Joining tiles sorted?

  • Yes, it's easily done, but there are several rules you must follow.

    1) When you run geoconvert, you should make sure it does not create masked images by disabling the option to do so. If the option is enabled, and if your ortho images don't have full coverage of one the tiles, it will create a partial image tile. It will also create a corresponding 'mask' tile which blocks out the rest of that region in the sim. If it didn't have the mask tiles, the areas that weren't fully covered would appear as black stripes. If it does have mask tiles, everything will look normal until you try to add adjacent scenery, in which case you'll always have a 'stripe' of the original default low-res photoscenery that the mask is revealing.

    To make sure you don't generate mask tiles, you need to make sure in your .tmc file it has this line: <[bool] [write_images_with_mask][false]>

    If you're using GeoConvert Helper instead of running geoconvert manually, there is an option under the tab "Advanced Tmc File Settings".

    2) When you download your ortho images with FSET, you need to make sure the region you download fully includes the area to generate complete AeroFly tiles for whatever 'level' you're geoconverting. For example, if you want to generate level 9 tiles, each tile is VERY large and you need a big enough ortho-imaged region to complete them, without masks. This is where we were having difficulty before, because we didn't have an easy way to know the exact coordinates that define these regions, so we would blindly just download very large areas and hope we got full tiles for the areas we cared about. However, now we have two different tools that will find the exact coordinates for you, an Excel one I made and a Google Earth one that Vogel69 made:

    Google Earth tool: Image tile coordinates

    Excel tool: Image tile coordinates

    3) Lastly, if you've already made scenery and did use image masks, you need to replace all of the tiles that were masked. You can identify them by their file names. If a tile is masked, you will have two files for it, for example:

    map_09_8580_a700.ttc

    map_09_8580_a700_mask.ttc

    You can either find all of these and replace them individually (might be a nightmare if you have a lot), or just start over with one of the tools above to download your ortho images from FSET which fully include the regions and re-convert them without masks.


    One thing to keep in mind is that if you download an area that is snapped to a certain geoconvert level, you can geoconvert all higher-numbered levels with that same area without any masks. For example, if you download an area that is sized for a level 12 tile, you can geoconvert levels 12, 13, 14, and 15 from that same area without creating masks.

    My process is to download very large areas snapped to level 9 at low detail in FSET ('Download resolution' of 3 or 4), and then use that imagery to convert levels 9, 10, and 11.

    Then I refine the areas where I want more detail by snapping to the level 12 tiles, and download those smaller regions in FSET with a 'Download resolution' of 1,0, or -1, depending on how good I want it to look (-1 is highest res). Last step is to geoconvert those regions for levels 12, 13, 14, and possibly 15. In the excellent AeroFly wiki there is a table that shows recommended FSET Download Resolutions vs AeroFly Geoconvert Levels you can use as a guide. Here is the table below, and the wiki entry is here: https://www.aerofly.com/dokuwiki/doku.…cenery_creation