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Placing Dots on FSX Scenery

M

moish

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2
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israel
Hello,

I'm not a scenery developer and never created a scenery. I have a Google Earth KML file which I created with Google Earth by placing pins with about 100 locations on a map. From this file I would like to create a BGL file that will put small red dots on the FSX scenery, so they can be easily identified from the air while flying with FSX. This kind of file, when installed on top of the scenery, will assist pilots learn where to find these locations.

Can anyone please explain or refer me to an explanation of how to create it step by step?

Appreciate your support!
 
moish said:
Hello,

I'm not a scenery developer and never created a scenery. I have a Google Earth KML file which I created with Google Earth by placing pins with about 100 locations on a map. From this file I would like to create a BGL file that will put small red dots on the FSX scenery, so they can be easily identified from the air while flying with FSX. This kind of file, when installed on top of the scenery, will assist pilots learn where to find these locations.

Can anyone please explain or refer me to an explanation of how to create it step by step?

Appreciate your support!
Click to expand...

Sorry to put a huge brick wall in front of you but such thing will not ever assist pilots to learn where to find these locations, they know how to find locations by VORs, ADFs etc and FMC where they can enter a lat/lon, not by looking for huge red tear drop shaped icons...

But if you really want to do it, you can't, it's that simple. You could however make your own 3D blip and place it using MCX...but I think the idea would totally be defeating the purpose of having a flight SIMULATOR.
 
If you really wanted dots on the ground you could make a small photoreal for each location with SBuilderX, place your dot on the source imagery with photoshop, blend mask everything else out, compile, and place in an active scenery folder. Probably take you about 10 min per spot once you got the ball rolling.

That said, I think it would be easier, quicker, and more visible if you made some kind of 3D marker object (a giant google earth push-pin would be pretty cute, lol :) ) and placed them as any other scenery object. You could pretty easily convert your google earth .kml into an XML placement script, compile it with bglcomp, done deal.

Sounds like a fun project to me actually.

Jim
 
Could be accomplished using SBuilderX and making those old style textured polygons, with a nice BRIGHT RED texture! Once you've placed the first dot it's a simple copy and paste to put in more.
 
I'm sure you'd be able to do something similar with FSX's Mission engine... however I've not meddled much with it though.
 
Thank you all! Actually these locations are VFR reporting locations so no IFR assistance will help learning them. I was looking at the NL2000 "Education" layer and wanted to make something like that... So I'll look at your advices and see how to progress. Thanks again.
 
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