FSXA Waterclass in ADE

[FlyingAxx]

At the moment I'm working on quite a lot of airports located on Pacific Islands. It just took me a couple minutes per try to find out that MS had been quite sloppy regarding their locations, shapes and even the spot in relation to the realised coastlines where the airport should be. In some cases it had been only necessary to shift the airfield a bit but sometimes the whole arrangement should be reworked as in reality the islands should have beautiful lagoons with bright blue water, sandy coastlines, reefs around the islands etc.

It might be that there are better tools for designing sceneries than ADE, but, is there any chance to get a better selection of waterclass parameters in the future, allowing to design such features in the vicinity of an airport?

MS's SDK tells me about definitions like:

• Shallow Ocean Water 1: 0-5m
• Shallow Ocean Water 2: 6-15m
• Shallow Ocean Water 3: 16-30m
• Shallow Ocean Water 4: 31-50m
• Medium Depth Ocean Water: 51-80m
• Deep Ocean Water: >80m

and later on it says:

13 - Shallow Ocean Water 1 - Class1 (High Plankton Concentration)
<...>
37 - Shallow Ocean Water 1 - Class1 (High Plankton Concentration), Tropical
<...>​

... and so forth, however, I have no idea whether there is any tool to make use of such differentiation - ADEX definitely not. To make it short: Is it only the file "worldwc.bgl" that defines the water colour of each place? If not I would be highly interested to learn how to tackle the above mentioned problems to picture difficult environments like tropical islands. Up to now I didn't find the right access to SBuilder X, but if this tool provides the key for solving those problems I'm prepared to lock me in for a couple of days in order to learn how to handle it.

Finally: Probably I just overlooked it while searching, but, what I didn't find in the SDK was the Waterclass "Non Perennial Ocean" which is offered by ADEX. If it is coupled with tidal effects it could be valuable close to islands, too. Nonetheless, I'm not even sure which effects I could expect when using non-perennial features (where ever). In the context of features described for the terrain.cfg it seems to be rather a matter of seasons.

Any advice?
If it is possible to get access to the described features, is there hope for future versions of ADE (sometimes the water is really close to airports )?

 

[JRobinson]

I think what you're seeing in ADE is the ability to create hydro polys and what you're seeing in the SDK documentation are waterclass values. Hydro polys don't have a color, they are just flat wet things used to turn land into water and the water color is defined by the waterclass. Hydro polys are considered vector objects and are compiled with shp2vec where waterclass is a raster object like photoreal and is compiled with resample.exe. Two completely different things in other words.

You'll need SBuilderX to make waterclass but it really couldn't be simpler. You can make a small waterclass around your islands of any size or shape, in SBX you just use the waterclass tool to click in some squares around the shorelines for example and those will override worldwc.bgl only in the areas you've changed, outside of that area the WC is transparent so the effects of worldwc.bgl will show through. The finished .bgl will need to be in a scenery layer above worldwc.bgl obviously.

Just go to the area in the sim that you want to change, then in SBX choose View > show aircraft from the menu (requires FSUIPC). Zoom in to zoom level 10 or so with the mousewheel and click View > show background. This will download some google imagery that you can use as a guide (if google doesn't work do Edit > preferences and choose virtual earth satellite instead). Pick the waterclass tool and select a waterclass value from the list, then just start clicking in some squares around the islands. It's no problem if they overlap land, they won't turn land into water, they'll just color the water up to the shoreline and stop. Do File > Properties and select a folder to output your .bgl to and then save the project so you can open it back up and try another waterclass value when you decide the first one you tried wasn't what you wanted . Do Select > all water tiles and then hit the green button on the right with the arrow, put a check in "copy .bgls to BGL folder and hit the compile button. Start the sim and have a look.

Jim

 

[jvile]

Jim

Very good

I don't think I have ever seen it explained that well. I need to mark this post for future reference when working with the water.

 

[scruffyduck]

Let me second that Thanks Jim R.

 

[FlyingAxx]

I think what you're seeing in ADE is the ability to create hydro polys and what you're seeing in the SDK documentation are waterclass values. Hydro polys don't have a color, they are just flat wet things used to turn land into water and the water color is defined by the waterclass. Hydro polys are considered vector objects and are compiled with shp2vec where waterclass is a raster object like photoreal and is compiled with resample.exe. Two completely different things in other words.

Thanks Jim,

That's really clear. After looking again into the ADE polygon selection I have to admit that it was my own wishful thinking just leading me to add "class" to the menu topic "Water" like it is in "Landclass" mentioned in the selection before. But, it was indeed my own insufficient knowledge leading to such deductions. This means, unless otherwise defined by add-ons I only can see what is given by worldwc.bgl.

You'll need SBuilderX to make waterclass but it really couldn't be simpler. You can make a small waterclass around your islands of any size or shape, in SBX you just use the waterclass tool to click in some squares around the shorelines for example and those will override worldwc.bgl only in the areas you've changed, outside of that area the WC is transparent so the effects of worldwc.bgl will show through. The finished .bgl will need to be in a scenery layer above worldwc.bgl obviously.

This induces other questions: Does this mean that some features are "triggered" by the type of water polygons? And what is responsible for the presence of water in case of the "non perennial" attribute, is it just a seasonal effect or does it include ocean tides, too?

Regarding your "how to" explanation: It's not only clear, it really looks simple enough to encourage me to fire up SBX in a couple of minutes, thanks again Jim.

EDIT: Everything worked nice - except Google Satellite (Street Maps is useless but works). VirtualEarth only gives back a relatively low resolution and Yahoo gives back nothing, too (35 tiles are indicated and nothing happens). When looking into Google Maps directly I can just zoom in to read the local paper's headlines . BTW, I tried it out with NTKH, Fakahina (French Polynesia).

EDIT 2: @Jim Vile: You're right, it's worth to be shifted to the tutorials.

 

[JRobinson]

Wow thanks guys, I'm not worthy .

Axel, I haven't seen where there's any difference at all between the types of hydro polys, if you look in the terrain.cfg there are several different types defined but the only difference between them is the GUID and the name. My guess is MS must have reserved some extra functionality that didn't materialize by making the different types available, I'm really not sure.

I don't know of any tidal effects but there is the surf effect, the water crashing onto the shore. That effect is actually tied to the shorelines, you can search the terrain.cfg for "Effect=wavecontroller" to see the available shoreline types with the surf effect attached to them. Some of those seem redundant as well, I believe if you make a vector line in ADE and tag it "Ocean" it will have the wave effect. In SBuilderX it would be "Shorelines_Generic_Ocean".

Note also that "landclass" can be a bit confusing as there are two types of landclass, there are landclass polys which are vector objects and what you see in ADE, then there is also a resampled landclass which is very much like waterclass, the latter is more for wide area usage and not nearly as precise.

Jim

 

[JRobinson]

EDIT: Everything worked nice - except Google Satellite (Street Maps is useless but works).

Most likely you need to update GoogleServer.dll which is located in the SBuilderX314\Tiles folder. Google changes filenames or something on the server which makes it necessary to update the .dll periodically, the latest .dll is always available in the last post of this thread:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/new-googleserver-dll.19913/page-2#post-677209

Jim

 

[FlyingAxx]

That's it, thanks again Jim.

EDIT (hours later): Jim, it's worth another feedback. You definitely ripped the wall down hindering me to work with SBuilderX. The original task was done in a couple of minutes and now the fog disappeared. My next project was a quite complex one, redrawing a complete island including shorelines, applying LC-polygons and finally (done with ADEX), pushing the airport into the correct position and extending it according to the papers.

The result is documented with the enclosed pic:

 

[FlyingAxx]

Wow thanks guys, I'm not worthy .
<snip>
Jim

Jim, you are, I have to say it again.
Meanwhile I made the first photo scenery of such a (MS) forgotten island, including of course an ADE corrected airport, and autogen trees. I've learned a lot during the last days and I have to declare you guilty!

There had been a lot of trial and error but finally I'm quite satisfied. The really annoying work had been producing the watermask (I used GIMP2). Probably I should have used a vector layer instead of a pure paintjob.

However, I'm wondering about the SDK Annotator tool producing a whole bunch of files, even if I placed two different types of autogen objects only (the buildings are done with ADE). Is this normal or is there even a better tool?

 

[ollyau]

The AGN files are location dependent. A new AGN file will be made for each LOD13 cell that you annotate, regardless of the amount or types of objects you use. As far as other tools, there's AgenT (FS9), Autotrees (FS9), VogelTree (FSX), and scenProc (FSX), which all offer automation to one degree or another.

 

[JRobinson]

Right on Axel, it looks great and I'm glad you're getting along with SBuilder!

Yep, what ollyau said about the .agn files, in the annotator you can do Aerial Imagery > Show tile grid to see the QMID15/LOD13 lines, you'll end up with an .agn file for each cell even if you put only one tree in it.

Jim

 

[FlyingAxx]

The AGN files are location dependent. A new AGN file will be made for each LOD13 cell that you annotate, regardless of the amount or types of objects you use. As far as other tools, there's AgenT (FS9), Autotrees (FS9), VogelTree (FSX), and scenProc (FSX), which all offer automation to one degree or another.

Right on Axel, it looks great and I'm glad you're getting along with SBuilder!

Yep, what ollyau said about the .agn files, in the annotator you can do Aerial Imagery > Show tile grid to see the QMID15/LOD13 lines, you'll end up with an .agn file for each cell even if you put only one tree in it.

Jim

Thank you guys. I'll give those tools a try. Fortunately I only have to take care for FSX - this cuts in halfs the job. . However, I think I have to explore some more possibilities of the annotator tool. Unfortunately it doesn't give visual help regarding the objects it offers for placement - and, the keyboard shortcuts don't work for me (probably because of a German layout - I'll check it).

@Jim: Obviously I filled 31 cells somehow...