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Old September 21st 03, 09:30 AM
Mark Cherry
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In ,
Joseph Brown wrote:

Check the documentation of your add-on to know which textures you
added in FS98 and must be ported over to FS2004...


The documentation doesn't offer much of help since this file is part
of an entire scenery area.

If I won't find a way for FS2004 to generate generic textures within
this airport perimeter, what I'll end up doing, is probably copy the
all FS98 texture files into the FS2004 texture directory and cross my
fingers for any conflicts or incompatibility issues.


Judging by what Tom Gibson said about 2004 not being able to handle R8 files
then the textures you are seeing when down at ground level have to be the 2004
textures. Up in the air, you probably see the white splodge because the 98
scenery is interefering with the display of the terrain mesh.

Converting textures to BMP format won't do any good because bgl code calls
texture files by name and expects the R8 extension by default. Where custom
texture file extensions have been used, the scenery maker would have had to
specify the texture name and extension when they wrote the code. Therefore it
won't find its textures if you've changed their extension names. There are some
subtle differences about the file format of R8 compared to BMP (possibly in the
header information) which means that BMPs cannot be displayed properly by the
old bgl code.

MS have freed themselves from the restrictions of "Bruce's Graphic Language"
(Bruce Artwick) and opened up new possibilities for whoever can write the next
freeware scenery compiler but, at the same time, they've closed us all off from
the massive libraries of 3rd party scenery created to date. The FS team at MS
can't be expected to map the entire world in infinit detail and they never had
to - up to now there's been a small army of helpers producing detailed sceneries
based on genuine local knowlede. Unfortunately, they've now been put out of
action....

Your current airport file might be okay as a stop-gap but it would be better to
wait until 3rd party scenery makers work out how to build new airports for
FS2004.

What I'm intrigued by is that there are a number of airports which are not as
flat as a billiard table - runways that slope from one end to another, or can be
somewhat dish shaped in profile. There's going to be a whole extra level of
sophistication required, to simulate that, so we might only be able to expect a
slow trickle of stuff at first. Let's see.

--
regards,

Mark