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FSXA Trying to understand missing autogen :s

kevinfirth

kevinfirth

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unitedkingdom
Hi, sorry if this is in the wrong place, I know this is a commercial product I'm referring to but I'm trying to understand why autogen is being excluded over a large area :S

The answer I had to this from the developer was that there was nothing they could do about it, but no other scenery I've seen had suffered this problem this bad? The airport itself is pretty good I think, but the horrible 2-dimensioned flat tree planes around the airport look terribly amateurish and kill any immersion for me...can anyone shed any light on why this is happening with this scenery and if there is any technical solution please? :s

I've included an screenshot showing the mapping of the missing autogen from Autogen Annotator. The red boxes denote the missing areas of autogen shown in the FSX screenshot. The central largest one corresponds exactly to the boundaries of the airport ground layer, which gave rise to a hypothesis that this photoscenery .bgl is causing that 'knock out' of autogen. The other smaller knocked out region foxed me though.

epscmissingautogen-1.jpg


With the EPSC_Ground.bgl (the main airport ground image) inactive, the autogen referred to above in the smaller box to the top left shows properly, but the main central square is still not showing. So one question answered but not the one I was expecting!

The amended screenshot below shows EPSC without EPSC_Ground.bgl or EPSC_Fence.bgl active. As can be seen from the two shaded elipses, this has brought back a large chunk of the missing autogen. There is still an area missing from the other side of the runway, but it is much smaller than before - this is outlined by the straight red lines.

epscmissingautogen_test.jpg


So I continued disabling bgls to find what's causing the problem on that side of the runway...further investigation reveals:

apronlights.bgl - impacts on autogen
fence.bgl - impacts on autogen
gateFSX.bgl - impacts on autogen
linesFSX.bgl - impacts on autogen
redlights.bgl - impacts on autogen
rwylights.bgl - impacts on autogen
snow_fsx.bgl - impacts on autogen
taxilights.bgl -impacts on autogen

epscmissingautogen_test2.jpg


The image above is with only those bgl's inactive. (+EPSC_ground.bgl) As you can see the autogen now covers exactly what annotator says it should.

I tried to get round some of the problems by creating a new layer in the scenery folder and placing just the extended photoscenery and autogen files in that, above the scenery folder containing the airport itself. What I've discovered is that solves the smaller missing autogen square referred to earlier, but not the larger one. That makes sense partially...I think!

One strange thing was I noticed the developer had annotated both photoscenery bgl's fully, despite them overlapping to some extent around the airport. What would be the point of trying to add autogen to the same place twice? Could that be having any effect?

The airport itself is pretty good I think, but the horrible 2-dimensioned flat tree planes around it,which were placed there to try to mask the missing autogen, look terribly amateurish and kill any immersion for me...can anyone shed any light on why this is happening with this scenery and if there is any technical solution please? :s

Sorry for the long post, and thanks for reading!
Kevin
 
You need to have the appropriate agn files in the texture folder associated with the scenery folder containing the ground image.
 
Thanks George they already are. It is simply the case that the autogen appears or not in the areas marked on the screenshots depending on whether some of the scenery bgl's are active.
 
That probably means that the objects were placed without NoAutogenSuppression or that the ground image is not a photo-scenery bgl created by Resample.

What does the ground image look like in TmfViewer?
 
Missing autogen - ground image in tmfviewer

Here it is...I'm guessing that the problem may lie with the NoAutogenSuppression then? I think my only experience of this is using Instant Scenery 2 to palce custom objects, and there is an option there to allow autogen suppression...is that the same thing at the end of the day or something different?

Cheers
k
 

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kevinfirth said:
...is that the same thing at the end of the day or something different?
Click to expand...

Yes, it is the same thing.

I have just created a simple photo-insert with autogen and it seems to be ok:







However, I didn't create a blend mask so your mask may be limiting the effect of your autogen.

It is more likely that some of your objects may be suppressing autogen.
 
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Thanks George,

I shall play around with it some more, but just to re-iterate, it's a commercial product so I unfortunately do not have access to the source files and models. I can only assume now that the placement of some objects, through the lack of the NoAutogenSuppression flag, is causing the autogen to be eliminated over certain areas. That would potentially explain why the list of bgl's causing missing autogen above each eliminate different areas of autogen. Unless anyone can offer a different explanation of course! :p

Cheers
k
 
Ground polygon's may also suppress autogen if they are not properly made.

On another note. You are using the scenery differently from how it was intended...
The developers choice of fix was just not to your liking.
If you have the time and the will, you could make your own tree models and place them individually for that area as scenery instead of autogen, as a fast and very dirty fix, but that would have an effect on frames.

I am pretty sure that there IS something that could have been done to bring back the autogen. Only thing is, often, it may take months of head banging to figure it out for us developers. Some give up, some fix it another way (like this one) and some do not release until it is fixed.

P.S: May I ask how much this cost?
 
Hi Kevin:

The author Jakub Pączek appears to have updated this scenery package periodically, and the version you have may be different than the DEMO version that I looked at:

http://www.drzewiecki-design.net/prodPAv1_X.htm



However, it appears likely that SCASM code may have been used in creating most of the object BGLs you listed in your OP:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showpost.php?p=574998&postcount=1



Assuming you intended to modify this commercial scenery for use ONLY on your own FS installation: :spushpin:


There are tweaks which can be made to that legacy code which may effectively eliminate the suppression of autogen::idea:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=22764&highlight=NoAutogenSuppresion


http://forum.avsim.net/topic/311168-fs9-autogen-issues/



Such SCASM generated BGLs may be decompiled into SCASM source code via BGLAnalyze version 3.1:

http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID=fs2002sd&DLID=27375


The edited *.SCA file SCASM source code can then be re-compiled via SCASM:

http://www.scasm.de/

http://www.scasm.de/dat/sca296.zip





The <NoAutogenSuppression/> parameter may be edited (ex: via Find and Replace) into the *.XML file BGLComp source code for the "other" non-SCASM object BGLs generated by FSX SDK BGLComp:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19971


[EDITED]

Such FS SDK BGLComp generated BGLs may be decompiled via Scruffyduck's BGL2XML:

http://downloadcenter.scruffyduck.org.uk/ > ScruffyDuck Utilities > BGL2XML > Bgl2Xml Version 1.50


NOTE: This 'current' version of BGL2XML works for reviewing BGLComp XML source code with "most" default and 'some' proprietary scenery objects.

[END_EDIT]


...or via Alessandro Antonini's BGLXML version 2.1:

http://www.fs2000.org/index.php/downloads/doc_details/9077--fsx-bglxml-21\


The edited *.XML file BGLComp source code can then be re-compiled via FSX SDK BGLComp:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526978.aspx



PS: Also, be aware of other possible conflicts with *.XML placed MDL / library objects and/or autogen objects when ex: "light" objects are placed via SCASM:

http://www.simforums.com/forums/ultimate-terrain-usa-can-ak-murders-autogen_topic26191.html




Further searches on these topics at Google and here at FSDeveloper should yield more info. ;)


Hope this helps ! :)

GaryGB
 
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Thanks GaryGB and Mousy, I appreciate you taking the time to reply!

I had considered just placing a lot of trees into the bare areas as a relatively quick and dirty fix, but I was hoping to learn a little about _why_ the issue occured in the first place, and whether it was something that could be worked around, even if the developer hasn't done that yet.

There's a part of me that wonders why I'm even asking these questions, as with a full time job already and a little one on the way, even if I find the holy grail of answers the only benefit it will ever confer on me is to be able to sleep a little better at night! :p

The quest for knowledge continues though, as I absolutely detest not being able to know the answer to a problem I have discovered...

The product in question is Polish airports v2 obviously and I think I paid around 25euros at simmarket iirc.

GaryGB - Yes I have downloaded and installed the latest update I could find, I have v3.1 which is the most recent I believe.
- Thanks for the numerous links, I can see even from a cursory glance that there's a lot to get my head round there, and since DD have come back and said they intend to do an update at some point it may be that I'm wasting my time even trying to learn. I shall have an investigate and then make a judgement as to whether it's something that's worth this particular Alice disappearing down the rabbit hole for and if so how deep!

Cheers
k
 
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