default bridges question

[CAFedm]

If this has appeared before, apologies - did a search and came up with nothing on it.  Wondering if there is any way to remove select default bridges in FS9.  Reason for this is because of inaccurate placement and the wrong bridge type (e.g., suspension used where it should not be of such type).  I've tried using exclude switches but they don't seem to have any effect.  

[wji]

AFAIK, Ultimate Terrain (payware) will remove all default bridges when it's installed.

[bm]

Hi CAFedm,

I can't believe Ecludebuilder2 wouldn't do the trick, but otherwise you could try using defarea to delete the bridge by selecting the appropriate layer.

Hope this helps.
Birdy

[dave3cu]

The normal exclude utilities (Excbuilder V2, etc) wont remove the bridges.

While reading thru the SBuilder help file I stumbled onto this. What is needed is a VPT Exclude. SBuilder will do this.

VTP Exclude Polygons

You can exclude default roads, polygons and other VTP scenery by using a polygon of type equal to "Exclude". The exclusion is on an Area and on a Layer basis. You should press F3 to display the LOD13 grid. Every LOD13 square entered by the exclusion polygon will be candidate for exclusion. The other thing that you need, is to set the layers to be exclude. In FS2004, default rivers are in Layer 4, roads are in Layer 6, railroads in Layer 5, coastlines in Layer 8, bridges and airport polygons in Layer 7 and electricity pylons in Layer 4.

Dave

[bm]

Rgr that Dave. Defarea is used to exclude vtp layers.

Birdy

[CAFedm]

Thanks guys, I just downloaded SBuilder to work with roads.  Once I get the hang of using it, will try it on the bridges as recommended.

[RollerBall]

Nooo... that's not the way to do it. All objects like these have a reference point which is situated roughly in the middle of the object and a little exclude placed right over it will take the object straight out. That includes all kinds of default and library objects such as the carriers, runways, terminal buildings, bridges, taxiways and all that stuff. The exclude need only be a few metres in size (relative to the scenery) and you can take out whole aprons with an exclude that's only something like 3 metres square.

I've done this with the Dartford Bridge which is a default object that was missed in 04 9.0 but put in in 9.1. Notice how the exclude has taken out the bridge but left the tunnel vents and other 'special' ie non-autogen objects on each shore.






You can just write a litlle XML exclude and use BGLComp but to make it easy all I did was start a flight near the object in the Bell, go to top-down view and go into slew mode. Then slew until you're directly over the centre of the bridge ie over its reference point.

Start up SceneGenX and create a new scenery at the flight sim position (I'm assuming you've got FSUIPC installed so the FS and SceneGenX are linked). Then just right click, create new exclude and reduce the size of the exclude it makes down to the size of the Bell's position in the sim. Save and generate scenery and pop it into your Addon Scenery file in the usual way.

Make excludes for all your other bridges in the same way and put the bgl files into the same addon scenery folder.

Job done

[dave3cu]

Nooo... that's not the way to do it.....

From what I can tell (after 'extensive' testing

[RollerBall]

No you're probably right Dave. Certainly the 'bridges' which are just roads going over rivers would be removed by editing VTPs.

[dave3cu]

It includes more than just roadbed crossings.

Here is an example, west of London, that a normal exclude didn't remove. You can see the extent of the 'exclude-all objects' used to make sure I covered any reference point.

I'd guess that on a world wide basis, most bridges are of this type.

Cheers,
Dave

Wow! Just noticed the upgrade to the 'Upload Successful' page. The path(s) now includes the filename(s). Should eliminate typos.  Great improvement

[bm]

Hi Dave & Roller, Thanks for clearing this up.

I do wonder whether the sbuilder exclude function actually works consistently - I think stevo (at uksd) has had a little trouble with it on occasion. But that bridge looks to me to be a vtp generated bridge so that is perhaps irrelevant on this occasion.

Birdy

[dave3cu]

Birdy,

I've had no problems with any of the functions in SB, that I couldn't blame on user error. The main one is:

Because your working in a project, rather than a single instance like in ExcBuilder or other stand-alones,