Coast Line Maker

[simonovman]

Anybody in here got any experience with Coast Line Maker?

I finally found out how to get it to work in FS9 (there's an additional program you have to get, by another guy, to make the grid lines display) and after some experimenting I found out how to lay in the new shorelines and put in the new polygons and all that; and it did work, sort of.

In fact it may have done all it does; that's what I'm trying to find out.

See, I needed to trim away some landfill in order to restore North Beach to its thirties proportions; and using Coast Line Builder I did succeed in eliminating the land itself. The green stuff is gone.

Unfortunately the shore itself remains. There's this narrow sandy strip, half submerged, where the old shoreline used to be; from the air it looks like a white line, like a dried sweat mark on dark work clothes. Looks terrible.

And of course unacceptable; that line has got to go. But how?

I've tried various things with Coast Line Maker and it just won't go away. I tried doing a flatten too (it needed one there anyway) but that didn't help.

Now I imagine I could do something with landclass to eliminate the line, but that seems a clumsy way to do it; this particular scenery is already getting inordinately file-heavy, because of certain complexities and peculiarities. I'd far rather do it without bringing in yet another program and generating yet another file.

I've got an email in to Iain Murry but so far no reply and I doubt if I hear from him any time soon, given the hour now.

So has anybody here got any experience with Coast Line Maker, and does anybody know what to do about this?

[simonovman]

Found out what the problem is. Program bug, as usual. Coast Line Maker works by generating two files which are converted to bgls: the VTP file, which draws the coastline, and the LWM, which puts the water (or land) in.

Sometimes - too often - it fails to generate the files correctly. If it doesn't create the LWM properly, you wind up with a neat little white shoreline squiggling across dry land. If it blows the VTP, you get water where you wanted it but the shoreline still remains.

And unfortunately it isn't necessarily obvious what's happening. Sometimes, yes, because quite frequently it will declare that it can't find the VTP entries (even though you're looking straight at them!) but other times it will claim to have created the files, and the files will indeed be there, only they're short. (You can look at them in Word Pad and see.) So you install them and get a screwy picture.

The worst part is that in the current case I have to do this twice; the terrain is divided up in big boxes called LOD8 and you can't edit a coastline across an LOD8 border - at least not with Coastline Maker - you have to do separate bgls.

I finally got one section done and it looks very good; but I did it simply by persistence - trying again and again until I got it to save the information - and I guess that's what I'll have to do with the other part too.

Anyway if anybody was wondering, that's what was wrong. Just a program glitch.

Too bad, because in a lot of ways this is a really nice program. The interface is outstanding; anybody with a reasonably steady hand can learn to use it. It's just got some kind of bug - not really surprising in an old program that was made for FS2K and has been patched now through two different versions.