am not doing the entire Ontario shoreline, because I don't fly up there. But when I saw how awful FSX rendered Long Point and Erieau, I just had to do those 2 areas. Long Point has a lot of naval history. There are over 200 shipwrecks there dating back centuries, and it is a very popular dive site. I found it interesting that Erie, PA, which has a very similar attractively colored sand spit with a large basin in the middle of it and lots of shoreline development, is pretty much straight across the lake from Long Point. I wonder if the 2 sites were joined at some point after the lakes were created, and then erosion carved out the middle? Anyway, nice scenery from the air!

@Jim - is this what you had in mind when saying overlaying layers in TMFV could be transparent?ld Archfer, this brings a question to mind. I don't think in all my years of FS I've ever seen an AI train moving on a railroad. Is FSX capable of doing that? I would agree with Jim that I would think default roads and RR would be overlaid with our own custom scenery. And after restoring those FSX terrain CVX files, I now have highway traffic moving along my scenery interstates. I am not sure if they actually follow the same paths as the default scenery interstates, but I haven't yet seen a vehicle off-roading it. ;) How much effort is involved in making traffic move on secondary roads? Based on what you folks have said here, is it just a matter of tracing the desired path on our scenery and then compiling some kind of additional BGL file? I did have an odd thing happen for awhile last night, but before I could finish creating a post here, with screen shots, of what I was seeing it suddenly vanished and I still have no idea what was going on. I was fixing a coloration issue at Long Point, Ontario (fascinating geology there) and suddenly a "dashed line" appeared parallel to the shoreline in my scenery. I actually looked like thick versions of "~ ~ ~ ~ ~" in a black color. At first I thought it was somehow the edge of the area's hydro-poly (remember, most of my scenery was not created with full QMID7 sized hydro-polys because it is not islands, except those in the west end of Lake Erie, which is far smaller than a QMID7 grid area). So I used SBX to move that hydro-poly boundary, but the line remained. Oddly, it was not apparent on the Long Point.bmp base image. I tried a few different things in GIMP and after each re-compile it wad still there. I unloaded my Long Point scenery and found the line to be following a winding line of trees along the shore in the default terrain. Somehow, it was trying to show THROUGH my imagery. I checked in GIMP to assure my bmp image was 100% opaque, and it is. So I set the issue aside to think about it and started gathering the screen shots to post it here. Along the way I found a coloration mismatch I wanted to fix, using tools in GIMP where the three segments of scenery match up to comprise the whole of Long Point (its about 40 km square). As I was fiddling with the opacity of a green overlay on the adjoining segments to get the best match, recompiling each of the 3 segments each time to see them in FSX, suddenly that line disappeared. I still have no idea why it ever showed through in the first place. So I did not bother posting about it. But your comment on the railroad reminded me of that event. What could cause something like that to "bleed through" opaque custom scenery to the surface and be visible?

Tiberius K. in the flesh! At last we meet. I thought you had moved on to that great flight sim in the sky. Um....wait....that's what we're doing here, isn't it?? lol I want to thank you profusely!! It was literally decades I used most of the evolving versions of MSFS and dreamed of having scenery actually look even vauguely like my part of the world, and found it very disappointing it did not. When at long last I found an online vendor willing to make and sell Ohio scenery I was ecstatic! Finally!! Imagine my disappointment then, when what I bought had a large percentage of the lakeshore waters completely NOT water but a very ugly photo imagery. And the vendor gave up when trying to implement some sort of fix for it, and later went out of business. Every time I flew I was staring at that ugly lakeshore, dreaming of SOME way to come along to fix it. When I could stand no more I started researching how this might be addressed by any means possible. I bought addons that were supposed to make water more realistic. But since it isn't water, they did not work (not knowing anything at all about FSX scenery at the time I had hoped FSX could use the utility addon to "fix it". That did nothing). Eventually I started looking for some way to "work with FSX water scenery", and after some Googling I was led to this nifty tutorial. You've opened a barrel of dreams for me here, and I really do thank you for it! You've also kind of created a monster. lol Well, you and GIMP, which had also been unfamiliar to me. The further I go the more I learn, and I find myself literally circle touring Lake Erie around and around again applying newly learned fixes to improve the appearance of my scenery more and more. But I enjoy doing this so at least I'm a happy monster. :) I'm currently adding all the little marinas along the lake shore to the watermask, rather than having static water coloring in them. On the subject of clouds and satellite image coloration, I've only very rarely seen a single cloud in the imagery for my entire project, which is mind boggling because we get a lot of overcast weather here in Ohio. I was led to believe these satellites must deliberately only photograph areas with no clouds on any given day. Of course the clouds were in Canada, where all my lousy scenery coloration has seemed to be. I don't understand why. Anyway, glad to meet you! And did I say THANKS? :)

Hi Jim, Yes, I'm using the version of TMFViewer that came in the FSXA SDK, but I think after reading your clarification I know why my experiences are different. I never actually "open" or run TMFViewer as an application. At least not since the very first time it was mentioned in this tutorial. I set Windows 7 file association for bgl files to open with TMFViewer so it was quick and easy to look at a BGL file by just clicking on it. My primary reason for ever doing so up to this point has been more a matter of making sure I know where I am in reference to the overlapping boundaries of adjacent scenery files, of which I have a bunch. I learned the hard way that editing a feature right on the very edge of a segment usually means also having to edit it the same way in the adjoining segment, such as coloring a river or harbor that spans the 2 segments. Otherwise they won't match up right in appearance. Also to see the shape of a segment's hydro-poly without having to fire up SBX. All these other nifty things you've pointed out TMFViewer can do are new to me. I'll try opening it and dragging the files onto it instead, to see how that works. Thanks for the clarification. I agree a lot of these procedures sound like greek the first time I read them. :) I felt the same way when I was told on the GIMP forum how to constrain the fuzzy select tool using a Channel. Sounded really complex to me until I actually did it a few times. It is actually child's play and works really well! I am using the technique to revisit marinas around the lake shore and some of the rivers, to add them into the watermask of their segment, so that instead of being a static colored area they actually have FSX water effect in between the boats and piers. It sure looks much nicer, and would take forever to trace by hand. Although I did the entire tutorial at Nauru, including the shoreline wave effects to learn how that works, I don't generally apply them to the scenery I am doing along Lake Erie's shores. The waves look nice against the large beaches of a tropical island, but the beaches up this way are for the most part pretty narrow, and often non-existent. And since I've had no luck in trying to exceed LOD15 when capturing scenery here, I generally fly at least 2500 ft. AGL to get a decent appearance, so I wouldn't be noticing beach wave action much anyway. If leaving them out contributes to a few more FPS I'll take that instead. :)

If we are going to not remove the terrain CVX files, then I am not sure if it will have much impact on how default terrain will peek through compared to the segment in this tutorial on using SBX, creating the hydro-poly, drawing the poly to create the "hole", etc. I would not know how that will pan out until I would try re-doing an island like Nauru and NOT remove the CVX file at the beginning of the process, and then work through it to see what problems popped up. I can say that, aside from the mystery terrain that showed up in the Muddy Creek area in my recent posts, I am going around looking at things elsewhere and not finding any problems so far. I'm also researching where to find a good tutorial on TMFViewer, as Jim's information makes it seem to be a very valuable troubleshooting tool, but at this point I don't have a clue how all that works. :) In your case of this island, yes, I think I would probably proceed with using Exclusion polys in SBX to handle unwanted terrain showing up. But maybe someone else will chime in with other suggestions. In the step where Tiberius has you "Press H" to get the typical water type for the polygon, there is a very long list in there of many kinds of things, including several types of exclusion types. Hopefully that will get you where you need to go. Never hurts to experiment. :) just keep backup copies of any files you spent a lot of time to create. You can always go back to them if needed.

Thank you! Ανυπομονώ για μια αγγλική μετάφραση κάποια μέρα. :) For the part I understood (in the edit at the end ;) ), each bgl file I open with TMFViewer opens a new window. How do I tell the utility I want it to add them in layered fashion? This will take some study, but it sounds like a valuable way to find a problem. Do you happen to know of a good tutorial on using TMFViewer? Thanks for the kind words. I have spent a lifetime troubleshooting and usually fixing a great many things about which I actually know very little. Many of them would require years of college degrees to be considered "proficient" or "an expert" enough that someone would expect such repair capabilities from a person. I didn't have that kind of time to devote to most of them, because they were time critical to get them working again. FSX is an exception, I admit. And good product design results in an intuitive function, making troubleshooting easier. Sadly, a very nearly deceased art among design engineers. And an extreme rarity in software design. I got lucky, in short. I pride myself on the ability to distill a problem to its essential cause, and then deal with that. Saves on the reading. :) And flying is more fun than reading. ;) What's a Vector in FSX scenery? lol

Thinking this over, I decided to "divide and conquer". :) I have removed all three of the Muddy Creek 2 (which I named MCK2 for simplicity), Muddy Creek, and Marblehead segments from their list in the Scenery Library at locations, 90, 91, and 94 respectively. I will add them back in one by one, to try to see which one causes the rectangle of unwanted land to appear. This is just Marblehead, with the other 2 still not loaded. It is not causing the rectangle. So likely explains why using an SBX exclusion poly in the Marblehead segment did not work right. But it also shows something else interesting. [ATTACH=CONFIG]140689[/ATTACH] That 'snake' of unwanted scenery I had to exclude, mentioned above, is actually a fictitious river created in this area by FSX in its default scenery. There is an Exclude_All_Streams type in the SBX polygon list. Now's the time to see if that's meant for this kind of issue. I opened the MCK2 SBX Project file and redefined the exclusion poly as _Streams instead of All_Terrain. If it works when I load MCK2 next, I'll have learned something. :) Most of the time when I am stumped it is simply because I don't have a key piece of information. :) Next I loaded the MCK2 segment in the Scenery Library. Ah! The 'snake' (stream) is now gone! :) And still no rectangle. [ATTACH=CONFIG]140690[/ATTACH] Now to load Muddy Creek. And, just as I had hoped, by moving these 3 segments up to the top of the Scenery pecking order, the 'mystery land' is now abolished! :)) [ATTACH=CONFIG]140691[/ATTACH] Now I get to make another flight around the area to look for any other problems, but it appears that this area, at least, is now OK. :)

This is crazy! I start with this: [ATTACH=CONFIG]140687[/ATTACH] I add an Exclude_All_Terrain poly to this area to see if it will help: [ATTACH=CONFIG]140685[/ATTACH] And it actually causes MORE default terrain to show!!?? [ATTACH=CONFIG]140686[/ATTACH] This makes no sense to me at all! I'm completely baffled here. (But persistence will prevail. Read on.) ;)

Replacing the CVX2517 and 2617 files I had pulled out of folder 0302, and then using SBuilderX313 to draw Exclude_All_Shorelines polygons covering both those QMD7 sized areas did indeed remove the lines I had seen in the water along various shoreline areas. BUT...... (As I say.............) Now it seems to be causing some other problems that I am not having much success in correcting. This area is at the root of the Marblehead Peninsula in Ohio, and is referred to as the Muddy Creek area. This is before any editing at all, directly from Virtual Earth servers. [ATTACH=CONFIG]140682[/ATTACH] Here is what I now see in FSX, with the underlying CVX2517.BGL file restored. This "snake" in the water only appeared AFTER restoring the CVX file. It was not there before. [ATTACH=CONFIG]140683[/ATTACH] I can make it disappear by using an Exclude_All_Terrain polygon in that area. But when I do so, I get s piece of default terrain suddenly appearing in the water just north of this area : [ATTACH=CONFIG]140684[/ATTACH] If I try to use the same kind of exclusion poly to make that go away, it has no effect whatsoever. I do not know what to do here. This is at the 3 corners of meeting segments of my scenery, so it may prove to be an "overlap issue" I have seen before with coloration, where making a change doesn't work unless you make exactly the same color change on the edges of BOTH meeting segments. I am still experimenting to try to fix this. Any suggestions are welcome!! :) Aside from this problem, everywhere else along the Lake Erie Shoreline in Ohio, Michigan, PA, and part of Canada across the water all look OK having restored those CVX files.