Berlin VFR

[Wouter Roerdink 0]

Two weeks ago I visited Berlin and when I came home I looked for berlin scenery. So I bought and installed the download VFR Berlin and it looks nice. But I have a problem: in the area of the Museen insel, some buildings seem to sink in the ground. There are strange valleys all over this area. It is only restricted to this area and not anywhere else. I also use FSTerrain, so I disabled this, expecting this program to cause the strange effects. I even disabled all the scenery and replaced all the files in sceneryeurwscenery with the origanal files from a backup, but still no result. Does anyone have an idea what causes this and how to solve this problem?

Wouter,

The Netherlands

[Shaun Fletcher 570]

Hello Wouter,

What level is your TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL= set to in your fs9.cfg

TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19

TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=20

TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=21

These are the 3 most commonly used so you may need to change it to view it correctly. With so many different meshes and sceneries around people have to change this value sometimes before starting FS9 depending where they want to fly.

[Rainer Duda 305]

Hi Shaun and Wouter,

this problem could be solved from different directions. Therefore it could be interesting to have some further information about the part behind... what you don't see.

These valleys are the "old" Microsoft-riverparts. When designing a new scenery like "VFR Berlin", a designer has to "exclude" these wrong rivers to place correct ones. Sadly this is fact, the data MS used are not so exact like the data the scenery design groups use for their own small parts.

You (as designer) have now 2 possibilities to delete this false rivers...

The first one: simply delete the rivers.

But then you have to manipulate central MS-files. And they are huge and cover a bigger area your addon maybe wants to be. So... you maybe disturb other sceneries as well.

The second possibility is to exclude the false rivers. Therefore Microsoft give "us" the possibility to exclude "layers". The MS rivers are placed at a known layer and so - if we tell the engine to disable this layer - all rivers are excluded...

But... and now comes the interesting part:

They are still there, but you can't see them. Because the engine get the command to exclude this layer.

After that information you now have to know that Microsoft has a routine in their engine that - when such a river (in this case a so called VTP-Line-river) has to be placed it will create a small valley automatically. Normally rivers flow through small valleys. So that's a nice effect.

Can you now imagine what happens? Correct... the engine exclude the river but ... the valley is still there.

A very important information about this valley-creating you can find in your terrain.cfg in your fs9-folder. In this terrain.cfg you'll find the following part (nearly at the beginning):

//Stream Lines

[Texture.1024] // stream lines / unknown / perennial

Type=1

Size=4

ExcludeAutogen=1

MaskClassMap=3

Textures=RiverSU.bmp

offset=-10

[Texture.1025] // stream lines / unknown / non-perennial

Type=1

Size=4

ExcludeAutogen=1

MaskClassMap=3

Textures=RiverSU.bmp

offset=-10

In this offset-parameters for both textures the valley-heigh is defined. If you now set these both offsets for example to 0 (offset=0), then these valleys will disappear.

But what Shaun wrote was correct too:

Because it has to do s.th. with the terrain_max_vertex_level in your fs9.cfg:

This -10-offset looks good when you use terrain_max_vertex_level = 19.

If you raise it to 20 or 21, then the valley looks extremely like canyons.

So the idea of Shaun wasn't false. Reseting your terrain_max_vertex_level to 19 will bring you a wider valley and you won't recognise it. But it is still there.

Sorry for this longer comment. I hope it was not too technical.

Very important:

All changes in terrain_max_vertex_level or the offsets in terrain.cfg are worldwide!

I described this in my OWL-manual too: page 45 and 46

http://www.aerosoft-shop.com/~images/OWL/manual.pdf

Ciao,

Rainer.

[Wouter Roerdink 0]

Thank you both for your help. It helped me at least to understand a bit better how FS works. I tried both options and it looks a lot better from the air. On the Microsoft site I also found how to make a flatten switch and this also gives a reasonable result. In fact the solutions you both gave still leave some "hills" in Berlin, which I can't remember.

So thank you once more and safe flying!

Wouter Roerdink