I have been stymied for a day or so now at Geoff’s ‘Terragen Topo Map’ video tutorial (video #9), and have been waiting anxiously for some help from the Condor Scenery forum folks.

Last night I got a post from ‘Cadfael’, one of the original scenery designers, with a pointer to an earlier tutorial he did that was the basis for Geoff’s tutorial.  Cadfael also provided a Strata.ZIP file containing the SOPack plugin, one of the two missing ‘strata.bmp’ files, and the ‘Topo.tgw’ and ‘Topo_Map.tgw’ files.

So, this morning I dl’d the ‘Textures.ZIP’ file containing the tutorial, and the strata.zip file containing the strata.bmp file and the other stuff.  I had already installed SOPack.tgp, so I just copied the .bmp and .tgw files to C:\Program Files\Terragen to mimic what I’ve seen so far in the tutorials.

This is a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, except I’m pretty sure I don’t yet have all the pieces, and I don’t even have a picture of the finished puzzle to work from ;-).

It appears to me that the ‘strata.bmp’ file is just a bitmap of a psuedo-color scale for elevation coloring.  It starts out at the bottom with green, and then proceeds upwards through several shades of yellow, brown, and gray to white (snow?).  Maybe ‘Strata1.bmp’ is a variation on this?

The ‘Textures.ZIP’ file I got from Cadfael contains, among other things, a ‘Texture Manual draft’ in PDF form.  Oh boy, more study! ;-).

Oops!  Right away, on Step1, I’m in trouble.  The first step says “You need to have two terragen – one with plugin Sopack for textures, and one with plugin Sopack for topo map (different version of Sopack). Please copy your terragen to folder Terragen1 (program files) and replace sopack with sopack for topo. Copy to this folder also a file ‘strata.bmp’.”

Ach! Spdsskjs;dlfgkj@@! – two versions of SoPack – wonderful!  How does one tell them apart? What happens if you have the wrong version?  Does one use the two versions in sequence?

Double Ach!!  About 90% of this draft manual deals with PhotoShop procedures for creating forest, map, lake, river and other layers.  I really, really wanted to avoid jumping down the PhotoShop rabbit hole :-(

As a sideline to the pursuit of answers regarding Terragen, SoPack, and ‘strata.bmp’,  I have started looking for alternatives to PhotoShop (have I mentioned before that I HATE the idea of having to learn PhotoShop?).  I know about Gimp, having used it a bit in my Linux days in a previous lifetime, but wasn’t all that impressed with its usability either (typical Unix/Linux – uses a myriad of text configuration files and very obscure command-line tools).  However, based on another Condor Forum post I found Paint.Net, which started out as an undergraduate project to replace Paint, and acquired a life of its own.  Looks like it might be simple enough for even me to use – and I don’t have to learn PhotoShop!! ;-)

OK, back from the Condor forum with a few more clues.  NoXylophone (Geoff?) responded to my latest plea for help with the clue that there was a generic .TGW file included in the Condor Scenery Toolkit (installed a few days ago).  I went to C:\Program Files\Condor\Scenery Toolkit\Generic Files\Terragen and sure enough, found ‘TerragenCondor.tgw’ – yay!

So, I opened this file in Terragen and found good news and bad news. The good news was that it did indeed have what appears to be a complete set of terrain layers specified.  The bad news was that the layer names were all in Slovenian, completely incomprehensible to a lowly English-only speaker like me.  Hmm, so I had the bright idea of doing a Google search on one of the layer names, thinking I might find a translation.  In fact, I *did* find a translation of the term I searched for, and all the other terms as well —- In the Condor Scenery forum, of course!  Why I didn’t think of that to start with, I have no idea, but there you are ;-).  Anyway, I used the forum post to translate ‘Gozd_listavci’ into ‘Forest with Deciduous Trees’ along with all the other terms.  The following images show the original and translated forms:

So now I may once again be able to go forward with my adventure, into the unknown wilds of video tutorial #9 – Terragen Topo Map.  On the way through today’s adventure, I also noticed the ‘Doc’ folder in the Condor Scenery Toolkit, and I’m thinking it may be time to do a little RTFM, too – maybe I’ll do that tonight and tackle the video again in tomorrow or Thursday (hope to fly my RL glider tomorrow!).

Series Navigation