Introduction
This document shows the step-by-step process of creating custom FS2002 terrain files using public domain data files from the USGS web site and inexpensive utilities available on the web. I have also created a few utilities of my own to help facilitate the process. For this tutorial I will be enhancing the region of Colorado using the USGS areas shown below. You can access these files from the following web site: http://www.gisdatadepot.com/.
Below shows a topographical respresentation of the same area.
Programs used for FS2002 Enhancement
| Application | Web Site or Source | How Used |
| Global Mapper | http://www.globalmapper.com/ | Used to load USGS STDS DEM files for a given area of the US. Typically we can load several quadrants to cover the area that we are interested in. In the above example we load files associated with Fall River Pass, Trail Ridge, etc. Once the data is loaded, export the data to a single ASCII DEM file. You can export the file to 10 meter, 30 m, 60 m or whatever resolution makes sense. This is width of the grid cells for the terrain. |
| 3DEM | Load the single ASCII DEM file created by Global Mapper. I then export this data to a Terrain Matrix file 16-bit integer format. | |
| Terrain Converter | not available | This is my utility which flips the order of Terrain Matrix file so that it is compatible with FS2002 raw DEM file. |
| UTM Converter | not available | This is my utility I use to create an inf file used as input for the FS resample.exe utility. It converts the UTM extents from the *.hdr file of Terrain Matrix to Lat/Long values in *.inf file. |
| resample.exe | FS2000 SDK | Convert the raw binary DEM file to tmf file. |
| tmfcompress | FS2000 SDK | Compress the tmf file to a smaller tmf file |
| tmf2bgl | FS2000 SDK | Converts the smaller tmf file to the final bgl file which can be put into the FS2002 scenery directory. |
FS2002 Screen Shot of Enhanced Area
