World Wide Guide
to FS Scenery Design | Knowledge Bank
World Wide Guide
to FS Scenery Design | Knowledge Bank
Textures are the files that designers use to put authentic looking surfaces on the ground and on 3-D objects. Using such textures to best advantage, and dealing with issues of colour, transparency, etc., is the focus of this page. If you have something to contribute, please send e-mail to kraybill@vianet.net.au.
Dealing with compressed
texture files
Searching for a bluish
green
Using MS Photopaint for
textures
Creating transparent windows or
polygons
See also:
A fine collection of textures that may be adaptable for FS scenery
Q. Apparently Schiratti Commander won't read a texture file if it's not 64 KB. Needle.R8 seems to be compressed. What program can I use to convert the texture file to the full 64 KB?
Roland Weigelt, of Bonn, Germany, says:
Try R8WORX. This is a program for manipulating texture files that was never finished completely (I know -- I'm the author), but there seem to be some people who like it and use it on a regular basis. The function that reads compressed R8 files has a small bug so it won't work with all compressed files, but I know that it can read Needle.r8 as it was one of the files I tried the function on. Then you can save Needle.r8 in the normal 64kb format.If you have anything to contribute on this subject,
please send e-mail to kraybill@vianet.net.au.
Q. I'm working on a little scenery project and a need for a color I haven't seen documented anywhere: blue/green. It's more like the color of tarnished bronze and would commonly be seen as a paint for the ironwork of a bridge (for instance). This must a day color (turns to gray/black at night).
Konstantin Kukushkin says:
You can probably get the right color by accessing the color palette of FS5 directly. The problem is, such colors will not change their brightness according to the position on the Sun (but will during the night). To access a palette color directly, you have to specify its number and the suffix '69' instead of 'f0'. By the way, using the suffix '68', you can get 'transparent' colors - this technique is used for shadows and could be interesting for some bridges.
To display the color palette, you can use R8WORX. In your scenery, you can use colors 0-115 (decimal), 192-255 (these colors are taken from FS5.PAL unless you use your own color palette) and probably some colors used for sky/clouds/thunderstorms (160-191). Colors 116-127 do not fade at night and 128-159 are used for instrument panels and can change according to the current panel and time of day.If you have anything to contribute on this subject,
please send e-mail to kraybill@vianet.net.au.
Phil Schubert [e-mail: pschubert@westrail.wa.gov.au] writes:
Microsoft Office 97 includes a program called MS Photopaint. There is a lovely feature in it called "Texturiser," which is an excellent tool to create textures. There are many other controls including brightness, contrast, colour saturation, RGB Gamma values, sharpen, smooth, blur etc.If you have anything to contribute on this subject,
please send e-mail to kraybill@vianet.net.au.
Nico Visagie of South Africa [e-mail: nvisagie@global.co.za] put out a plea for help with transparent windows on the Flight-Sim mailing list. After receiving tips and hints from a number of experienced designers, he wrote this description of how to make tinted "see-through" windows in a Control Tower:
Creating transparent polygons for use as tinted windows, is done by using type 68 as your Surface Color. This command will turn polygons into transparent shields (for example, a tennis course net).To add a transparent polygon, replace the 'f0' at the end of your SurfaceColor Command to '68'.
For example:
SurfaceColor( colorcode 68 )instead of
SurfaceColor( colorcode f0 )It is important to know that type '68' will also change your color codes, but only until you change it back to 'f0'. One you use '68', red will no longer be code '05', neither will blue be code '07'. All these codes will produce BLACK windows. How do I get BLUE windows then? I discovered by mistake that code 'ff' gives blue windows. I have not experimented with the other codes to see what colors they yeld, but please experiment!
Here is my small SCASM Control Tower Macro with Blue Tinted Windows:
; SCASM Control Tower Macro with tinted windows.
; %1 = Lat
; %2 = Long
; %3 = Scale
; %4 = Rotated Heading
Area( 5 %1 %2 10 )
PerspectiveCall( :A )
ShadowCall( :A )
Jump( : )
:A
Perspective
RefPoint( 7 : %3 %1 %2 )
RotatedCall( :B 0 0 %4 )
Return
:B
Points( 0
007 015 -007 ;00 South Wall
007 000 -007 ;01
-007 000 -007 ;02
-007 015 -007 ;03
-007 015 007 ;04 West Wall
-007 000 007 ;05
007 000 007 ;06 North Wall
007 015 007 ;07
000 021 000 ;08 Roof
009 019 -009 ;09
-009 019 -009 ;10
-009 019 009 ;11
009 019 009 ;12
)
SurfaceColor( 03 f0 ) ;Sides
VecPoly( a 0 1 2 3 ) ;South Wall
VecPoly( a 2 3 4 5 ) ;West Wall
VecPoly( a 4 5 6 7 ) ;North Wall
VecPoly( a 6 7 0 1 ) ;East Wall
SurfaceColor( 00 f0 ) ;Inside
VecPoly( a 0 3 4 7 )
VecPoly( a 8 9 10 ) ;Roof
VecPoly( a 8 10 11 )
VecPoly( a 8 11 12 )
VecPoly( a 8 12 9 )
VecPoly( ai 9 10 11 12 );Roof Inside
SurfaceColor( ff 68 ) ;***** BLUE Tinted Windows! *****
VecPoly( ai 0 9 10 3 )
VecPoly( ai 10 3 4 11 )
VecPoly( ai 4 11 12 7 )
VecPoly( ai 12 7 0 9 )
LineColor( 00 f0 ) ;Roof Support
MoveToPt( 0 )
DrawToPt( 9 )
MoveToPt( 3 )
DrawToPt( 10 )
MoveToPt( 4 )
DrawToPt( 11 )
MoveToPt( 7 )
DrawToPt( 12 )
Return
EndAIf you have anything to contribute on this subject,
please send e-mail to kraybill@vianet.net.au.