TerraGear, FlightGear's scenery-building tool, now includes support for NIMA's VPF format. That means that you can get all of your raw data for building scenery -- except for elevations (DEM) and airports (see $FG_ROOT/Airports/default.apt.gz) -- from the one of the four free VMap0 (Vector Map Level 0) CDs downloadable from NIMA (with worldwide coverage). Here's a document explaining where to download the CDS and how to build landmass, lakes, rivers, roads, land-cover (forests, fields, grass, etc.), cities, towns, and lots of other scenery from them: http://www.megginson.com/flightsim/fgfs-vmap0/ This is *not* a general scenery-building tutorial, but it could form part of one. With this change, I think that scenery building is easy enough for the braver regular users to try, though they might want a little more documentation. You'll need an up-to-date CVS copy of TerraGear to try this. The tgvpf utility also works with the much more detailed VMap1 CDs, if anyone's brave enough to try them (US only, unfortunately). I have found that the detail in VMap1 tends to make far too many triangles for FlightGear in its current state. For any GIS people reading this, the general C++ VPF library is completely separate from the TerraGear-specific stuff and can easily be included in other unrelated GIS apps. Enjoy, David -- David Megginson [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
