Photographic Scenery

Over the past year I've been playing around with autogen in my head, and on odd occasions reviewing the SDK terrain and environment sections.

I've come across a couple of very good utilities in FSET (FSEarthTiles v.1.03), and FSX_KML.  I've been a johnny come (very) lately to the utilitarian functions of Google Earth as well, until now just seeing it as a nice virtual version of that spinning globe I had on my bedside table when I was much younger!

My initiation into FSET was entirely by accident as I was browsing the AVSIM forums.  I came across this post: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/365949-fsearthtiles-updated-version/  FSET allows you to create your own custom photoscenery for anywhere that the imagery is available on a tile server on the internet.  There are numerous providers but I won't mention them here...

FSX_KML allows you to use .kml files and transform then into .shp files which SBuilderX can import.  (SBX cannot import .kml files directly.)  FSXKML is downloadable from: http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/downloads.php?do=cat&id=5

FSET took a little bit of working out, mainly in terms of updating the providers section of the .ini file so that it worked properly.  With a couple of hours research it wasn't too difficult and I was soon able to create a small test area of photoscenery to prove it was possible :)

Since then I've been very busy and FS scenery hasn't been uppermost in my mind, but I've come back to it over this Christmas.

I looked through the manual for FSET to try to learn how to create water masks and blend masks for photoscenery.  Surprisingly, it seemed very simple, all that you have to do is create a .kml file with two lines in it using Google Earth.  To make it work, you need to assign a specific name to each of the lines.

So I tried it on a small test section, first creating the .kml file in GE and using that to create the blends and masks in FSET. Lo and behold it worked perfectly! Hurrah!

 

Then I had a rather unsettling thought........