Some specific questions about the upcoming GeoConvert tool

Quote from drhotwing1

No, you did nothing wrong here. Your image represents a raw image file. For images like this you will obviously need to edit them a bit. There are two ways to achieve this. I use Gimp. Load the image into Gimp and add a transparent alpha layer to the image, use the various tools to outline the area that you want to make transparent (like what Rodeo mentioned above). Or delete sections that you don't want, find a nice water image, add a layer to the project and replace the area with no tiles with that water and save.

This mostly only happens around waterlines where their imagery stopped. We will add a couple of tutorials about editing your images but you will need to understand either Gimp or Photoshop somewhat to do this. Gimp is somewhat easy to use with some guidance.

Here's a quick and dirty fix of your image that took me 30 seconds to do in Gimp.

Thanks Jeff, I'm more than comfortable with that level of image editing. The entire coastline of Scotland will be a different matter though! Is it VES that decides not to supply an image of water or FSET detecting a lack of features? If I was doing a large area I'd prefer to take whatever the satellite imagery provides.

It's virtual earth that's the limiting factor here. FSET will happily download tiles from virtual earth no matter what the content is. However, you'll find the map services stop providing tiles very close to shore as you head out to sea.

When using FSET with Fsx-based sims, you create water masks by using vector-based tools, with one path drawn for the water-land interface and a second drawn a bit out from shore to represent the deep water, which allows a gradual blend from photoscenery to sim water. It's actually a pretty simple process. It would be excellent if the same water masks that FSET can create could be used for masking in FS2/Geoconvert as well. It's only a theoretical issue at the moment, as FS2 does not have any water that can be revealed by creating a hole like this in the photolayer. But photoscenery looks great from down low when you have water that can give reflections of the sun and the surrounding terrain.

Hi DrHotWing - Any chance we'll get GeoConvert this week, well ideally before Thursday evening? If so I'll put some time aside for it as there's someone visiting I was really hoping to demo some local scenery to.

Quote from drhotwing1

Unfortunately there's still a little bit of work left on the tool before it can be released publicly. Sorry.

Fair enough. I'll let it go. Only 10 days to Orbx now anyway.

Looking forward to trying the upcoming GeoConvert tool.

Will it include an Aerofly FS2 updated "FSEarthTiles.ini"?
(The existing content is made for Microsoft Flight Simulators and not for Aerofly FS2).

Inside my "FSEarthTiles.ini":

#--- Services Configuration --- # you can add up to 9 Services entries

[Service1]
ServiceName = Virtual Earth
ServiceCodeing = 0123
ServiceUrl = http://a1.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net/tiles/a%s.jpeg?g=172
#Referer = http://a1.ortho.tiles.virtualearth.net
#UserAgent = Mozilla/4.0
ServerVariations = a0,a1,a2,a3

[Service2]
ServiceName = Google Earth
ServiceCodeing = qrts
ServiceUrl =http://khm0.google.com/kh?t=t%s&n=404&v=713
Referer = http://khm0.google.com
UserAgent = Mozilla/4.0
ServerVariations = khm0,khm1,khm2,khm3

What means - "ServiceCodeing = 0123" and "ServiceCodeing = qrts"?

Should it be possible to download satellite photo from this link = https://coast.noaa.gov/dataviewer/#/imagery/search/

Is it necessary to also provide a "ServiceCodeing" = **** ? (I do not know what it is ....).

Quote from drhotwing1

You can add as many services to the config file as you want, I have 6 services and around 3 working at the moment. "Service2" is just one of the ones i had open and use. I believe i have that service set to VES

Do you have the link to the 3 that work?