Global Surface Water
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Thread: Global Surface Water

  1. #1

    Global Surface Water

    The Global Surface water files are ready for download at my URL.

    (Maybe Rami can help get them into the Library. The files are very big.)

    GlobalSurfaceWater_West.zip

    GlobalSurfaceWater_East.zip


    The Global Surface Water collection of land-water masks for CFS2 are a set of LWM BGLs that cover the earth with new land and water.

    The collection is derived from Europen Commission's Joint Research Centre Global surface Water project's Transition rasters.
    https://global-surface-water.appspot.com/download

    The cleaning the ocean areas are derived from OSM ocean data.
    http://openstreetmapdata.com/

    Issues:

    The default beaches will need to be removed or excluded to hide them from view.
    Some land areas will need landclass adjustments to insure their display.
    These BGLs will completely cover any land or water beneath them in the Scenery Library order.

    Some Missions and GSL object placements may be affected.

    Recommendations:

    The downloads are in 2 parts, _West and _East due to upload restrictions of Sim OutHouse.

    I place all the GSWCFS2*.bgls in a single directory named "Global Surface Water", inside a nested "scenery" folder.

    I place "Global Surface Water" above the FS2000_prop entry in the Scenery Library...
    that would be after FS2000_prop in the Scenery.CFG file

    If older land water sets are after FS2000_prop in the Scenery.CFG file, they will have priority, and by simply deactivating the
    "Global Surface Water" Scenery Library entry, you'll restore older missions and GSL to their older usage. Some GSL and Missions
    will not be affected as placement problems will only be near shorelines.

    "rhumbaflappy"
    Richard Ludowise
    April 3, 2019

  2. #2
    Thank you very much sir! I'll download and give it a try as soon as I get home.
    "De Oppresso Liber"

  3. #3
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    Thanks very much Dick. I went for a fly around Sydney and the shorelines are extremely accurate. Well done!

    Kevin

  4. #4
    Thank you for all your efforts sir, very appreciated.

    msfossey

  5. #5
    Many thanks to Jim Keir and his Slartibartfast and his LWMViewer1.3!

    The files correspond to the FS9+ file naming convention. So you should be able to track down specific files. Some creative simmers might use LWMViewer1.3 to make a bitmap of the LOD5 area, and use it in Ground2Kv4 to create shorelines and roads.

    It will be a while, but I might be able to come up with some auto-generated shorelines (beaches). They'd also follow the general naming convention.

    Another future project is to come up with a set of landclass files using the same naming convention, but grouped in separate Region folders. That should allow each region to have it's own texture set. The regions are labeled A-Z. Each region could be turned on or off with the Scenery Library if needed. Then Tropical Australia would not need the same textures as the rest of Australia, for example.

  6. #6
    Rhumba -MR: This is what I get with MR's MN Peleliu in Mission Builder and Free Flight at about 5000 feet. Your coastlines look great but MR's base was built, I believe, for stock coastlines. I'm gonna use it though. MR's recently released MN GI Tarawa-Betio looks as it should.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails grab_Pel023a.jpg   grab_Pel028a.jpg   grab_Pel036a.jpg  
    "De Oppresso Liber"

  7. #7

    Exclude files for the default CFS2 VTP lines

    Hi all.

    The default CFS2 VTPs need to be removed or renamed as .orig extension or excluded by bgls.

    Here a scenery folder you can use to exclude them without renaming or removing:

    Exclude_Default_VTP.zip

  8. #8
    Senior Administrator Rami's Avatar
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    Icon22 Reply...

    Good morning,

    Rhumbaflappy, I will work on getting them into the library this weekend. Thanks for all of your work!
    "Rami"

    "Me? I'm just a Sea of Tranquility in an Ocean of Storms, babe."

    My campaign site: http://www.box.net/shared/0k1e1rz29h
    My missions site: http://www.box.net/shared/ueh4kazk3v
    My scenery site: http://www.box.net/shared/knb1l0ztobhs2esb14rb

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Rami View Post
    Good morning,

    Rhumbaflappy, I will work on getting them into the library this weekend. Thanks for all of your work!
    A big Thank You in return Rami!

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by rhumbaflappy View Post
    Many thanks to Jim Keir and his Slartibartfast and his LWMViewer1.3!

    Another future project is to come up with a set of landclass files using the same naming convention, but grouped in separate Region folders. That should allow each region to have it's own texture set. The regions are labeled A-Z. Each region could be turned on or off with the Scenery Library if needed. Then Tropical Australia would not need the same textures as the rest of Australia, for example.
    I have a question on that idea?

    Given the range of some aircraft, or on actual missions flown, would switching areas in the Scenery Library possibly be too blunt an instrument? Or would it work to activate the multiple regions the aircraft would fly across?

    As an example, the ferry flights made from Melbourne to Darwin and then on to Papua New Guinea, or the missions flown from Tunisia to attack Sardinia, Sicily and Italy would cross several different terrain regions. Both exist in campaigns.

    My thanks also for your work on this. As you know the shorelines have always been a source of confusion and problems especially in the Pacific and Balkans areas. So Oh Man! If you are able to do the auto shorelines we'll want to build a virtual CFS2 shrine to you
    Cheers,

    Captain Kurt
    ------------------------------------------------------
    "Fly, you fools!" Gandalf the Gray

  11. #11
    Thank you so much Rhumbaflappy

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by UncleTgt View Post
    Thank you so much Rhumbaflappy
    Thank you too UT; here's your Cape Gloucester with the new water added on.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails grab_Pel038.jpg  
    "De Oppresso Liber"

  13. #13
    Thank You rhumbaflappy!!!

    So far I have been enjoying Rhode Island. It is as it should be!

    voyager

  14. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Captain Kurt View Post
    I have a question on that idea?

    Given the range of some aircraft, or on actual missions flown, would switching areas in the Scenery Library possibly be too blunt an instrument? Or would it work to activate the multiple regions the aircraft would fly across?
    I think each region would have it's own Scenery Library entry, and all regions could be active at once. No switching needed.

    You can have a local texture folder with landclass sceneries, if ALL the textures used are in that texture folder, if I recall correctly. So we'd need 26 region entry directories, each having it's own scenery folder for the LOD5 landclass BGLS. And we'd also have in each of those region folders, a local texture folder which would have all the textures needed for that region's BGLs.

    For the most part, we all have larger hard drive storage capacity than in the past, so to have a lot of redundant texture storage wouldn't be so bad.

    I'm a ways from implementing this.

  15. #15
    Worth the wait then.

    I wonder. Weird thought but regarding multiple texture folders, has anyone tried aliasing a scenery texture folder? It can work inside the aircraft folders, but would it work if the texture folders in the local scenery folders were aliased to one main texture folder maybe having subfolders divided by landclass type textures?
    Cheers,

    Captain Kurt
    ------------------------------------------------------
    "Fly, you fools!" Gandalf the Gray

  16. #16

    Some Shorelines

    Slartibartfast, by Jim Keir, is the main program to generate land-water polys I used. It also makes shorelines for FS2004. It can export BLN text files for the shorelines, but they include the crooked tails that are needed in FS2004 to control autogen.

    I've written a program to remove those tails. Not 100% perfect, but not too bad.

    Next is creating a CFS2 shoreline from these BLN files. One path to this is to use SBuilder9 to make an SBX file, and then use Sander de Cocq's CFS2AutoCoast to make the BGLs. The problem here is that Sander's program introduces some anomalies:



    Alternatives might be to write a program to create a Ground2Kv4 file from the BLN. I remember Christian Fumey did have such a program but never released it publically, so it is possible. Or write a program to do essentially what Sander has already done... but iron out the bugs. I'm going to explore the file structure of Ground2K files, and see if BLN2G2k or SBX2G2k is feasible.

    Landclass files will be needed to make the invisible islands appear.



    Here's Delavan Lake, Wisconsin, with a "tan_rock" texture:



    As always, 2 steps forward and one step back. The process is only semi-automated, and time consuming. I need to brush up on my programming skills.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails DelavanLake.jpg   LandclassProblem.jpg   Anomalies.jpg  

  17. #17
    Great progress.

    The artifacts from Sander's program look very similar to the VTP1 number error that you fixed a while back, I'm not sure his latest release of Autocoast (version 3 Release Candidate 1, SEP 2013) needed the VTP lines to be run through your VTPfixer though... I'll go searching back through my archives.

  18. #18
    Will we still need to provide flattens? I'm pootling around the SWPTO stock locations & see some areas where the watermasks & mesh still look slightly out of synch - flattens would iron out most of these issues I think?

    BTW - The India/Burma major river mouth area's look amazing, just crying out for a G2K makeover... Might try your LWMviewer bitmap export idea & experiment a little.

  19. #19
    Flattens would still be needed in some Area16n flattens areas. As far as anomalies in the vtp lines, I haven't been able to pre-process the BLN files to eliminate them entirely, and I even managed to get uncompilable BLNs.

    I'm not sure we are using the same version of Sander's program, but the odd lines are generated by CFS2AutoCoast 3.0.5004.18489

  20. #20
    Thank you Rhumbaflappy for all your excellent and hard work. You are really helping to keep CFS2 alive.
    "De Oppresso Liber"

  21. #21
    Good news and bad news.

    Here's the good news:

    2812_vtp_8:

    The BLN file is 71.7 MB, the resulting SBX file from SBuilder is 165 MB. The bgs file created by cfs2autocoast is 669 MB! The compilation took 9hrs. and 20 minutes, and BGLC_9 used upwards of 2.5 GB of memory in producing the shoreline BGL. 2812_vtp_8.bgl is 49.9 MB . CFS2 displayed the BGL just fine, with no noticeable drag on my FPS. Admittedly, I have a pretty good PC.

    The bad news:

    Cfs2autocoast introduces many anomalies... odd straight lines cutting through the scenery. Another approach is needed. Perhaps automated shorelines are not going to happen, and we'll still be drawing them all by hand. I'm working on a way to convert BLN shoreline files to G2Kv4 LWM files. If Ground2K can handle the massive size of some of these BLNs, BGLC_9 can compile the resulting assembly files.

  22. #22

    Partial vtp shoreline success

    I recalled a conversation with Sander in which he was surprised that he had anomaly free success when all lines were 2 points.

    This is still the case as far as I can tell. I need to revisit my program to delete the hooks slartibartfast creates, and 'explode' the lines to 2 points. not the best, but if it works, I should be able to get some shorelines.

  23. #23
    Dick

    That is encouraging. Best of luck and thank you so much for all this hard and painstaking work.

    We'd better get started on that shrine to you
    Cheers,

    Captain Kurt
    ------------------------------------------------------
    "Fly, you fools!" Gandalf the Gray

  24. #24
    Quote Originally Posted by rhumbaflappy View Post
    Flattens would still be needed in some Area16n flattens areas. As far as anomalies in the vtp lines, I haven't been able to pre-process the BLN files to eliminate them entirely, and I even managed to get uncompilable BLNs.

    I'm not sure we are using the same version of Sander's program, but the odd lines are generated by CFS2AutoCoast 3.0.5004.18489
    I have the same version of CFS2 Autocoast, can't say I noticed artifacts or anomalies when transferring FS9 bgls & converting (which is what this version was "optimised" for), so I wonder if running bgl through your VTP fixer post bgl generation works?

  25. #25

    GSW Shorelines

    My computer has been grinding out some Global Surface Water shorelines. I'm doing the whole earth.

    Sander's Cfs2Autocoast has been a champ! The batch file has been processing the earth for about 24 hours. The biggest file so far is 1708_vtp_vtp_8.BGL (Sorry about the redundancies in the file name). It's in northern Canada, of course. Most of the world's lakes and rivers are there. The center of that file is around N65 W115.



    The file is large. Over 34MB compiled. The .bgs file pre-compiled was 464MB.



    This one file took about 3 hours to compile. So, it will take a few days to do the whole set. There will be some anomalies, but most not noticeable. Hopefully no crashes. All the shorelines are white sand. Not much I can do about that right now, but the SBX files may allow some editing in SBuilder for 2004. I haven't tried to eliminate the anomalies pre-processing as they are slippery devils, and often the cure is worse than the original error. As nice as Sander's program is, it still needed some tweaking.

    I may get a Sbx2G2k program working. That might allow a different approach to making some adjustments. Or it might be a new hell-on-earth.



    I'll check back in a few days when the compiling is done, and see how CFS2 likes the huge collection of gigantic files.

    I had to write a program to convert the BLN files from Slartibartfast to SBuilder9 SBX files. That worked well.
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails in_1708.jpg   1708_vtp_8.jpg   1708.jpg  

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