The scenery in Virtual Sailor is based upon a global scenery model in which every scenery has a rectangular area defined by minimal and maximal longitude and latitude.

The scenery is inherently made for covering actual areas of the earth, and for using freely available data that can be download off the internet.

At the basis of each scenery lies the elevation matrix and the header file defining it, and on top of that come layers of ground texture, vegetation and 3D objects of many kinds.

 

The scenery design process:

Making new scenery for Virtual Sailor can be very simple, from the third step described below your scenery is ready for use, however to make a really interesting and sophisticated scenery a few more steps are required.

By default you do not have to change the scenery textures and vegetation, the program has default files which make your scenery appear correctly as soon as the elevation matrix files are found.

These are the basic steps required to make a complete scenery:

• Create an empty directory inside the scenery directory.

• Put inside this directory the elevation matrix and header file.

• Run the program and select this scenery from the map.

• Apply ground textures by elevation and slope.

• Apply dense ground textures for each texture used.

• Select vegetation types and set properties for them.

• Define objects that are related to ground textures and generate the automatic scenery objects.

• Create specific groups of objects such as villages, forests and roads and save them in files.

• Integrate the groups of objects into one objects file and save your work.

The following sections explain the different aspects of scenery making and the structure of files used.