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Unresolved issues
TerraBuilder uses SCASM command TexRelief to
generate landscape "patches" (referred to as "chunks"
in TerraBuilder) that are tiled next to each other forming a contiguous
land form. With the advent of Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2000, scenery
system was completely re-designed and no longer used the "seed"
system from previous version of MS Flight Simulator. Although Microsoft's
FS design team provided for compatibility with older, FS98-style scenery,
the transition is not seamless and without problems. As such, the scenery
built by TerraBuilder in its present form (and sceneries built by ALL
other scenery design packages) suffers from several drawbacks, which
present themselves as technical barriers and limitations solely dependent
on SCASM compiler and the limitation of the Flight simulator to display
SCASM-produced code, and not scenery design package in general, and
TerraBuilder in particular. These are:
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Visibility cut-off: All Area 9 scenery (which
means all 3D objects, polygons and elevated mesh scenery) is limited
in visibility to approximately 20 km. This means that, as you depart
the TerraBuilder-built mesh scenery, the parts of it will start to disappear
as they move out of the visibility range.
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Surface hardness: Elevated mesh terrain built
by TerraBuilder will be "hardened" if there is no FS2K
default land under it. This means that all surfaces built above FS2K
water surface will be hardened and landable. Elevated mesh surface
built above default FS2K terrain will NOT be hard and landable - the
airplane will be able to go right through it to land on the default
surface. This can be remedied in part by introducing FS98 Level 6
"hole seeds", which will disable the default terrain and
make TerraBuilder terrain landable. This, however, introduces
additional problems of "texture"smearing if the hole seeds
are not laid correctly.
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Terrain Grid cracks: Although TerraBuilder
uses the best possible geographic extent calculations (based on the
seed grid configuration), due to the imprecision of representing the
curved surface of the Earth with flat polygons inevitably results in a
slight error, which manifests itself as unavoidable terrain cracks
between the TexRelief chunks. The latest version of TerraBuilder
introduces the options to control and minimize this problem. As it
stands now, some cracks are visible only on the mountain slopes, when
viewed from below.
It should be noted that at the time of writing of this
document, new SCASM compiler version 2.39 became available, and it
introduced several new commands that seemed to have replaced the TexRelief
command. In particular, new commands have solved the terrain grid crack
problem and (still not confirmed) surface hardness problem. The
visibility issue still stands. These new commands and their impact on the
default FS2K scenery is still being investigated, and if the results are favorable,
they will be incorporated into the next version of TerraBuilder.
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Urban area of the SynthWizard scenery
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