var faqs=[ ['My question isn't here!','Do a search on (or ask a question in) the AVSim scenery development forums, chances are you'll find the answer there. If you think your question should be included here, mail me.'], ['Is my computer powerful enough?','Probably, if it's capable of running FlightSim. You will need diskspace for your data (typically tens to hundreds of Mb) and enough RAM to process it (256Mb is OK at a push, 512Mb is OK for most). More is better! In addition, the payware version needs a CPU with SSE extensions - an Intel Pentium3 or AMD Athlon is good enough.'], ['Payware? Pah!','I tried to keep the freeware version usable for most people. The payware version is intended for advanced users, who really need the extra features for fine-tuning the output. It can handle more detail than the freeware version and it works 50-70% faster but it does basically the same job. It will also use modern hyperthreading processors, or even multiple processors.

Try the freeware version out, what have you got to lose?'], ['OK, I'm convinced. Where can I buy it?','Uh, nowhere yet. Sorry - I'm working on this and hope to have something available within a few weeks.'], ['How do I register it?','First, it's not yet available so this may change!

You will receive a license code by email. This is yours - keep it safe!

Keep the email
Store it in a PDA
Put it in a file and back it up to CD/DVD
Have it tattooed on a sufficiently large body part
Don't just keep it in a file on disk which will be lost if your hard-disk turns itself into a spirograph.

Run the commercial installer and copy/paste the key into the dialog that appears.'], ['I installed it and there's no icons. Now what?','Slarti is a command-line tool just like most of the official tools from Microsoft. Check the Walkthrough section in the manual, most people can get themselves working pretty quickly after that.'], ['So there's no GUI?','No - not yet, anyway. I intend to add a GUI in version 2 but this depends on how much interest there is in version 1!'], ['The memory estimate for my project is enormous!','There's a section in the manual about this. Because of the design of MS Windows, it isn't possible for a program to use more than 2Gb of memory regardless of how much you have (RAM and swap). The only realistic way to beat this is to use a Pro or Server version of Windows with a modified boot.ini, or Windows XP 64-bit with an Athlon64 or Opteron processor. I'll support this as soon as I can afford one!

The good news is that you can almost certainly reduce the memory requirements by following the advice in the manual.

Warning! The boot.ini changes worked on WinXP Pro but failed on my WinXP Home installation, producing an unusable computer. Don't try this unless you know how to recover it!'], ['It still runs out of memory even though the estimate is less than 2Gb!','There are two possibilities:

You don't have 2Gb available - this is the total of your physical RAM, and the size of the Windows Swap File.
You do have 2Gb available but it doesn't seem to use it all. In this case you're suffering from memory fragmentation and there's very little that can be done, you will just need to process a smaller area or use lower resolution input data.
For curious techies, try putting "MemDump = true" into the LWM section of the .inf and read the logfile.

'], ['Holy Toley! Look at all those options - I'll never work this out!','Sure you will. You can get by with no more options than you'd need for resample.exe. Then you can add features in one at a time - this is what the Walkthrough in the manual does.

All of the options do something significant. They're needed to give you, the designer, the most detailed control possible over your project. They make Slarti extremely flexible - even people who have been using it for months still come up with new techniques, often ones I hadn't thought of!'], ['How do I ...','

RTFM :-)
Experiment qf. What you're doing when you don't know what you're doing
Search or ask in a developers' forum such as AVSim - there's a lot of experienced, helpful people around (plus me!)'], ['My coastlines look all wrong, and Slarti complains about the file sizes','Check that you haven't saved the data as RGB. This matters for both images and RAW data.
If the file is three times larger than Slarti expects, you need to convert it to greyscale first. An RGB (colour) image with only grey values still counts as a colour image, and Slarti can't work with these.
If it's twice as big as expected, you may have a greyscale image with an alpha channel - you'll need to get rid of this too.'], ['The default coastlines are still there!','Slarti won't make any changes to the default scenery, so you need to disable or override the default files for coastlines and shorelines. You can use the Remesh feature to override small areas, or the PatchLWM feature to make modified versions of the default files which you can then copy into place.
A better solution would be to replace an entire LOD5 area because these correspond to a single file, which you can then just discard; if this isn't possible, try using BGLPatch with an installer - this will let your scenery co-exist with other people's.'], ['I don't want to put resample and other tools in C:\\Terrain_Tools','No problem. Set "ToolsDir" in the .inf file to point to the folder that has your tools.'], ['Which version of resample do I need?','Slarti will work with resample.exe from the FS2000, FS2002 and FS2004 SDKs. I have found that the newer ones sometimes don't produce correct BGLs though, so I recommend the FS2000 version together with tmfcompress and tmf2bgl. These are provided with the free version of Slarti but, to avoid potential copyright problems, not with the commercial version. The newer resamples will usually produce smaller BGLs though. Basically, use whatever version you feel happy with.'], ['I've run it and just get a load of .bgs files. What gives?','These are the source code for the VTP and LWM files that define the coastlines. Check the last few lines of the logfile - they will tell you to run a batch which will compile the .bgs files (and others) into .bgl files that FlightSim can read.'], ['Are there any examples of what it can do?','Yes! Check here for some of mine, or search the AVSim File Library with the keyword "*Slarti*" (include the asterisks). You will need a (free) file library account before you can do this.
If you've created a package and want me to add a link to it here, mail me with the details.'], ['Can I use a mesh BGL to set the heights of lakes automatically?','No, you need to have real elevation data in either RAW or an image format.'] ]