Flatten help requested, and copyright opinions please.

[Airspeed]

I've been trying to flatten the terrain in FSX, so the lumps don't poke through my flat scenery. There's a tutorial on adding a line to scenery.cfg for FS2000, but it doesn't seem to work in FSX.
OK, I could build the terrain into my model, by sticking lumps onto the base polygon, but identifying elevations all over FSX doesn't look practical.
Any tips appreciated.

I've read in the earlier posts about scenery that some of you used FSearthtiles. Found a freeware V1.0; is this what is current?

The author also warns that use of Google's satellite images amounts to copyright breach if you even store them on your own system. Is there really need to worry, especially if it's intended to offer the scenery free to others?

[TSR2]

Hi Mike,

i think you've got your wires crossed. Mesh is what adds lumps and bumps. Programs like FS Earth tiles add scenery tiles which are a bit like a table cloth with a picture on. If you lay the table cloth over the mesh, you'll get the lumps and bumps from the mesh under it giving you the hills etc you'd expect. Earth tiles are copyrighted because you're taking images from Google, Bing etc, so you cant use them for scenery that you make public.

A flatten will effectively flatten the mesh over the designated area to a fixed altitude and this is what you would typically use if you were building an airport.

what programs are you using to do your scenery and what are you trying to achieve?

[Airspeed]

Hi Ben,
Thanks for that.
I'm using FSDS 3.5.1 to build 3D objects on a base polygon. The polygon is made to fit an FSX screen shot to represent the ground outline as it appears in FSX.

I modified Google Earth images to get actual roads and paths etc to fit the objects around.

Tonight, I've started delving into FSX SDK, having discovered that there is an actual HELP HTML. If I'd realised it was there, I'd have RTFM before starting. I thought it was just another required thing like unregistered FSUIPC, to let things like Instant Scenery interface.

It all looks OK, it's just that I have to raise my polygon to the elevation of the highest point in the area to stop base scenery from showing through.

[Airspeed]

Some of you are using SBuilderX, I think.

If anyone is successfully using it, would you please show us what the first group of lines looks like in the .ini file? Mine are all = (blank)