Detailed documentation

- Program menus

- Program status line

- Setting preferences

- Using scenery overlays

- Coastline integrity

- Using paint programs to edit FSLandClass files

- Working with transparency

- The replacement file

- Advice for multiple authors working together

- Publishing sceneries

Documentation of menus

Menu | Item | Description
File | Create new file New fill | If this is selected before reading a file, you are prompted to select the coordinates and can create a file from scratch. A new land class coverage will be calculated based on your selection. If selected a second time or after reading a file, a new land class coverage will be calculated based on your selections. Since the details of many assignments depend on random numbers, two consecutive runs of this command may give slightly different results.
| Read | Reads a land class file. Selections can be made via coordinates only. If have already selected a file to work on, you cannot change to another without ending and restarting the program, but you can have several instances of the program running at once.
| Write | Saves a land class file.
| Write Resample | Saves a land class file and produces a TMF and a BGL file from this.
| Exit | Exits the program.
Zoom state | View all map | Shows all 256 x 256 squares.
| View north west | Shows the upper left 128x128 squares enlarged.
| View north east | Shows the upper right 128x128 squares enlarged.
| View south west | Shows the lower left 128x128 squares enlarged.
| View south east | Shows the lower right128x128 squares enlarged.
Action | Global Change | Exchange one class for another throughout the scenery. This is an easy way to get rid of classes that are unwanted.
| Statistics | This menu item pops up a dialog which tells you which class is used how oftenly in the scenery. The 0 (sea water) is displayed as 256.
| Export Image | Exports the map as a bitmap. Read below.
| Import Image | Imports the map as a bitmap. Read below.
Coordinates | Where am I? | Helps to find your location. Read below.
Help | About | Displays the program version and the license text.
| Preferences | Allows you to alter settings to customise the program.

Program status line

At the bottom of the program there is a status line which changes when the mouse moves over the map. The following information is displayed on the line:

Coordinates in longitude and Latitude | Position of the square by column and row on the tile | actual Class | Vegetation zone *1) | Height above sea level in m | Number of pixels *2)

*1) Currently the following zones are implemented:

- 0 = unknown
- 1 = forest
- 2 = fields
- 3 = grasslands and meadows
- 4 = fruit and vegetables
- 5 = vine
- 6 = high grasslands, Tundra
- 7 = desert
- 8 = sand desert
- 9 = swamps
- 10 = glaciers
- 11 = unused
- 12 = unused
- 13 = dark green meadows
- 14 = crop land
- 15 = savanna

*2) These numbers are just the numbers of pixel found and summed up on the different maps that carry information for this square. You can modify the data by a right mouseclick.

- Number of pixels assigned to forests (if available)
- Number of pixels assigned to fruit and vine (if available)
- Number of pixels assigned to populated areas
- Number of pixels assigned to lines of equal altitude (if available)
- Number of blank pixels
- Number of pixels assigned to water
  Thus, the above example reads: Square is column 182 and row 158 on the tile, placed at E6:24:49 N46:04:46, 504 m above sea, in an area dominated by grassland and meadows, 8 of 25 pixel are population. This is a typical small village or town or suburb.

Setting of preferences

The new version comes with a ini file. You can modify settings with the menu Help Preferences. Three settings can be applied currently: a) You can make the current tile the default when starting the program. Thus, you do not have to navigate arround the earth every time. Warning - do not use this before a file is read or created, because if you do any new settings will be discarded. b) You can select the screen size for the next startup from 256x256 (these smaller pictures give a good overview) to 1536x1536, which allows precise placement. c) An option is included to overlay FS2000 scenery files disassembled with BGLAnalyze. More detail is given below. |

Overlay of scenery files

Several users of version 1.0 asked for better orientation of the class sceneries against the classical scenery. Therefore, an overlay of classical elements has been added to the program. If you have FS2000, it is strongly recommended that you use FS2000 scenery files for that, because the format of the rivers and roads of FS2000 is known and can be used easily, while the mesh type roads and rivers of FS2002 are not yet understood.

Get the tool BGLAnalyse from the usual websites. With this, you can read the BGL files and disassemble them to SCASM format. If you need several scenery files, you can merge them with an editor like Wordpad or the NT/W2000 version of Notepad. Copy the resulting .sca file into the FSLandClass directory and enter the file name into the field in the Preferences dialog. As soon as you check the Overlay check box, the file will be read and overlayed to the squares with the next redraw. You can force a redraw using the Zoom State menu. |

Coastline integrity

A special problem found in FSLandClass Version 1.0 concerned coastlines. FSLandClass can detect from the USGS DEM data if an area is sea. All squares that can in principle have a corner on land are treated as land, the others as sea. The problem is that small shifts between the DEM, map and scenery coordinate system allow water triangles to pass under coast lines, and sometimes up hills, particularly on northern and western shores. This is cured in Version 1.1 by adding an additional row of land textures at the northern and western sides. This makes very natural coasts, leaving very few problems with:

1. very narrow peninsulas
2. wrong placed coastlines
3. artificially built areas.

If the program were modified to add yet another line of land squares at the coast, the remaining coast would be display badly in FSLandClass.

Therefore, a new dialog was created which appears whenever you compile the scenery. This allows you to create an additional band of grass textures along any coastline. These additional squares are only created for the compilation. |
As example see the airport of Nice in southen France as it is compiled by FSLandClass by default. Most of the area below the airport is built up artificially and is not present in the data. This is why you see water under half the airport. You will get this result if you selected "Coastline band 0" in the above dialog. |
This is a very good example - because the airport is built far into the sea, "Coastline band 1" gives this result. Things have improved, but are still not good. |
"Coastline band 2" now throws millions more tons of land into the sea and you see that this airport is perfect, as is Genoa some 100 km along the coast. But it has been reported that this selection can create new artificial islands in the sea. The amount of water enforced by the coastlines seems to be small, and this setting has been observed to create land in areas where there is none. |

My recommendation on the settings to choose is as follows:

"Coastline band 1" seems to be fairly safe as far as creating artifical islands is concerned, but some have been seen with this method. On further investigation, at the location of the plane which is created from the artificial building into the sea, the default scenery of FSLandClass shows water. To fix the problem I manually changed that one square where the plane stands from class=0 to class=2 and created than a new scenery with "Coastline band 1". The result is identical to the image above, but the risk of artificial islands is reduced.

Using Paint Programs to edit FSLandClass files

A lot of features of FSlandClass have been suggested on the Newsgroup support.fsrail at simflight.com. This new feature of 1.2 was one of them.

Now you can use any paint program, even MS paint, to easily create your class scenery. Please make sure your display settings are "True Color " with 24 or 32 bit. 16 bit might work also, but will lead to some unwanted exchanges of classes. Second, the program has to be in the mode to display every square as 1 pixel, and zooming has to be off (Zoom status: View all map). You will get a screen like the one on the right, this one with the Britain Country Kit loaded. On the right you see a legend that shows the colors that correspond to the classes. The very dark gray indicates no existing classes, do not use them. With the menu "Action" "Export image" a Windows bitmap will be created, with name Classname.bmp. This bitmap has the color depth of your display settings, which is why information is lost when you are in 16 bit only. You can modify this bitmap now with a paint program. Select the colors of the classes you want with the pipette and paint, brush, etc. Do not use dark gray, nor any other shade of this color. The tickmarks at the legend help to identify color and classes. |
When you are finished, just select "Action" "Import image". This dialog asks you if the changes that will be applied to your scenery as a result of the painting should be added to the list of manual changes. If you check the box, the changes done by the paint will also be used for any new fill if you check the "Read Force" box. |
As example, I used MS Paint to spray the red color I found in London (class 1) to the beautiful forests of Wales - my apologies for that. Next I imported the image. A second later the FSLandClass redraws the map - now not the bitmap that it read, but with the class setting that it has computed from the map. If it does not understand a color, it ignores it and keeps the old settings. If you selected to store the changes, you can edit the file Classname.frc with an editor like Notepad. Now you can see every change you made. |
I recommend, in order to check out your graphics setup and program, that you go once through the following process: Display a scenery and export it as bitmap. Read it to the paint program of your choice and save it again without any modification. Import the bitmap to FSlandclass, with history storage checked. If no write to the file Classname.frc appeared, than your settings are ok. If the file is the newest file in your FSLandClass directory now, than your display settings or the paint program have to be checked, they have modified the colors. |

Working with transparency (Advanced feature)

Class 254 has been dicovered to be transparency. The usage of it just means that for the specific area the class is taken from another file, most likely from worldlc.bgl if there is no third class layer.

Two more classes (252 and 253) allow the usage of user supplied textures. These have to be produced with resample in the way described in the FS2002 terrain SDK, and to follow the naming conventions in there.

The replacement file (Advanced feature)

A user suggested to give more control over the filling mechanism to the advanced user. This should allow to prohibit the usage of some textures for certain files, like the European cities class 1 in US areas etc. This can be done like follows:

The program reads a file filename.rpl. If ths is empty or issing, nothing happens.It may contain lines with two I4 numbers, for better readablity in this text I write a b where there should be a blank now:
bbb1b101.

This just means that whenever the algorithm comes to the conclusion to use class 1, it will use 101 instead. This is done before the frc is applied.

The .rpl file can be modified with any pure text editor. Class 0 can not be replaced this way, but that would not make much sense anyway.

Where am I?

The earch has only 96 x 64 FSLC fles, each with 256 x 256 fields. This makes only 402.653.184 fields. Ups. No wonder some of you got lost.

Now you can find the field your planes is currently standing. Locate the plane where you want. In this example, we are at Lima Callao airport in Peru. Choose the map view in FS2002, and you will get a screen like this containing the current cordinates of your position. |
In FSLandClass, select> Coordinates Where am I? Now with copy and paste (ctrl. c and ctrl v) you can easily enter the coordinates to the dialog, and press OK. |
This is the answer the program gives you. Of course a wrong answer. The correct is: Before your PC. |

Advice for multiple authors working together

What is the correct procedure if several authors work on one file?

There are two possibilities:

Method 1: Merging FRC. All manual changes you make, included those you make through the paint import & export if you want, are recorded to a protocol file with the extension .frc. These are simple ASCI text files that can be read with any text editor (Notepad, Wordpad,...). As an example, let us assume that there are two designers, one of whom manually optimizes on the above map the Bristol airport environment, the other of whom works on the Heathrow approach. If they then merge their .frc files, a new fill will give both of them the manual changes the other author made as well as their own.

Method 2: Bitmaps. Both Authors work on different areas of one file. Each of them creates a bitmap which is exported to a paint program. These should be identical with the exception of the areas that they are working on. Now they can use any paint program to create a common bitmap out of the two areas (using the copy and paste commands), import it again, and merge the sceneries.

Now let me make a recommendation for publication of sceneries.

Publishing sceneries

In a published kit, include the frc file. They are small after compression anyway, but they allow other designers to continue your work. If you use them, give credits to the creators: "Heath Heathrow made the LandClass changes near Heathrow, Bris Bristol near Bristol, and I gave Nottingham its palm trees back".

If you want, I encourage you to also publish an export bitmap in the 24bit format. This can be done as part of the documentation of your work, and it will allows others to continue to enhance it.