posted 11-27- 06:21 AM               

I have created a copy of the dover.sm file I have stripped down to bare minimum. Bare minimum means that only the terrain tile Models (g1644#1 etc ) are included and only one texture is included (the Supertexture). This stripped down dover file works when I rename to replace the bad file.

As far as I can see the non-working SM file I have generated is structually the same as the working stripped down dover file. I even looked closely at all of the records and they are identical except for the references to LODs etc, and they all appear to point to the right places.

I can load up the generated file in OPS ok, which I know isn't the definitive test, but at least it tells be that the polygons are all there and textured properly and that there are no major problems with the file structure.

One interesting thing that happens is that when the "working" terrain is loaded, the aircraft starts at the altitude set in the mission file, 20,000 ft. When the "non-working" file loads the aircraft start at 6000ft.

Is there something special with terrain files that I have missed here? I'm pretty sure that the terrains not showing up becuase SDOE found an error loading it. Is there a debug version of SDOE somewhere that will report these kind of errors? The error.log file in the media directory isn't showing anything useful.

I know I;m probably overlooking something simple but for th elife of me I can;t find it! I'll keep pluging away but any help would be very welcome.

Thanks,

posted 11-27- 08:41 AM               

If you get down to ground level, do bits of the terrain become visible?

If you will ftp upload the file to www.fightersquadron.com/incoming

It's a "normal" ftp server, just login with user: anonymous
password: your email address

and don't be alarmed when the file isn't visible after uploading. It won't be until one of the admins moves it.

posted 11-27- 09:55 AM               

As always with these things, I found out what it was literary 2 minutes before I read your reply. It turned out that I had the version in the file header set to maj 1 min 0 instead of maj 0 min 1 so I guess the engine figured it didn’t know how to read it.

I spent hours carefully checking LOD after LOD, Model after model without even going anywhere near this before. Oh well, as always the simple thing catches you every time! You'd have thought I would have learnt my lesson by now.

Thank’s for your help anyway.