The tool I should have made earlier

I think it was more than a year ago. Nick asked me if I would make a tool and my answer was that it was not necesairy because the tweak only involved a few easy lines of ASM code. Yesterday I started making a tool for this simple tweak, plus some other features. What am I talking about? Ground polygons. If you look at the forums they remain a hot issue all the time. Having to use the FS2002 gamepack, having to tweak the ASM code by hand.

So now I started working on a tool that I called GroundPolygonAssistent. It will help you to do the following things:

  • Tweak the ASM code of ground polygons to make them proper ground polygons
  • Combine different layers of ground polygons in one BGL file
  • Split the polygons if they are bigger than a certain size, this can be useful for FSX, where they have to be smaller than 100 meter to work correctly with the curvation of the earth
  • Output the polygons with different reference points, this can be useful for big airports where accuracy errors occur at big distances from the reference point and it can also increase the overall performance a bit
  • Reproject the polygons, sometimes the data might be in a different projection than the flat earth one used by FS for its XYZ coordinate system, in that case the tool will help you to keep the accuracy of your origional data

Below you see a first screenshot of the user interface. As the tool is not finished yet (actually the buttons have no functions yet at this moment), things might change a bit. I will keep you informed about the progress.

5 thoughts on “The tool I should have made earlier

  1. GianP says:

    Hi Arno,
    as you are on this topic!!

    What about that couple of bits for “visibility” to be added to Actigate?
    (You know, many of us are waiting for FS11 to unistall FS9!)

    Ciao, GianP

  2. NickWhittome says:

    Hang on…

    I asked you 2 years ago didn’t I 🙂

    Nice one Arno, I’ll do my usual beta test. 🙂

  3. arno says:

    Hi Gian,

    Ah, yes, that was also still on the list. Sorry, it slipped a bit. I think I will try to look at it during the Christmas break (I guess I promised the same last year :)).

  4. Jeffrey S. says:

    That GUI looks like my private little (buggy) tool for groundpolygons! It also spits out a combined bgl of the different layers. One difference is, that I implemented also that dummy rotated call for FS9 sceneries if you selected the appropriate check box. Just an idea.

  5. arno says:

    That might be an idea, but if I remember correctly the dummy rotated call no longer works in FSX. The other features (to split polygons, etc) are more focused at FSX.

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