Building Scenery from Scratch

Hi all,

I'm trying to rebuild the scenery locally from scratch using the current 
CVS.  I'm using the modeling howto from the TerraGear website.  It seems 
a little outdated (however the first problem I had is running the 
genapts command0.  My reason is twofold.  First, I'm trying to write 
some conversion utilities to generate base data for new scenes for two 
of our older flight simulators.  Our modeling station is old and all 
scenery is build from scratch which takes an enormous amount of time.  
Second, I'd like to add features to some fgfs scenery--especially in 
Seattle (the base of the airline I work for) and  the state of Alaska.

1) The vmaplv0/ directories or the genapts command seems to have 
changed.  Several of the directories are part uppercase and part lower 
case.  This causes the build to fail.  The source needs to be fixed as 
there are just too many references (e.g. I'm too lazy).  I don't know if 
this is recent change in the data file or source.

2) The format of the command seems to have changed and the --area=Lake 
type commands didn't work.

3) When flying KSEA you can't see Mt. Rainier from takeoff.  10,000' of 
volcano is rather hard to miss.  ;)  And other features of KSEA/KBFI 
that should really be seen.

I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to use a modified version of fgsd or 
the Terragear utilities.  Either way I'll hopefully be providing 
input/output capability for the SPX-200 macro format.  Their object 
database format is undocumented but they provide convesion and 
documentation for the text macro format.  My code is provisionally GNU 
but depends upon whether the manufacture will permit me to make it 
public.  (Also, I only run Linux.)

Any suggestions, opinions or comments will be welcome.

Thanks.


Dale