FlightGear Newsletter February 2012: Difference between revisions

For a long time, FlightGear has had the ability to place random objects on the scenery.  Previously, these objects were placed completely randomly based on a specific density for the material, defined in materials.xml.  This didn't look particularly realistic as the placement never matched the underlying texture. Now object and trees can be placed using a "mask", so buildings will only appear where the texture shows buildings, and trees only in green spaces. Additionally, placement is controlled so that random buildings won't overlap with other random buildings, and buildings don't overlap onto adjacent piece of scenery.  This makes the random objects appear more realistic, and moves FG one step closer to the auto-gen scenery of MSFS and X-Plane.  Further details can be found in fgdata/Docs/README.materials and on on the [[Howto: Editing tile textures and materials]].