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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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

 

 

 

 


Urban area of the SynthWizard scenery