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Can Trees be Removed from Autogen?

H

haegri

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10
Country
unitedkingdom
Hi.
I'm trying to alter the landclass of Shetland, in the North of Scotland, where I come from, where there are virtually (and really!) no trees. I've blanketed the whole islands with a suitable background landclass, with the idea of adding in the various settlements as landclass polys (using, at the moment, FSK KLM.) Unfortunately, all of the suitable landclasses for villages (such as the medium city set) seem to have trees - it doesn't seem to be possible to get houses without trees along with them.

I thought I'd get around this by editing the fsx.cfg file each time I flew in this area. Unfortunately, although adding TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=0
removes all the houses, adding
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=0
(or with a small number instead of zero) does not seem to remove all the trees!?

I've also looked at the various configuration files, but while some have the option for turning off autogen as a whole for some landclasses, there doesn't seem to be an option to separate out trees.

Ideally, what I'd like to do would be to create a new set of landclasses with names like the default ones but with 'treeless' as an option instead of 'wet' or 'dry', by using the existing ones as a template, removing the trees from them, and saving them under the new name. However, much googling has not produced an answer as to whether this is possible or not, and before I start experimenting with SbuilderX, Autogen Annotator and other parts of the SDK, I thought I'd ask whether this is possible, and if not, what other options there might be for removing trees from autogen in a specific area.
 
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You won't need to create a new landclass, you can just reannotate the autogen for the landclass you want to change, and put the agns in your newlandclass\texture folder.
 
Right, thanks. I'll do some experimenting before I ask any more questions!

BTW - having established that setting trees to zero doesn't work, I tried replacing the tree textures (in the main texture folder) by files with both the image and the alpha blanked out. Even after a system restart the sim still showed trees!
 
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Hello:

FSX has default tree textures in both these folders:

[FSX install path]\Texture\

...and:

[FSX install path]\Scenery\Global\Texture\


Hope this helps ! :)

GaryGB
 
Hello:

Open all seasonal versions of the tree texture files in FSX SDK ImageTool.exe and be sure any edited copy (make a ZIP backup first) matches the original parameters (aside from eliminating the tree image itself).

Be sure to include the same count of MIPs, as FSX will still be rendering the objects.

These can then be swapped out with the original tree texture files via a batch file before loading FSX when you wish to fly in an area that normally would have trees as autogen.


Hope this works for you ! :)

GaryGB
 
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Thanks GaryGB, that'll do nicely as a workaround. If I can't sort out the reannotation thing, I'll maybe get round to replacing the trees with garden gnomes!

@toprob - do I take you to mean that if I create a new .agn file for a default landclass and put that in the texture folder for my addon scenery, that FSX will read that in preference to the default .agn when it loads the landclass for that scenery?
 
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Place the copy of the landclass textures, plus the new treeless AGN files in the LOCAL texture folder, and a new landclass BGL into the LOCAL scenery folder... that should apply the new AGN.

You could make a transparent photoreal, and apply autogen over that, and it would over-ride the default landclass AGN, but for a large area, that wouldn't work well.

Dick
 
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