- What is LWM/VTP Scenery anyway?
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- LWM: Land Water Masks
- Land Water Masks is polygons that
allow us to change the type of textures that FS uses. These
polygons decide where to draw water and where to draw land.
With the help of these polygons you can draw lakes and
islands, and also define coast lines. Another thing these
polygons do is setting elevation. You can fix lakes to a
certain level, or force elevations to be 0 at coastlines.
Another use for these kinds of polygons doesn’t have to do
anything with land and water. They are used to set
elevations at airports to a fixed value, without actually
changing land / water properties. These polygons are just
invisible. The use of LWM scenery in FS2004 are mainly for
airport flattens, land and water mask.
VTP : Vector based Textured Polygons
- To create areas with
different textures to the terrain textures you need to
create VTP scenery. FS2004 uses this kind of scenery to draw
coastlines (shores), roads, streams, airport background
polygons, non-perennial water, and parks. You could create
this sort of scenery ground polygons and lines. VTP scenery
doesn’t get it’ own polygons; it rather gets mixed with the
terrain textures. The combined textures then get put over
the terrain mesh. The advantage is that you don’t have
conflicting polygons anymore. On the other hand, since VTP
scenery is blended with the terrain textures, roads and
everything else only has a final resolution of 4.8 meters.
This makes roads and streams look a bit blurry at times. VTP
scenery use in FS2004; airport background, bridges,
coastlines, parks, roads, railroads, stream lines and
utilities (poles etc).