NZFF

I was at Matarangi yesterday and realised there was an airfield there- when I got back home today I visited it on flight simulator and realised that even the RBE updated landclass does not represent the beautiful area realistically at all.

Here is a topdown view vs. google earth comparison:


What I want to know is if it is possible to modify landclass at all with out making the terrain texture photorealistic- ie, just adding a beach and streets (red in colour if possible) next to the airfield- and remove the duplicate runways that are visable (one is an AFCAD and one is the RBE topo addon strip, slightly to the east)

Cheers

Yes it is possible to change land class, the challenge is the way its set up in FS. Basically you are limited to squares, cant remember the exact size but they are reasnobly large, 1 sq km or something like that, so while you can change things it effects a fairly large area. From the pics it might be possible to get quite a good result given it does cover a reasnoble area.

Others with more knowledge and experience with this than I will no doubt be able to shed further light.

Personally I don't know to much about land classes, but I have been holidaying at Matarangi all my life and would love to see a better land class for it.

As far as I know there are two ways...one is for bulk updating for large areas, the other is for smaller areas

The first is the way the globes landclass is defined and these are the 1.2km (?) squares that JonARNZ referred to....these are OK for large areas but arent very accurate.

The other is to define a polygon and use the shapefile to Vec conversion tool- You then define the GUID of the texture in the attribute table of the shapefile and it should draw those areas as the new landclass. This is good for adding smaller features like golf courses, irregular shaped areas of settlement etc...

Ive yet to actually try this as im going to go the photoreal way for my scenery but that is what i think the SDK documents tell me

Thanks for the info Timmo, where is this 'Vec conversion tool' available, and how to do actually save it into your sim?

Do you have to hand draw everything or is there a libary or textures you can mix and match?

In VOZ 1.1, they included a nice big landclass defined beach on Hinchbrook Island- I was wondering if the same could be done for 90 mile beach (as well as Matarangi)?

Its in the SDK: Installpath....\SDK\Environment Kit\Terrain SDK\Shp2Vec.exe

Unfortunately...you will need to find a shapefile creation tool...i work with Shapefiles everyday so no worries for me but i suspect you may find it hard to actually create a shapefile polygon?.....(i.e. The software i use to create them costs tens of thousands of dollars PER LICENSE!)...
There may be some free tools on the web though...or there may be an alternate way of creating polygon areas....

It might be possible to create areas using the autogen annotation tool

Oops- I just realised i was assuming you were using FSX? I dont think those tools are avaliable in the Fs9 SDK

EDIT- Have a look on Avsim- there is a new version of EZ Landclass which allows this kinda thing in FSX and FS9