Working with land classes, an e xample

Here is an example of how to use FSLandClass to modify the scenery provided in a country kit. At the east coast of Mallorca, there is a beach called Cala Millor. In reality it has a lot of hotels, with a palm forest at the southern end. The coordinates are approximately W3:24 N39:35. |
While the small ancient village a few km inside is on the maps, the hotels are not. That is why they do show up in the country kit. Our aim is to put them there. In the land class provided in the kit (and the Spain country kit), you find the area unpopulated, the textures a mixture of fields and bushes. |
This is how the area looks in the FS2002 standard scenery. A wide grass land with a few fields. Well, that is not as it is in real life.
This small image extracted from a much bigger map shows the land usage of the isle of Mallorca. There is forest at the north western coast, fields in the east, and the central and southern part has fruit trees and fields with vegetables. This is one of the inputs to FSLandClass country kits.
To begin with load the file LCE01N15 from the Spain country kit, or the distribution kit of the program which is attached as an example. Call Write Resample from the File menu and get a new BGL file - LCE01N15.BGL that we copy to the fs2002\scenery folder and then restart FS2002. Now it looks as it was before tourism started. |
| Next we change the few relevant squares by clicking or shift clicking and choosing a new class value.
| The coast line should be replaced by class 32 (palms with small trees). We already know that most of it is likely to be covered by the sea and beach, and that we should get a few palm trees between the beach and the hotels - they were there when I was a child at least. We also choose this class for the southern end of the beach. For the hotels we choose class 103 from the list - blocks with trees in between. That fits the hotel skyline best.
This is the result. We only exchanged 10 bytes and created a complete city.
Another view from the side. With five minutes effort, the autogen scenery and FSLandClass allowed us to create a level of realism never experienced before.