by TreeHugger » Tue Feb 16, 2010 8:19 pm
I just ran some simliar tests and can confirm your results. The last figure in the scene statement is indeed the grid width in meters. It's an absolute value and doesn't change with scene width.
But the values depend upon another - The bigger the scene is, the coarser the grid must be set or I would receive an error message upon loading: "Access violation at address 00481217 in module FMS.exe". You just can't have a big scenery and a fine ground resolution. That's what I meant by saying a smaller ground would allow for a lower number and a finer grid.
In my experience, the factor between size and grid is about 25, as in these scene statements:
500 ... 20
250 ... 10
200 ... 8
100 ... 4
Unfortunately this relation is not constant across different computers and may depend upon other factors I didn't test. That's why I lost interest in scenery making, without a technical documentation it's just fishing in the mud. The whole idea of setting a grid width strikes me as unneccessary, because the grid resolution is already fully determined by the size of the heightmap in pixels.
Regards
P.S.: Nice screenshots, thanks for sharing!