Canadian National Tower

Toronto Dominion Bank Centre
_____________________________________________________________________

This file, ONTCN.BGL (Ontario CN Tower) is a scenery file for FS5, intended as
an add on to Alfred Grech's excellent Ontario SouthWest scenery file,
(ONSBGL3.BGL).

Alfred has done a terrific job creating scenery for the island of Malta (his
homeland), Italy and southern Ontario with northern Ontario on its way.  He 
has been using BGLGEN to create this scenery.  That in itself is quite an 
accomplishment, as Alfred is not a programmer and BGLGEN is extremely 
difficult to use because it does not have a comprehensive instruction manual.
If anyone out there knows the ins and outs of BGLGEN, it would be great if 
they were to put the info on paper (disk?) and upload it to bulletin boards.

One shortcoming of FS5 is an apparent limitation to the available resolution,
one block of scenery can only be as small as approximately 3.5 km.  This means
that narrow waterways, islands, coves etc. must of necessity be at least 3.5
km. wide regardless of its size in the real world.  Alfred has done a great
job even with these limitations. 

Another limitation is that (at this moment) BGLGEN does not allow for the 
creation of buildings that look like those you would recognize.  There is a
piece of texture which can be inserted in BGLGEN scenery which is a generic
patch of buildings, but you cannot create the CN Tower or similar structures.
Hopefully, Enno F. Borgsteede, the author of BGLGEN will continue to expand
this compiler's capabilities so that buildings and other objects can be
created.  

There is an excellent set of scenery programs which covers much of Canada, 
CANADA.BGL, CANADA2.BGL and CANADA3.BGL.  These were (I believe) created
using BGLCOMP, a program similar in concept to BGLGEN.  BGLCOMP is also an
excellent compiler and has more features than BGLGEN.  It can produce
buildings and other objects, but it too has very little documentation.  The 
author, Hiroo Umeno admits freely that he has not provided enough 
documentation to enable users to properly utilize this program.  It would be 
a real service to would-be scenery designers if comprehensive
documentation would be produced for BGLCOMP.  (I would gladly create such a
manual if I could understand how to use the program properly.)  As it is, I
can only plod through a few of its excellent capabilities.

Would anyone volunteer to explain to me how to use BGLCOMP?

Alfred's southern Ontario gives us great ground/water scenery for the Toronto
area but it does not have the buildings like the CN Tower etc. in downtown
Toronto.  His program does not work well in conjunction with Canada.bgl, small 
differences (eg., elevation) cause database errors, sections of scenery
disappear as you fly, etc.  Alfred asked for people to help him by creating
scenery to work along with his efforts.  To that end I present some
experiments in the form of ONTCN.BGL which seems to work with Alfred's
ONSBGL3.BGL.

TO INSTALL.........
It is assumed that you have already unzipped and installed ONSWBGL3.ZIP into
your \SCENERY subdirectory of FS5.

Place a copy of ONTCN.BGL in your scenery directory.  Remove CANADA.BGL,
CANADA2.BGL and CANADA3.BGL if they are in that directory (or change the
extension to something other than .BGL.)

You may wish to put ONTCN.STN into the \PILOTS subdirectory and upon starting
FS, select the CN TOWER from the situations menu (Options, Preferences, 
CN TOWER).  You will be flying south over downtown Toronto towards the Toronto 
Island Airport.  After passing the tower you will be over the Western Gap,
then as you approach the island turn hard to the left. Do a 180 and you will
be looking at the Toronto Dominion (Bank) Centre, a group of six black buildings,
and a tall white building, the Bank of Montreal.

(No, not perfect, but I am still learning.)

Please forward your comments.  If there is enough interest, we will try to
add other features such as the SkyDome, City Hall and other buildings as 
well as major rivers, roads/freeways, etc.  These will be created with an 
eye towards accuracy (within the limitations of the medium).

PROBLEMS.........
Our testing had shown that 'Database' errors sometimes occur when ONTCN.BGL, 
ONAVS.BGL and ONSBGL3.BGL files are used together.  Alfred suggests that there 
may be incompatabilites between programs created with BGLGEN & BGLCOMP. We
eliminated the database errors by controlling the order in which these BGL 
files are loaded.  If these are loaded by FS5 in alphabetical order, the errors
seem to disappear.  To control the order in which they are loaded you can do
a directory sort (use Norton's DS, directory sort, eg., ds ne sorts by name and
extension) and then a 'dir' will show that the files are in alphabetical order.
This causes ONAVS.BGL to load first, then ONSBGL3.BGL and finaly ONTCN.BGL.  
The result was that the database errors disappeared.

When database errors did appear we could usually press Enter a few times and
the error message went away for a while.

By the way, Alfred has asked anyone designing scenery to cooperate and 
coordinate their efforts so that together we can COVER THE WORLD in FS5.

Morton Biback
Flight 642 BBS
CRS BBS
Internet (usenet) address morton.biback@canrem.com