Anyone Interested In Checking My Course?

[wojo]

I restarted rebuilding Salishan from square one... this time starting from flat terrain instead of importing a DEM. Those old USGS DEMs you can download are more of a pain than a time saver. The information in them was collected by a satellite (maybe a Martian one), and the Z accuracy is not at all reliable. The satellite can't see under the trees so it guesses the elevations there, and this golf course is probably 70 percent trees. I tried every way to convert LAS points into the old USGS ASCII format, but couldn't do it. We tried a few different GIS programs to export 7.5 minute DEMs but when you look at them in Notepad, you can see it looks nothing like a DEM from USGS... so APCD says "Wrong Format" when you try in import it.

So I restarted using my course overhead image again so I could trace everything. So now I'm back to square one... it validates but won't play. Danny says he replaced the Overhead terrain with a stock terrain. (Did he have to redefine the Overhead texture too and save it? Then he says he "simply replaced the overlay texture assignment to a stock rough texture, and then planar-sized the entire plot back to the default size of 16." I don't get how to "planar size the entire plot". Can you please explain the steps it takes to do that?

Thanks
Wojo

[pmgolf]

I could tell you the Lez Marwick lesson, but I don't think that would do you much good, now would it.

Pete

[Lez Marwick]

Under Terrain/face/select you need to select the 'all of type' icon (the 4 red circles) and click on a face that has the overhead texture in. Once the overhead texture faces are all highlighted you need to choose a texture to change the overhead to (usually rough) and apply the texture. This will replace your overhead texture which is too large for Links with one that Links can handle. The new texture you apply will still have the enlarged mapping of the overhead that you added as a planar, so to scale the rough correctly you then need to select the Texture co-ordinate mapping icon and then either click 'remove from' in the assignment section, or click 'select mapping', choose 'default planar' and then click 'add to', which does the same thing, setting the scale back to 16, (unless you have altered the default, in which case you will need to select uniform scale on the default planar and manually change it back to 16. if that is the scale you desire.

[wojo]

Thanks, Lez. Go to hell, Pete.

[Danny D]

Under Terrain/face/select you need to select the 'all of type' icon (the 4 red circles) and click on a face that has the overhead texture in. Once the overhead texture faces are all highlighted you need to choose a texture to change the overhead to (usually rough) and apply the texture. This will replace your overhead texture which is too large for Links with one that Links can handle. The new texture you apply will still have the enlarged mapping of the overhead that you added as a planar, so to scale the rough correctly you then need to select the Texture co-ordinate mapping icon and then either click 'remove from' in the assignment section, or click 'select mapping', choose 'default planar' and then click 'add to', which does the same thing, setting the scale back to 16, (unless you have altered the default, in which case you will need to select uniform scale on the default planar and manually change it back to 16. if that is the scale you desire.

What you just described is pretty much exactly what I did for him Lez. He was trying to get it to play in Links so he could look at it and test it in the game. I replaced his overlay and replaced it's planar with the default one. I also told him that he could use it in Links for testing, but when he went back to working on it again, he could use the saved CRZ that he sent me BEFORE I made any changes to it. That way he didn't have to re-add the overlay back to it.

Dan

[Danny D]

Danny says he replaced the Overhead terrain with a stock terrain. (Did he have to redefine the Overhead texture too and save it? Then he says he "simply replaced the overlay texture assignment to a stock rough texture, and then planar-sized the entire plot back to the default size of 16." I don't get how to "planar size the entire plot". Can you please explain the steps it takes to do that?

Thanks
Wojo

Since you are asking others about what I did, I'm beginning to think you don't fully understand what I've told you. I'll go into a little more detail. When you do the "all of type" function to select ALL of the overlay, you simply re-apply a different texture to the overlay texture. I chose the standard stock rough. Once it had been turned into rough, it's planar size had to be reduced from Google Earths scale, down to an APCD scale.

For example, an APCD default texture planar scale is approximately 16 feet by 16 feet. Your overlay planar was the entire length and width of your courses on GE, which was most likely near 1500x1500 yards, or 4500x4500 feet. (just making an estimate of an average sized plot for this explanation) So then a default planar is 16x16 feet, and the overlay planar is 4500x4500 feet. To make a picture with enough clarity to show you GE's imagery, the overlay can be 4096x4096. That size is allowable in the APCD, but not in the Links game. Maximum allowable texture size in Links is 1024x1024. Because of this, the overlay texture must be removed from the CRZ file before playing the course in Links. When I applied the stock rough to the overlay, the planar doesn't automatically change, so it magnified the grass to the same magnification as the overlay planar. After I applied the stock texture, I then assigned it the "Default Planar". Now all textures were being displayed at the correct magnification level, and the overlay texture is no longer in use.

Next I did a "Validate and save". Doing so eliminates the overlay file, (the 4096x4096 one not allowable in the Links game) Now it can be played in Links. Remember, it was near 40mb when you sent it to me, and when I sent it back to you in a playable mode, your crz file had shrunk to 3mb. The large overlay TGA file was around 35mb.

I hope that made more sense.

Another thing, recently you dropped in with a couple of questions about something. Seems like I replied to a couple of your questions, but I have no idea if you even found my replies. If you actually did read them, would you be kind enough to acknowledge it. Just a thumbs up emoji would be enough to let me know that you got the message.

Dan

[wojo]

I read them all. Thanks.