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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:
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. |