| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
Author: lynx 108 Posts Status: Confirmed Pilot  | Date 09-10-07 01:45 |
HB-100 wrote:
It wasn't there 2 month ago by my knowledge. (but tell me if I err, cause that would put this into another light)
The blacklisting has always been there, but it seems to be stricter lately. Actually, this is the same mechanism used by the provider's search engine (and probably most of it's other services). And
that's probably where this "virus" thing comes from - attacking the search engine makes more sense, me thinks.
HB-100 wrote:
As I said earlier. I wouldn't mind to pay something for usable earth textures we may download as we just need it and integrate it into the
flightsimualtor. Maybe they then even might deliver better quality (colours/contrastc) special fitting for our needs in the flightsimulation.
All would benefit from this.
Me too, as well as I don't mind buying photo scenery products for the areas I tend to fly over most (there should be a very promising package for Germany soon, by the way). I think that would
make a great business model, too. I can't help but wonder if Microsoft themselves will come up with something like that for the next release of FS. At least, they are well aware of TileProxy, and they
already included vast improvements in the scenery engine especially for photo sceneries. And they alreay have much of the necessary data in-house. On the other hand, this very idea seems to
have crossed Service1's mind too - they now have a (very basic) flight simulator included in their other geoinformation product. 
As for coping with the blacklisting, I think the best idea would be to simply throttle the download engine enough to remain under their radar, so to speak. But for that we'd first have to find out how
slow is slow enough, in order to have a good starting value for the ini file. For an offline tool like FSEarthTiles, downloading slowly is no problem, but for an on-the-fly tool like TileProxy, this is simply
not feasable.
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: Flying Monkey 83 Posts Status: Pilot | Date 09-10-07 09:47 |
Hey HB-100, I'm just popping in to say that I ve been using slowly but in a consistent way FS Earth Tiles, and I must say it's smooth plain sailing
for me, a brilliant software, and as far as I'm concerned I did not bump into a single bug. It's simply great! The best FSX addon tool for me so far!
Thank you again 
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
Author: HB-100 1151 Posts Status: Living Legend  | Date 09-10-07 20:20 |
lynx wrote:
The blacklisting has always been there, but it seems to be stricter lately. Actually, this is the same mechanism used by the provider's
search engine (and probably most of it's other services). And
that's probably where this "virus" thing comes from - attacking the search engine makes more sense, me thinks.
The blacklist yes. But that captcha (nice word. didn't know it before) is new. 2 month ago it simple printed an error page.
Maybe it's because of the search engine. Don't know.
lynx wrote:
I can't help but wonder if Microsoft themselves will come up with something like that for the next release of FS. At least, they are well
aware of TileProxy, and they already included vast improvements in the scenery engine especially for photo sceneries. And they alreay
have much of the necessary data in-house. .
I read a blog somehwere where the developer argumented against useing photoscenery in FSX. No real good arguments if their
alternative is their bad default textures. I don't get why they didn't put more effort in creating fitting default textures. It destroyes a lot. Tile
Proxy can be seen as a little rescue for FSX. The only bad point is that the look of phototextures in FSX is still all a little too fuzzy and matt. If they work on this this would be a great thing
Do you know if their are parameters you can adjust the brighness, color and contrast of the FSX in general? It somehow alters the
windows or videocard setting but to the bad side.
lynx wrote:
As for coping with the blacklisting, I think the best idea would be to simply throttle the download engine enough to remain under their
radar, so to speak. But for that we'd first have to find out how
slow is slow enough, in order to have a good starting value for the ini file. For an offline tool like FSEarthTiles, downloading slowly is no
problem, but for an on-the-fly tool like TileProxy, this is simply
not feasable.
Something to think about. I think it probabily has to be very very slow, sleeping slow, because the 'recover' time seems to be a few hours
it might be they observate all the time. I also wonder a little what triggers the detection.. is it more a download pattern or is it the raw flow
or maybe both? It would be interesting to figure it out. Just the "should you do all what you can do? What is on the safe sidethat you can
do? question in this case is a little a problem here.
Post Edited ( 09-10-07 20:25 )
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: HB-100 1151 Posts Status: Living Legend | Date 09-10-07 20:23 |
Flying Monkey wrote:
Hey HB-100, I'm just popping in to say that I ve been using slowly but in a consistent way FS Earth Tiles, and I must say it's smooth plain
sailing
for me, a brilliant software, and as far as I'm concerned I did not bump into a single bug. It's simply great! The best FSX addon tool for me
so far!
Thank you again
Thank you a lot. A very welcome feedback!
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: Wolfram Ravenwolf 78 Posts Status: Pilot | Date 09-11-07 00:08 |
HB-100 wrote:
p.s. I could not test/check the new accuracy in FSX.. didn't have time to compile large areas and test this in fsx...spend that time in
improveing the code...so i realy a little on you here. report if something is complettly messed or missplaced in the flightsimulator
Just a quick note to let you know I'm working on redoing the comparison I did before - it's compiling the final area right now. Unfortunately I don't
have any more time tonight so I'll have to continue tomorrow (well, it's past midnight, so actually today). Then I'll upload some more images which
compare the different undistortion options.
I'm curious: How are they implemented and what's the difference between Good and Perfect?
By the way, since this modifies the actual tile images, I guess I won't be using tile snapping all that much anymore - with the tiles being modified,
what's the point, I might as well snap to Long/Lat. You once tried to explain the accuracy difference between the various snapping options and their
purpose, but lost the post. Would you explain it again, time permitting? Maybe write it with a word processing program locally first so it won't be
lost again, and it might be of use for a future Readme.
Thanks! See ya later...
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: HB-100 1151 Posts Status: Living Legend | Date 09-11-07 00:38 |
Wolfram Ravenwolf wrote:
I'm curious: How are they implemented and what's the difference between Good and Perfect?
what's the point, I might as well snap to Long/Lat.
Maybe write it with a word processing program locally first so it won't be
lost again, and it might be of use for a future Readme.
Thanks! See ya later...
Thank you for testing this. I still havent found the time to do this myself.
I own you the explanation for the undistortion and especially in connection with the SnapModes, I know.
It's maybe the time where I should start with a usable documentation.
It is a lot simpler to explain with some good graphics/pictures.
With perfect yes you may as well use any mode you like and you should get a perfect result if I did no mistake. However there is still some
difference that is good when you know it.
LatLong is what I prefer because it's good for multy areas.
And good perfect depends if I am in a hurry or want to keep the texture for a longer time.
If you are testing..there is something I still have to check about myself and this is how the FSX resembler handles the area coords by its
default settings. The SDk doc default settings contradicts all default settings of the previous FS SDK's..
FSEarthTiles requires that Lat/Long is specified at the left top edge of the area/pixel and not at pixel center. (the coords are sourrounding
the area and all pixels are completly within encapsulet) When the FSX SDK default option is set wrong (the fsx sdk seems to indicate that
but only the one of fsx) then all textures will have an offset of exactly 0.5 pixel toward north west. This I can only figure out by testing it and
try the two option modes. I have to do that somewhen. But I say this so you know.
Post Edited ( 09-11-07 00:43 )
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: Wolfram Ravenwolf 78 Posts Status: Pilot | Date 09-11-07 19:25 |
Alright, here we go...
Texture Undistortion Off:
Texture Undistortion Good:
Texture Undistortion Perfect:
Good job, it's perfect! The remaining misalignment probably is caused by FSX itself - or the service provider's accuracy... Interestingly, I
couldn't spot any difference between the Good and Perfect undistortion options!
So far I only tested tile snap mode with this... Do you want me to test any other settings for you?
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: lynx 108 Posts Status: Confirmed Pilot | Date 09-11-07 20:06 |
HB-100 wrote:
captcha (nice word. didn't know it before)
Me neither. I read it on the TileProxy forum for the first time. It supposedly stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"...
HB-100 wrote:
I read a blog somehwere where the developer argumented against useing photoscenery in FSX.
The most obvious argument against worldwide photo scenery coverage is simply storage size. They'd need to invent a new removable media technology (BlueRay++ ) first to be able to even ship
this.
HB-100 wrote:
The only bad point is that the look of phototextures in FSX is still all a little too fuzzy and matt.
I haven't noticed much difference in this area, apart from the increased texture resolution in FSX. Maybe you graphics card or display (or the combination of both) is doing something funny there (or
FSX doing something your hardware or driver doesn't like)? Granted, the mipmapping mechanism tends to display lower resolutions too long, but that can be adjusted by the MipBias setting (i will
never understand why they took this one out of the settings dialog). But for me, everything above 4 (the default, I guess) causes massive texture shimmering.
HB-100 wrote:
Do you know if their are parameters you can adjust the brighness, color and contrast of the FSX in general?
Nothing I'm aware of. These things need to be adjusted in the graphics driver, or in the display. You should be able to define a seperate profile that will be activated automatically whenever you
launch FSX (at least the ATI driver can do that).
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: Wolfram Ravenwolf 78 Posts Status: Pilot | Date 09-11-07 20:33 |
lynx wrote:
Granted, the mipmapping mechanism tends to display lower resolutions too long, but that can be adjusted by the MipBias setting (i will
never understand why they took this one out of the settings dialog). But for me, everything above 4 (the default, I guess) causes massive texture
shimmering.
That's why I sold my ATI and bought Nvidia instead: The shimmering can be removed very easily. Try setting "Negative LOD BIAS" to "Clamp" rather than
"Allow". Unfortunately the ATI drivers didn't have any such option (that's why I switched to Nvidia).
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: HB-100 1151 Posts Status: Living Legend | Date 09-11-07 22:15 |
Thank you very much for your tests Wolfram! You are an active contributer to that too probabily more than you aware off.
That's very cool. So it works.
I have compiled some drawings here that I hope will explain the undistorting thing a little for those interested and really want to know it.
Will use this in the doc later.
The very first slide is still an issue I have to check with the FS compilers. It seems that the FSX SDK's default want the the area border
coords defined as drawn in the right exactly in the center of the pixel whereas all the older FS SDK's default option set seems to go along
with FSEarthTiles outputs. It's just a matter of settting the FS compilers option right in the .inf file.. But this is still open to do.
p.s. byway i havent testet how the border in FS really looks of two connected neighbour ares with the good/ prefect mode. I hope it looks
right!
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: HB-100 1151 Posts Status: Living Legend | Date 09-11-07 22:20 |
Wolfram Ravenwolf wrote:
So far I only tested tile snap mode with this... Do you want me to test any other settings for you?
No the modes are not that interesting here in this connection. But if you really have time (do as it is ok for you) you might try to test the look
of two close neighbour areas you snap with one of this modes Off/LOD13/LatLong once with good and once with perfect.
Or try to figure out that FS compiler option..but i guess for this you need to set resolution lvl 8 and adapt the .inf that it compiles it down to
at least LOD13 else you will see nothing of the texture in fsx. that would help me to safe time.
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: skyhawk263 7 Posts Status: Young recruit | Date 09-12-07 01:59 |
After spending a few days using pre v0.6 I have to say you have made alot of improvements. The d/load speed has about tripled for me. Thank
you! I think your very close to a version 1.
I have to agree with Wolfram, I see the same results with airport alignment now. I now have done an area from Los Angeles to San Francisco in photo
scenery.
If anybody is interested, I do different amounts of detail to keep the scenery sizes down. I do a 2 to 3 mile radius at 1 meter around the airports,
big citys at 2 meter and go up to 4 meter for remote areas.
Thanks for all your hard work.
Skyhawk263
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: GSalden 15 Posts Status: Young recruit | Date 09-12-07 12:11 |
If I want to do a country, in my case the Netherlands , what would be the best procedure to follow ?
Now I just start at an area at 2m/pixel from 12x12nm.
I need to make squares and make the overlapping as small as possible.
Or would it be possible to make a large square around a country in which there are small squares , so it would be possible to download
each square at the time ?
Gerard Salden
Netherlands
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: skyhawk263 7 Posts Status: Young recruit | Date 09-12-07 13:41 |
Hi Gerard,
This is the procedure I use. First I start by looking at a sectional map and figuring out what areas I want to do in what detail. ( 1m, 2m, 4m).
To make it easier I try to do areas in this manner, say 34 30' N by 33 0'N by 117 40'W by 117 20' W. At 4m/pixel this will give you about a 100 meg
bgl. For areas I want more detail, I make the d/load areas smaller 34 30' N by 34 15' N by 117 40' W by 117 30' W. At 2m/pixel this will give you
roughly a 90 to 100 meg bgl. For airports, I center on the airport , then depending on the size of the airport do a 2X2 or 2X3 mile area around it.
I just use lines of Lat, and long, to seperate the 2 and 4 meter areas. I also use tile mode, this way the areas overlap a small amount and there
are no gaps in the ajoining areas and are seamless. Airports I just give higher piority to in the the FSX scenery library, so it is on 'top' of the 2
meter area.
If you have any more questions please post and I'll try to help you. When I have more time I'll post some screen shots of the areas I've
been working on.
Skyhawk263
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: lynx 108 Posts Status: Confirmed Pilot | Date 09-12-07 14:00 |
GSalden wrote:
If I want to do a country, in my case the Netherlands , what would be the best procedure to follow ?
The fastest way would be to make a base area large enough to cover the whole country at the highest resolution that won't give an error message (that would probably be zoom level 5 or 6, ie about
16 or 32 m/pixel, maybe even level 4 (8 m/px) for the Netherlands). Then, download smaller areas at higher resolutions of the important places, like major town, airports you visit, etc. However, you
need to force resampling of everything lower than 4 m/px (ie. especially the base area covering the whole country) to LOD13, or else FSX will still show the default scenery above the photo scenery.
You have to manually edit the .inf file for that. If the high detail areas are at 2 m/px or more, you can put all the bgl in the same directories, because higher resolutions have priority over lower
resolutions. If, however, the high detail areas are at LOD13 (4 m/px), you need to create a seperate scenery area with higher priority for them.
This approach should work quite well if you tend to cruise at high altitude. If you're more a low and slow guy, however, I'd create small 1 m/px areas (I think about 8x8 nm is the maximum, depending
a bit on the available memory) for the whole area, or maybe for a corridor along the planned route. Since this will become tedious very quickly, I have posted two batch files that can do this semi-
automatically several pages ago (however, they depend on the command line interface that was present in my patched v0.3, but has not reappeared since). Doing this for really large areas is
completely insane though: the southern half of Florida (south of about the 28th parallel) takes about 230 GB in area bitmaps right now, with well over 1 million tiles downloaded so far, and I'm still not
finished yet (and this is downloading since the release of v0.3-p1...). And if I'd want to have water masks (which would need to be created at least semi-automatically for such a large area), that
would be another 230 GB. I expect the resulting bgls to weight in at something around 80 GB using lossless compression. But, how else will I ever get my brand new 500 GB hard disk to fill up?
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: boojiboy16 21 Posts Status: Young recruit | Date 09-12-07 17:35 |
I've done large areas of Spain this way. My scenery folder is at 14gb I have only two high res areas though. If I didn't fly high in comercial jets this terrain would look awful but from 25000' it looks fairly good. Don't look straight down though as FSX seems to hunt for higher res images near to the aircraft and ends up using default scenery.
Post Edited ( 09-12-07 17:41 )
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: Wolfram Ravenwolf 78 Posts Status: Pilot | Date 09-12-07 20:06 |
I still find trying to do large areas at good resolutions very tedious: Getting the first area done is pretty easy, just enter coords or draw a
selection. But after that, I have a hard time moving to the next area. I regularly get lost when the selection is moved incorrectly/accidentially by
me. Quite frustrating, I can tell you. I can think of a few possibilities to make this easier:
1. Split very large areas in smaller chunks that get downloaded and compiled individually. Maximum size would be based on memory, anything too big
would need to be split. If the program did this automatically, it would be perfect.
2. If automatic splitting isn't an option, how about adding a selection movement control that jumps the selection box to the next border. You'd need
four additional buttons, one for each direction, they would fit nicely between the "Jump to corner" buttons and could be titled N, W, E, S. Make them
another color, maybe red, to show that they serve a different purpose than the blue buttons. The blue ones jump the view to the corner, the red ones
would jump the selection in that direction. For example, jumping to the East would keep the size of the selection, but move it so its left border
would be where its right border was before. Then I could use those buttons to move through the area and download/compile with ease. This shouldn't be
so hard to implement and would improve accuracy a lot for people like me who are most interested in covering large areas at high resolutions.
3. Batch downloading. Would also be useful in addition to the previous suggestions, not just without them. But it could stay a third-party (lynx)
patch if you'd at least add one of the other possibilities.
And another idea, not sure if it would be feasible, but I was thinking about tile provider accuracy: If the tile provider misalignment always was the
same amount, wouldn't it be possible to add a provider-specific offset? If Provider 2's tiles are offset to the North-East by a certain distance,
automatically correct that so the divergence is eliminated. Just an idea, sounds simple, but probably difficult to implement right.
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: lynx 108 Posts Status: Confirmed Pilot | Date 09-12-07 21:01 |
Wolfram Ravenwolf wrote:
If the tile provider misalignment always was the same amount [...]
It isn't. The accuracy mostly depends on the source the providers themself use. They don't seem to care about correcting (or even detecting) misaligned (ie. badly georeferenced) source material.
For a really bad example, take a look at the two FlashEarth screenshots of Altenbeken I posted some time ago. If you'd try to correct for that, well, all bets are off.
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| Re: FS Earth Tiles Pre V0.6 |
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Author: HB-100 1151 Posts Status: Living Legend | Date 09-12-07 22:58 |
Large Areas?
Why don't you simple enter unbroken coords ?
Use the 2 point enter option. All you then need is to keep track, a list, of the coords you enter
in pre v0.6 I improved the AreaSnap option a little so you can enter exact snap coords and it doesnt snaps to the next higher.
So you should be able to work unproblematic best with LatLong snap.
The other option of course is to do it with a batch file once I integrated steffens command line.
1 autosplit is no option for me.
2 thought about that also in the early stages.. but skipped it.
3 i probabily integrate a command line option like steffen did it for 0.3 .. but i am not 100% sure i wil do it.
byway 4 i also spend a short thought of giving it a simple script programming language.. but I skipped that. i think that's overkill for such a
tool.
5 someone here mentioned working with excel cretaing mutliple Earth.ini file...all missing is an autostart option maybe.
I never planed this tool for downloading large areas. It's possible to do but that means manual work. It can be expanded I am sure..but I
somewhere have to cut else I can never finish it. Honest I wish a little it would already be finish and I can turn to other things.
The main functionality is done and it's already working very well, but there is so much left to do that has to be that you will not see now
before you suddently need it in the future that I guess it will take all the left pre version space 0.7, 0.8 ,0.9 till to the final 1.0.
I will not continue to develope that tool after 1.0 At least so I have it planed.
Here is somethign that might interest you..
This is a small area downloaded with a negative Resolution Level of -3 !! (not possible in v0.6))
-3 means about 6 cm / pixel that's FSX best resolution. At some special places this is possible to get from the services.
That's how it looks then (Karlsruhe/Germany):
This is worlds away of the 4meter/pixel of FS2004
It' seems that a brute resolution helps to bring sharpness into FSX.. But it's a vast of space and speed and you wont find that resolution at
so many places.
Another thing I'll mention now. It's something I know since a long time. Some services have more than one set of tiles in good
resolutions. You know there is a version number in the services URL. Sometimes it's worth to play with this numbers a little outside the
range of what all already know. Have you every tried a large number 3 or 4 digits?
Try this at Kalsruhe (N48° 59' 39.87'' E 8° 23'57.88'')
To be honest I don't really know how to handle this multiset /version's best or if I shall do that at all. At the moment I tend to simple make it
possible to define up to 9 services in the config and let it to the user what he wants to do with that space. .Again unplaned more work.
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