AeroScenery Beta - Help With Testing Required

  • GACSavannah, can you try to run the conversion an a SSD?

    SSD, as in a Solid State Hard Drive? Unfortunately I don't have one to try it on.

    I just made it home from work, and a second square, just to the west of the first one (hence, much less masking going on) that I had started running about 1am in now complete, so it went faster than the first one. It was still running at 5am when I left, so sometime between 5am and now it completed. Either way, it took considerable less time than the first square did.

  • Nick, regarding how to detect when GeoConvert finishes, can you monitor CPU activity (10 sec avg) to detect the big drop when GeoConvert is done?

    You could, but it would be pretty inexact. Someone could be running something else that eats up CPU so we'd never know. GeoConvert might dip between levels and we close too early. Nightmare to test if people are complaining that things don't work.

    My initial assumption was that there would be a GeoConvert log line written, something like "all tasks completed", and I could poll the log for that. Unfortunately not.

    I believe the guys at IPACS are looking at ways they can improve GeoConvert in this regard, so fingers crossed.

    AeroScenery - Easily create photoreal scenery for Aerofly

    • Official Post

    I believe the guys at IPACS are looking at ways they can improve GeoConvert in this regard, so fingers crossed.

    Yes indeed. We are actively finding ways to assist you here. Good work with your tool so far and we are here to help where we can.

    IPACS Development Team Member

    I'm just a cook, I don't own the restaurant.
    On behalf of Torsten, Marc, and the rest of the IPACS team, we would all like to thank you for your continued support.

    Regards,

    Jeff

  • Yeah, he has done a fantastic job with this software! Made it so easy to import into the sim. And FSCloudPort.com is great for creating airports, too. No pun intended, but they literally are game changers!

  • SSD, as in a Solid State Hard Drive? Unfortunately I don't have one to try it on.

    SSD is probably the biggest overall performance-enhancing upgrade you can do to your computer, especially considering how low the prices are on them now.

  • Decided to give Aeroscenery v.04 a go.

    Ran AeroScenery with Google & zoom level 16, level 9 & 11 AFS levels, with "download imag tiles", "stitch image tiles" and "generate aid tmc" selected.

    Findings

    1. Really loved the GUI and ease of use, saved heaps of time. Thanks for developing this program.

    2. Once you set the geotools folder in the settings and then exit the program, Aeroscenery will not start again. Deleting the AeroScenery registery line allowed the program to run again, but you have the set up the geotools folder again. However after a successful processing run, this problem does not reoccur, and AeropScenery starts every time.

    3. Hitting stop after the program has been running doesn't clean up any files it created.

    4. Found the program errors if you leave the default setting that includes "Run Geoconvert" selected.

    6. I ran the program 2nd time with Run Geoconvert deselected. It downloaded all the tiles again, overwriting identical files, but finished successfully.

    7 Log from file download is overwritten with stitch details once that process runs.

    7. Ran with just "Run geoconvert" selected, but Geoconvert only created level 11 files while I had selected 9 and 11. Tried again with just level 9 selected but Geoconvert only generated level 11 filesagain.

    8. Grid appeared in FS2 OK, but Google textures are a bit washed out compared to the textures created with "Virtual Earth" & FSET.

    9. Tried it a second time with Bing instead of Google (all other values the same) and interestingly this generated both level 9 and level 11 files. Images below show tiles from the FSET & Virtual Earth on the left and the adjoining tile on the right was generated using AeroScenery & Google/Bing. Might just be season/time of image. Bing is closer to Virtual Earth, but both are less vibrant that Virtual Earth.

    Virtual Earth/Google

    Virtual Earth/Bing

    Thanks, Chris

    Win 10 64-bit, 24GB RAM, i5-9400F @ 3.9, 6GB Nvidia RTX-2060

  • In v0.4 I have been using Bing vs Google scenery because Google's Texas scenery had a brown cast to it - Bing had a better green look.

    Does anyone have any suggestions how to fix the tile merge issue below (shoreline)? I ran AeroScenery with MASK = ON and generated level 9-12 tiles.

  • You can download the free graphics program GIMP and match the water color and paint over the ugly stuff. Save your modified bmp files then run GeoConverter. Using a large sized paint brush you can cover up the bad areas rather quickly.

    A few select users are good at water masking and they can give you some professional advice on using the alpha channel to fix the problem.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • The shoreline water is a problem unrelated to AeroScenery as it also occurs using the more labour intensive FSET process. Editing the source graphic files is the way to go, done just before you run Geoconvert. Had a similar problem for some coastal areas using Microsoft's Bing data with areas of white and differing tile overlaps.

    There are 2 ways to deal with this. Options 1 is to do as suggested by Jetjockey10 and overwrite the problem areas. I used a simple cut and paste in GIMP to accomplish this, and used this when creating level 9 and 11 tiles. Options 2 is to get rid of the problem areas altogether as a transparency, also using GIMP. I used this method when created more detailed images for level 14. Note that when using transparencies, you mast have masks enabled or Geoconvert just skips any tile that would have contained the transparent section.

    One other issue I have noticed is when using Google maps in AeroScenery as the data source, you get google logos appearing in your scenery in FS2. They are most noticeable on water but they are present on the land as well. This was extracting the images at zoom level 16 (4m/pix). Higher zoom levels used to create a level 13 or 14 tile would no doubt make this more noticeable. Bing doesn't seem to use logos. The same area extracted using Bing had better colours and no logos.

    Thanks, Chris

    Win 10 64-bit, 24GB RAM, i5-9400F @ 3.9, 6GB Nvidia RTX-2060

  • Version 0.5 is now released

    https://github.com/nickhod/aerosc…s/tag/v0.5-beta

    In this version

    • Smaller selection tiles allowing you to download airport sized areas in very high detail
    • FSCloudPort airports now can be shown as a layer (thanks to Spit40 for allowing this)
    • "Choose for me" button for AFS level selection
    • Better logging and error handling
    • Lots of bug fixes and stability improvements, ready for the next phase of development

    AeroScenery - Easily create photoreal scenery for Aerofly

    Edited once, last by nickhod (July 23, 2018 at 12:28 PM).

  • Does anyone have any suggestions how to fix the tile merge issue below (shoreline)? I ran AeroScenery with MASK = ON and generated level 9-12 tiles.

    AeroScenery should handle water edges better than FSET because it adds transparency for you where it can't download a tile from Google / Bing.

    (I don't know much about FSET, but my understanding was that it adds black where there's no image available due to it being water).

    I'm confused by the texture missing icons that Aerofly is showing. Aerofly obviously thinks this isn't water and should have scenery or it would be adding in its default water texture.

    Maybe the Bing / Google's definition of the shoreline and Aerofly's is different here.

    If you give me a Google maps link I'll give it a try and see what I can come up with.

    AeroScenery - Easily create photoreal scenery for Aerofly