Howto:Use Terragear on Windows
This article is under development, please wait a few days so I can finish this article.
This howto describes the procedure you might follow when using Terragear on a Windows machine. If you run Unix, check the Using the Custom Scenery TerraGear Toolset-article.
Installing
- Download the latest TerraGear-cs-Win32-....zip file from ftp://ftp.ihg.uni-duisburg.de/FlightGear/Win32/.
- Unzip the package into a directory named Terragear/.
Elevation
The best elevation data currently available is from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). There are two types of SRTM data:
- Highly accurate 1-arcsecond resolution data, known as SRTM-1, for the USA
- Less accurate 3-arcsecond data, known as SRTM-3, for the rest of the world.
From now on, we'll assume you are using SRTM-3 data. Unless otherwise noted, the process for SRTM-1 is identical.
You can get download the appropriate data from ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm. You want all .hgt.zip files covering your region of interest. Depending on the size of your scenery, there may be quite a few. Download them to data/SRTM-3.
Now we've got the data, we need to convert it into something of use to TerraGear. First, you need to unzip each of the .hgt files. Open the commandline (Run > cmd.exe) and type this:
C:/Users/AS9423-ULT/Desktop/Terragear/hgtchop.exe 3 C:/Users/AS9423-ULT/Desktop/Amsterdam/work/SRT2M-Eurasia-3
Now you will get a lot of .arr.gz files in your work/SRT2M-Eurasia-3/ directory. We need to convert these to the .fit.gz format. Run the commandline again with (NOTE: the space and dot at the and are important!):
C:/Users/AS9423-ULT/Desktop/Terragear/terrafit.exe .
That's the elevation done.
Airports
Now we've got elevation data, we can generate our airports.
First set the commandprompt to run from your work directory:
cd /Users/AS9423-ULT/Desktop/Amsterdam/work/
The command to create airports is "genapts". Run it without any arguments to see the various command-line options. If it is simply run with a specified apt.dat and work directory, it will generate airport layouts for every airport in the file, which can take a long time.
C:/Users/AS9423-ULT/Desktop/Terragear/genapts.exe --input=D:/FlightGear/data/Airports/apt.dat.gz --work=. --chunk=e004n52
If you are generating a larger set of scenery, then you can specify the minimum and maximum longitude and latitude. Genapts will create two sub-directories in your work directory - AirportArea and AirportObj. These define the definitions of the airport layout and any objects present (e.g. windsocks).
Right, that's the airports sorted out.