What does "Landclass" do?

[pilot2017]

Hi to everyone here a SOH

A question nagging at me for quite a long time has been what exactly does "landclass" do in FS2004? Someone once told me its adjusts coastlines or shore lines of bodies of water, lakes, rivers, and streams. I suspect there is more to it than that.

Thanks for posting your answers.

[nigel richards]

Hi to everyone here a SOH

A question nagging at me for quite a long time has been what exactly does "landclass" do in FS2004? Someone once told me its adjusts coastlines or shore lines of bodies of water, lakes, rivers, and streams. I suspect there is more to it than that.

Thanks for posting your answers.

pilot2017: 'Landclass' is the term used to determine the type of textures (usually seasonal; Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, Hard Winter) used to create global ground texture rendering in all versions of FS, including FS2004.

To put it simply; 'Landclass' specifies the kind of landscape texture displayed in a given area. We create custom Landclass scenery when, for example; we may wish to change an existing area which displays in FS2004 as woodland, to now display as rural fields, or even perhaps suburb or city.

'Waterclass' is similarly the textures used to render the various classes of water.

The main textures are located within the Scenery/World/texture folder of your FS2004 installation.

For the creation of custom scenery (you will have to create a NEW scenery folder in the main 'Addon Scenery' folder, first) various useful payware and freeware programs can be used for creating your own custom 'Landclass' and 'Waterclass' scenery. Most programs also come with useful manuals which would be the First stop in understanding the Logic used in the creation of this type of custom scenery.

SBuilder is an excellent (if somewhat complicated) program which handles Landclass/Waterclass extremely well.
ADE handles waterclass and Landclass for FSX only.

One program I would highly recommend to beginners is freeware: EZ-Landclass.
This utility allows you to change any specific area (Landclass and Waterclass) using Microsoft Office Excel as an interface which connects with fs2004/FSX.

[Mick]

I second Nigel's recommendation of EZ Landclass. It's easy to use and almost always works (though not quite always, as you may have seen in my thread about a landclass problem.)

One caveat: I had a devil of a time getting EZ Landclass set up because there are two buttons you need on your menu bar(s) and only one of them appeared when I first tried to use the program with my old coal-burning version of MS Office that includes Excel97. They are the Capture MSFS button and the EZ Landclass drop-down menu.

I had to dig around in Excel to find the missing one, a trick made harder because I didn't know what was missing. And now I don't remember which one was missing or where I found it. But I did find it and you will too if you have to search for it. At least you'll know what two buttons you need.

[pilot2017]

Now I have a better idea what is going on. When I search for landclass your replies will give me a better idea what to look for. Thanks for your time, guys.