USA Regions have low quality satellite images

  • Depending on the region, when you zoom, if you see small blue circles (airports symbols) is the only place where you have very good resolution and plantation (3d trees, vegetation and buildings and structures), all the other USA regions not have high resolution neither objects (mainly central area of USA.

  • I could possibly assist here but I would like to have a more stable grid generator which can create a world white afs tile grid for every resolution to use in QGis so I don't need to make use of heavy overlapping to get seamlessly adjacent tiles. Currently I'm using this grid generator (by flight-sim.org community member Vogel69) for my NRW project but it has some limitations and for example crashes when trying to create very large grids. The generator should be able to do at least a global level 11 grid without crashing and also support standard shapefiles output aside from kml output (but others will prefer kml output when not using QGis, QGis just can't import the kml files the generator creates so I have to convert them using an online tool first).

    Further, what is the exact coordinates system used by AFS? I'm currently using "EPSG: 4326 WGS84" which works but I was not able to create a matching grid properly in QGis manually using this so there might be another WGS 84 based projection used. If I could create the grid in QGis there was no need for any grid generator on my end.

    the green is low quality, and the water doesn't look like water.

    This means, the imagery needs color correction - is that correct?

  • The Grand Canyon seems to have less quality image resolution than in FS2. Can this be fixed? I do have USA installed and I’m using 3080 with everything ticked to the max. But flying a chopper low and slow in the canyon definitely shows that FS2 resolution is far superior. In the new version, when flying in the canyon, some areas are a blurry mess and some are clear and perfect.

    To me, this was one of the most amazing VR experiences in FS2, so to see that degraded is painful.

  • I could possibly assist here but I would like to have a more stable grid generator which can create a world white afs tile grid for every resolution to use in QGis so I don't need to make use of heavy overlapping to get seamlessly adjacent tiles. Currently I'm using this grid generator (by flight-sim.org community member Vogel69) for my NRW project but it has some limitations and for example crashes when trying to create very large grids. The generator should be able to do at least a global level 11 grid without crashing and also support standard shapefiles output aside from kml output (but others will prefer kml output when not using QGis, QGis just can't import the kml files the generator creates so I have to convert them using an online tool first).

    Further, what is the exact coordinates system used by AFS? I'm currently using "EPSG: 4326 WGS84" which works but I was not able to create a matching grid properly in QGis manually using this so there might be another WGS 84 based projection used. If I could create the grid in QGis there was no need for any grid generator on my end.

    This means, the imagery needs color correction - is that correct?

    why dont you do small areas over and over instead?

    no, not color correction, the whole thing is very low res

  • why dont you do small areas over and over instead?

    I do level 10 sized tiles and then one by one. I do it this way because I want to do some color correction and a simple one-for-all filter is not giving me the desired results. I'm used to create about perfectly colored orthophotos fitting seamlessly into the surroundings for X-Plane and want to get a similar result in AFS so I can't just do all NRW in one or two tiles. Further, editing one single tile covering everything at 1m per pixel would result in a very large file size and I could not do the color correction in Gimp because I only have 32 GB of RAM and last but not least processing such a large high resolution tile in Geoconvert would take forever if it finishes at all, again I have not enough RAM to process this.

    In the end the Geoconvert process is limiting my workflow because I can download and edit my tiles much faster than Geoconvert needs to process them so my approach is not inefficient in any way (I prepared 14 tiles yesterday and Geoconvert is just half way through them by now).

    Here's my tiling in QGis, the red tiles ar the ones prepared already for process:

    I forgot: If I don't have the grid thus don't know where the tiles borders are I need a lot of overlapping for every single tile to get the lower resolutions without gaps in between. I used overlapping at first and the area effectively rendered (whole tile minus 20-30% overlap on each side) decreased to about 40% and the other 60% was wasted because overlapping means I have to render these areas again and again because they are present in multiple tiles. This is why I decided to figure out how to use the grid and started from scratch. Now it's going really fast.

    :)

    Edited 4 times, last by Paradoxagi (July 15, 2022 at 4:15 PM).

  • Where would you like to see the resolution being improved?

    I suggest a metropolitan area in the USA that can be used as a bridge between the small New England DLC and the sliver of South Florida DLC. This could be the Washington DC, New Orleans area, Atlanta area, St. Louis area, Chicago area, Houston, San Antonio, or Austin, Texas, etc.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • I think JFK could use some improvements, here's a view of IRL vs AFS4 Runway 22L landing; the green is low quality, and the water doesn't look like water.

    Here is an easier image to compare the two views.

  • In theory, as the whole US is available on USGS for free use (as far as I know) someone could simply create additional high resolution tiles here and there, especially if there are only few areas affected.

    That is correct, in theory, why don't don't you try a few as an example? I'm sure any additional HD scenery would be well received.

    Maybe Chicago, Memphis, Washington DC. or any area for that matter.:)

    Regards,

    Ray

  • I suggest a metropolitan area in the USA that can be used as a bridge between the small New England DLC and the sliver of South Florida DLC. This could be the Washington DC, New Orleans area, Atlanta area, St. Louis area, Chicago area, Houston, San Antonio, or Austin, Texas, etc.

    Regards,

    Ray

    I live in Louisiana, I would like to fly in New Orleans as it is my home state, even though I doubt they would add that region.

  • why don't don't you try a few as an example?

    I can't because I'm still rendering the NRW tiles. My computer is pretty busy doing this and this will take some more days to finish. Once this is done I will decide what to do next so I thought maybe others could join doing this stuff.

    There is a USGS tutorial available but instead of using Irfan View for the Tiff conversion I recommend using QGis because then you don't have to do the coordinates files manually but get TFW files instead, which can be read by Geoconvert directly - this is much more convenient to do then.

    :)

  • I live in Louisiana, I would like to fly in New Orleans as it is my home state, even though I doubt they would add that region.

    New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Mobile and SW Florida beaches would make a dynamite DLC area.

    Ray

  • I live in Louisiana, I would like to fly in New Orleans as it is my home state, even though I doubt they would add that region.

    You never know. The only reason we have South Florida DLC is because one of the IPACS team members liked to vacation at Key West.

    Ray

  • I just completed a quick test by using an old folder of HD scenery for FS2 for the Chicago KORD area. I have a 9 area, level 9 - 15 of the main airport area with some surrounds. The scenery folder is 1.93 GB in size. Should anyone wish to install it in FS4 I can upload it to flight-sim.org and make it available. Here is what it looks like in FS4. Scenery only, no cultivation or airport yet.

    Regards,

    Ray