previous print this page next


Excluding the default scenery with Hole Seeds

One of the scenery legacies left behind from Microsoft's Flight Simulator 98 are the Level 6 Hole Seeds. These seeds (synthetic tiles used to cover large areas of Earth in FS98) are actually "empty" - they do not contain ANY texture, and their purpose is mainly to wipe out existing default scenery. They still work in FS2000, and they can be used to erase any default scenery that needs to be removed. For example, even though TerraBuilder-created mesh terrain will be fully landable when placed over default terrain, certain default areas, especially around airfields, have a tendency to disrupt the landable property of the mesh terrain. The result will be that the plane may actually fall through the mesh terrain over those areas.

This is where the hole seed comes into play. If a hole seed is declared under this problematic area, it will remove the default airport and restore the mesh terrain's "hardened" properties.

Set up of the hole seeds will be an option in future versions of TerraBuilder. For now, this block must be set up manually and compiled using SCASM. The Block and Synth reference numbers for seeds must be determined (see SCASM documentation for more info). One aid that can be used for this is Airport2.10's Synthetic Tile calculation function. This calculator will determine index numbers of 1 - 6 level synthetic tiles. These index numbers must then be used to set up series of synthetic blocks in SCASM file, which can then be compiled into a hole seed BGL file. This file must reside together with the main scenery BGL file in the same directory.

Please note that this procedure is advanced SCASM operation and well beyond the scope of this tutorial. See SCASM documentation for more info on this.