FS 2002 Land Cover Redesign - Los Angeles North, California, USA
These files replace the default texture layout over the terrain. The default textures are used, just that they are now placed according to recent and high resolution land cover source data.
The area spans from Myoma, Riverside county, west to Naples, Santa Barbara county, north to Caruthers, Fresno county, east to Scranton, Inyo county. Two of my terrain mesh files based on 30 meter models are recommended: Los Angeles Version 2, and Riverside.
This is experimental work. Many anomalies can be found in this rendition. Comments are welcome, especially if you are very familiar with this area.
SOURCE DATA
The source land cover data are from the National Land Cover Dataset (NLCD), based on Landsat 7 imagery, at 30 meters horizontal resolution. However, this must be resampled to LOD of 5 (about 1.2 Km). Fortunately the high quality source data will enable you to distinguish much smaller populated places than the default. The NLCD data was processed using JASC Paint Shop Pro 7.02 and the Microsoft Terrain SDK tools: resample, tmfcompress, and tmf2bgl. No other tools were used.
The textures selected for this area can be intense on autogen features. If you have performance issues, you should try reducing the autogen density setting. Texture loading at startup may also take longer.
INSTALLATION
Extract the file LC_N12W31 from the zip archive to the FS2002\scenery folder and start the simulator.
The perimeter covered is bounded by:
A distinct boundary can be seen just around the new area since the default textures are not necessarily matching the textures selected for this new land cover layout.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Christian Stock has documented what Microsoft hasn't so far, mainly the use of the resample program from the FS 2000 SDK to generate these land cover replacement files. Many thanks to him.
FEEDBACK
Feedback to mesh64@att.net, http://mesh64.home.att.net/
