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Island not showing on FSX map


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Something I've always wanted to try is attempt to move an island from one part of the world to another. Your last thread triggered me and I've since successfully moved an island off the coast of Maine into the Pacific off the coast of Oregon, lol. I moved mesh, photoreal, and hydro-polys/shorelines by shifting the coordinates in all the source files. (I guess technically I didn't "move it", the island's still there in Maine, so maybe "copied it" might be better terminology) At any rate now I have a little "fantasy island" about 100nm out from Portland, it actually came out pretty nice and I had a lot of fun doing it. :)

 

...but mine doesn't show up on the map either and I don't know how to fix it! I tried GPS_Hydro_polys and I couldn't see where it did anything at all. I think you could use them to make a lake show up on a land mass but not a land mass in the middle of a 'lake' such as the Pacific, lol. I was almost sure the mesh would make it show up but nope. I don't know what files are responsible for the map displays in the sim and I don't know if ie the flight planner map is the same as the map in the GPS with terrain on? Hopefully someone comes along and tells us what we need to do. :)

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Problem with that theory is I never had ADE fired up even one time for the whole island project. :) I downloaded elevation data from the national map server, reprojected it to WGS84 and wrote an .inf based on the coords in the DEM download, then I fudged them 0.9756747614394° North and -57.6432941679687° West. Same with the photoreal and a thousand-ish points of my vector hydro polys and shorelines which I'd already made for the island in question back in 2013.

 

I'm wondering if the FS map background is fixed, like a .bmp texture or something? Maybe the only way to make your island show up in the map is to find that .bmp or whatever and edit it in photoshop so it shows up?

 

I'm not losing a lot of sleep over it TBH. :)

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Problem with that theory is I never had ADE fired up even one time for the whole island project.

 

And you never had to either. I'm just thinking that there needs to be some kind of ground poly applied to the island for it to show up, and ADE probably could do that. I've never did it before so not sure how. ADE has an awful lot of tools to use and I only use maybe 45% of them.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

A while back I did some test flights comparing freemeshx active with inactive. (selected with diabled in scenery library I mean.)

 

I remember I mostly checked for differences in the GPS. And the difference was very clear. Much more detail with freemeshx installed. (activated in library.)

 

I can't remember if I checked for a difference in the Map as well.

 

Does your island show up on the GPS but not on the Map? Or does it not show on either of the two?

 

I'm not sure if you added mesh to your island.

 

But JimRobinson, you said you did create mesh. Same question to you, does it show on the GPS? Or not there either?

 

Reason I ask is the rule: "For mesh library position is not important. If more then one mesh is installed then of all meshes covering a region the most detailed one will always be displayed.

(so if your island-mesh is less detailed then for example your also installed OrbX mesh, you won't see the island mesh. It will be overridden by the OrbX mesh.)

 

Good luck. I'll go see if I can dig up the thread when testing FreeMeshX to see if it has map-screenshots.

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Hey mate. :) Yes I did make mesh. It was weird, at first I couldn't actually land on the island, it bounced me off as if I was landing on water. Later I added some landclass for an unrelated reason and suddenly I could land. Nope, the island doesn't show in the FSX map nor the GPS. I dunno what the h*ll's going on, lol.
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Reason I ask is the rule: "For mesh library position is not important. If more then one mesh is installed then of all meshes covering a region the most detailed one will always be displayed.

(so if your island-mesh is less detailed then for example your also installed OrbX mesh, you won't see the island mesh. It will be overridden by the OrbX mesh.)

 

Just finally got around to checking this out. Firstly my mesh is about 100 nm off the coast of Oregon, pulling my mesh and Orbx's PNW mesh into TMFViewer there's no overlap of coverage. Secondly my mesh is LOD14 while theirs is LOD12 so mine should trump theirs even if there was an overlap. Also checked my mesh against the default mesh for the area and there's no overlap there either.

 

I did notice the BNXWorld*.bgls in the Scenery/World/Scenery folder so I decompiled one of them out of curiousity and found it to be "Geopol data" (geo-political boundaries) so I did up a quick and dirty BNX_fantasy_island.bgl using the vertices I already had from shifting the shorelines. Now there's actually and outline of my island both on the GPS and the sim map:

 

fantasy_island01.jpg

 

Better than nothing I guess but still no mesh/terrain showing up.

 

The BNXWorld bgls decompiled to "COASTLINE" as the geopol data type, I tried to do the same but bglcomp errored telling me I had to use "Coastline" or "Boundary" so I tried "Coastline" and got the same error. Then I tried "BOUNDARY" and it compiled without error so I dunno if things would be any different if I were allowed to use "COASTLINE" as the geopol data type. There's just a tiny little blurb on Geopol boundaries in the SDK, doesn't really tell you what they do or how/why you'd use them. I thought maybe this would be the key to telling the sim that this was "land" and it should therefore be displayed on the map but I guess not. Puzzling, lol.

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Sounds like progress:D, (if only small perhaps).

 

I can follow what you are saying. Just never did any of that myself.

 

I'll try googling the subject.

In the mean time, one suggestion. How's about opening that file with BOUNDARY you compiled successfully. Then recompiling that, this time with COASTLINE. (My thinking there is: maybe it needed boundarys defined before those boundaries can be defined as COASTLINE type.)??!

Edited by il88pp
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How's about opening that file with BOUNDARY you compiled successfully. Then recompiling that, this time with COASTLINE. (My thinking there is: maybe it needed boundarys defined before those boundaries can be defined as COASTLINE type.)??!

 

 

I actually did get it to compile a while later with COASTLINE using the P3D version of bglcomp but then I didn't see anything on the map at all, lol. (and that was in P3D so not an issue with trying to use a P3D .bgl in FSX) It was an easy enough test to duplicate all my "BOUNDARY" vertices and assign them "COASTLINE" however so I tried that which put both in the .bgl, but nope that didn't help either.

 

I did a little searching though and Dick Ludowise had this to say:

 

I had looked at the GPS polys and they can be excluded and redrawn.

 

But the problem is the Garmin GPS gauges don't use them! The GPS units appear to read the terrain waterpolys. This applies to the map view as well.

 

So it appears the GPS Hydropolys are useless.

 

So I don't know where that leaves us because there's definitely a terrain waterpoly there with a hole in it for the island.

 

I've gone as far as decompiling the default cvx1415.BGL, setting my Island as a hole in both the hydro polys and the GPS hydro polys and recompiling, replacing the default cvx1415.BGL with my modified one. I oppose anything that involves modifying default files so I don't see this as an acceptable solution even if it had worked, but this was a test that I can easily undo, I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this.

 

I tried moving my mesh file into the 0101\scenery folder and even renamed it "dem0101.bgl" while disabling the default dem0101.bgl.

 

My conclusion is officially: Damifino! :)

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