World Wide Guide to FS Scenery Design | Utilities | Special Task Utilities

FSASM's Tile Positioning Utility

Although not widely known by designers who use other compilers, FSASM includes a very nifty built-in "Tile Positioning Utility".

When designers lay synthetic scenery tiles, it's a fairly standard practice to use a piece of graph paper representing the square of land they intend to design, and determine the proper tile coordinates for the four corners of the square. (Details of one good method is provided with the BGLGEN documentation.)

PosPlus works well for this, but the Tile Positioning Utility in FSASM goes a step further by allowing you to create a text file containing a number of lat-long readings (for example, for the four corners of your square) and then generate a list showing the correct tile coordinates for all six possible sizes of scenery tiles. Or you could create a text file filled with lat-long readings for all the airports you intend to create, and then quickly generate a list showing the coordinates you would use to place a certain kind of scenery tile beneath each airport.

For example, if you create a text file with these three lines in it:

.synthinfo 33d04'08"S, 151d38'30"E, "Aeropelican"
.synthinfo 36d04'08"S, 146d57'23"E, "Albury"
.synthinfo 30d31'47"S, 151d36'58"E, "Armidale"

You will receive a list like this, showing coordinates for all six sizes of tile:

To use the Tile Positioning Utility, you simply run FSASM at the DOS prompt by typing FSASM followed by the name of your text file. Rather than compile a file, it displays a list of tile coordinates. 

Documentation:  Very good. Found in the FSASM User's Guide, Appendix B
Author: Adam Szofran, Tom Monnone and John Blackie

To download FSASM, turn to the FSASM page.