Missing Cooling Towers/Power Stations?
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Hi, great scenery and I'm delighted with frame rates etc. You've done a super job. I have a query relating to missing power station cooling towers which appear on my system as round white containers wherever there should be a cooling tower. Is this a known issue? There are replacement power station scenery packs which work on top of photo scenery, but not on this - and a whole set of UK special buildings (like Lichfield Cathedral) will also appear on photo scenery but not on this (these were part of Horizon's bgls) Is there anything that can be done to change the objects please? In the midlands where I live there are lots of cooling towers, but all I'm seeing is white containers?? As I say, great scenery - great work...thanks (Phil)
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@Lichfield1956
Probably autogen items at a guess that are replacing the images in the photos. I will check. -
@Derek Thanks for looking; I've tried flying over a number of known power stations and they too are simply white 'tanks' that fill the area that was or is a cooling tower. As I say, flying VFR (hence the title) means you use objects that give you guidance and power stations are certainly one of those. I have a program that enters all power stations new and old but it just won't cover these tanks as there's no flattening process.
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Things like cooling towers need to be placed manually. If we are supplied with the specific locations then that is the sort of thing that can be looked at for the updates. The only one spotted by the beta testers was at Cottam and we did a custom layout for that.
There is no source GIS data we can find that places cooling towers. Or indeed general storage tanks and gasometers. The only way to make sure that in most cases they get a suitable object placed (rather than a standard square building – which would look terrible) is algorithmically. We created code to scan the source building shape data and detect any that appeared to be “round” and replace with a suitably-scaled generic chemical tank. In most cases this worked really well as can be seen from many of the oil terminals and chemical plants etc where dozens of tanks of many different sizes can be seen closely matching the underlying images. Inevitably there will be occasional glitches where actual round buildings exist or with things like castle towers and of course power station cooling towers. These need to be individually identified and then they can be looked at for custom treatment. The problem is that unless you are familiar with a particular area you may not realise that the “chemical plant” below you should really be a power station.Other sceneries containing custom UK object scenery should be usable with this but you will need to identify the specific bgls and textures that contain them so that the objects can be separated out from any included photoscenery. As long as the scenery folder is placed above the VFR in the scenery library it should appear.
It should be noted that the volumes include all power line pylons and most windfarms (some more to come in the planned updates) so there is the potential for conflict if you use another addon that also adds these such as the FSX Power Project.
