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FSLandClass
for FS2002
by Burkhard Renk

Scenery design has never been so simple

Use your favorite paint program to paint forests, trees and cities into FS2002!

FSLandClass is a tool to create new mesh textures with fitting auto-generated scenery for FS2002. With the full version of the tool you can design new mesh textures and auto-generated scenery in the region covered by the country packs. The demo version is limited to one included area.

Now with:

• Support for transparent Landclass

• predefinitions of replacements of selected classes per tile

• menu driven transitions of US or European like cities

• greener or dryer plains.

The new terrain type of the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 called "Elevated Mesh" is an adequate description of the shape of the earths surface. Microsoft provided terrain tools to create such elevated meshes, programs like FSMESH are available to help in the design of the underlying digital elevation maps (DEMs) and to integrate mesh and scenery. The major point of criticism was that the coverage of the Mesh with textures was fixed, and no viable way existed to change them.

For the major part the world, the coverage supplied by Microsoft was sub optimal, as an example, the airport of Frankfurt was surrounded by city textures, while in reality it is surrounded by forests.
Therefore, there was a great desire to modify the textures, but this turned out not to work. Obviously, the information to place all textures of the world cannot be small. It was by accident that I detected that this was stored in the file ..\scenery\worldlc.bgl. I could verify this by replacing the same file in an early version of FS2002 by the one of FS2000 - the coverage of the mesh immediately looked like the FS2000 one. A suitable file in that directory indeed overwrites the default, so all you have to do is to place such a file there.

It turned out that it is very easy to create such a special form of mesh files. The programs that come with the Terrain SDK do that for you, if you provide them with the suitable data and information files. So some time was needed to find how this works, but if you have the format, than it is almost easy.

You see here the examples of two German cities, Karlsruhe above and Koblenz below. Not as they are in FS2002, there Koblenz does not appear at all. It is like they should be - and how you can produce them with FSLandClass.

FSLandClass is a software system that allows to create and work on class scenery.

 In FS2002, class scenery describes how the mesh is filled. To summarize the scenery model of FS2002:

• Mesh scenery gives the shape of the terrain, plains, hills, mountains. The tool to work on mesh scenery is FSMesh.

• Class scenery fills the terrain with textures, auto generated scenery, behavior on slopes, winter behavior. The tool to work on class scenery is FSLandClass.

• FS2002 river and road scenery type is unknown today, it is of a new mesh type. No tool exists today.

• Procedural scenery ( the one most design was done in up to now) is used only for details of special buildings and airports. The tool to work on procedural scenery for FS2002 is GMAX, provided in the professional version. 

Ready-to-Go THE COUNTRY PACKS

Landclass files can be created from scratch but this is not very effective if you need to cover large areas and want to be 100% realistiic about it. This would be required:

1) Purchase of many digital maps. They all are different, even if they have similar names. Sometimes, meanings of colors change within one map.

2) A lot of image processing and pattern recognition to get the relevant information from the CDs into software. This take CPU months.

3) Compactification of this into an adequate size and combination of different input sources including DEM height data.

4) Easy to use packaging into the LANDCLASS software system.

Therefore it was necessary to create a system that allows to move geographical data from high quality maps into the LANDCLASS software system easily. You copy all the files of the country pack into the directory of LANDCLASS, select File, Read, move to the correct coordinates.

Note: This Country Packs DO NOT require the main FSLandClass program to be used in FS2002! The main program is only required to modify the Ready-to-go Country Packs if so wished or to create new areas.

GO TO COUNTRY PACKS PAGE

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S C R E E N S H O T S

Playa de Palma de Mallorca, Spain

FS2002                                                                                         FS2002 + FSLandClass

Sassnitz, Germany
FS2002                                                                                         FS2002 + FSLandClass

Arnsberg, Germany
FS2002                                                                                         FS2002 + FSLandClass

Brillon, France
FS2002                                                                                FS2002 + FSLandClass      

The User Interface

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