SBuilder polygon + point questions

[gvbeek]

I need your help;
1) I'm using Sbuilder (FS9) for Land Classes for my scenery's, like 096Y Grasslands.
For Ramstein AB I'd like to use more than 1 polygon (Land Classes). If I make two poly's only the last one I'll see in my sim.
What am I doing wrong ?
2) If I make a polygon how do I add another point in this polygon. Or if I have a poly with 4 points and I look in my sim and I decided to add another (5th) point. I really don't know to do this.
Right now I'll make a polygon with a lot of points and later on I delete most of them.

I read several tutorials but that doesn't make sense to me.

I appriciated your help.

[RKE]

Not sure about the second question, but the first sounds like a VTP layer # issue. Or are you talking about having two different landclass .bgl files?

[gvbeek]

I'am talking about one bgl file. Lets say one polygon with grass and the other poly as a city.
Whatever I try I'll only see one polygon.

[MIKE JG]

For starters, make sure you understand the difference between land class and a textured ground polygon. The biggest difference is that these two different scenery items sit in different layers on top of the mesh.

Here are the basic scenery layers and the order they should be in:

Note that you don't see land class on that list. If you think about it, land class textures need to be underneath things like rivers and roads and airport background (base) polygons.

So something like a city texture, that needs to be added using the "lands" feature of SBuilder which will add that texture as a land class file automatically placing it in the correct scenery layer below all of that other stuff. Sbuilder adds the land class generically so you can't shape it as accurately as you can a custom polygon but it still looks natural despite that. When you add the land class in SBuilder, it adds it in large squares so you just have to shape your group of squares to cover the area that you need. Also and this is very important, the land class files need to be separated from your other scenery files and placed in their own independent addon scenery folder that DOES NOT have a texture folder inside of it. For MAIW scenery projects, we add a folder called "MAIW Land Class" to the user's Addon Scenery folder. That "MAIW Land Class" folder only contains a single "Scenery" sub folder and no "Texture" sub folder". That texture sub folder if you accidentally added it will cause a CTD as we found out the hard way.

For everything else, you can actually use any of the available FS9 textures, including land class textures, to create custom ground polygons. However with these polygons, SBuilder makes you set the layer of each polygon manually. That's where that little box pictured above is handy. If you place a custom polygon in any of those lower layers, it screws up the scenery and can even cause CTD's in some cases.

So when you want to make for example, a new airport base file, make your polygon, select a texture for it from the list and then make sure you edit that polygon's properties so that it sits at layer 20 or greater. If you use layer 20 as your base layer for anything you want to add, you will ensure that you do not mess with the default scenery layers.

In your example, if you want to place one layer with a specific texture on top of another layer with a different texture, you can easily do that by varying the layer numbers making sure that the layer you want to be on top, has a higher layer number. So make one layer, layer 20, the next 21, and so on after that.

[MIKE JG]

As far as adding a point to an already completed polygon, you have to hold down a certain key and left click while hovering the pointer over the polygon's side line.

Can't remember which key you have to hold down off the top of my head, I'll try to remember. Someone else here will probably know the answer in the meantime.

[gvbeek]

Thanks Mike for your explanation. Much appriciated.

When I was talking about landclass, I meant ground polygon.
I changed layers but whatever I try, the latest poly I draw is the only poly I see.
Example; I make a base poly (grassland) and a second poly (city). These two poly's don't overlap eachother. The only poly I see is the latest one I draw. Little frustrating .

[MIKE JG]

Gert, if you put your SBuilder source file inside a zip folder, you should be able to post it here and I can have a look at it. Sounds like a layering issue but it could also be a texture choice issue.

If you don't want to post it here, you can always send it to me via PM.