The only thing I've noted is that the underlying tile seems to me is still showing up in some sections or parts of it.
Hi Edward,
Here is some reading about that issue, no gospel truth, just what I think I understood so far - there's only trial and error yet to figure out how it all works...
Suggestions for setting up scenery priority
Cheers
Antoine
Yes, as Rodeo mentioned. It's not advisable to use anything lower than level 9 for anything. In fact, using only level 11-14 works very well for most sceneries.
Ok, thanks, wilco.
BTW If anybody from IPACS can provide a technical explanation for that I'm interested (not to challenge you, but to understand). Thanks in advance.
Cheers
Antoine
I think that setting priority of scenery to be shown can lead to the solution to the the current abnormal stripes showing around the GeoConverter scenery. It will disable the scenery you don't want to see, and eliminate the potential conflict.
Unfortunately not. Beyond the fact that hidding a bug is no fix, for the stripes not to show up you need a neighbouring scenery to show up instead. And as you noticed, the stripes are systematically "made" of neighbouring sceneries.
If you don't want stripes to show up, you'll need to replace them with another scenery, but then you just move the problem to the next border...
A kind of natural priority is driven by compilation level : a tile compiled in level 14 will show on top, instead of a tile compiled in level 13 at the same place, as soon as the tile level 14 is being loaded of course.
As you noticed, if you only compile your scenery in level 14, it doesn't show up until you fly close enough from the ground for level 14 to get loaded. Then it will probably keep displaying as long as that local tile of level 14 remains in memory.
That's why we have to compile in several levels, for the scenery to show up properly in all LOD levels.
When you overlap an existing DLC, you never know exactly in which levels it was compiled. Your tiles with higher compilation level will technically show up above the DLC, but there's no obvious rule for same levels.
For instance, if I create a scenery overlapping the Swiss DLC and compile it in the recommended levels 9, 11, 12, 13 and 14, usually it first displays instead of the Swiss DLC when I launch an in-flight situation (i.e. my scenery has obviously some priority).
When I fly towards my scenery zone, ground textures next to my aircraft get loaded in higher level and I can see tiles of the Swiss DLC pop up instead of my scenery. Either the Swiss DLC is compiled up to level 15 and the last level gets priority when loaded, or the lack of clear priority causes tough competition between two overlapping level 14 compilations, with unpredictable result.
The problem with the Swiss DLC is, the ground photo textures beyond the border in places like Geneva are artificially blurred, but compiled in the same levels as the rest of the DLC.
In other words, if we make a neighbouring French scenery to fit the Swiss DLC, the artificially blurred textures will always show up above.
The ideal solution would be IPACS to locally provide replacement ground textures without these patches of artificially blurred textures (they have the original orthophotos).
Otherwise, we need a way to force priority to the neighbouring scenery and overlap it in a way to hide those blurry patches of ground.
Cheers
Antoine
From my personal experience with with gliders the elevator behaves pretty much like in the video. But the ailerons are different more damped than shown. In our gliders the control forces are too low to significantly accelerate the stick, I can steer the aircraft with two fingers only and if I let go it barely returns to center. That is probably aircraft specific as well.
That's exactly what I wrote, except that there is no stick shaking during ground roll, but I understand Jay's point that it gives our brain a hint that we're on ground, why not.
In all aircraft controls are designed to provide an intuitive feel in the air. In some aircraft, forces may become high when totally untrimmed, but most aircraft remain perfectly steerable. Some aircraft like the PC-6 Turbo Porter, however, require an accurate trimming not to loose control - some have been lost that way.
I never experienced the effect you mention in sideslip, that may be specific to high wing span gliders.
The pre-stall buffeting is usually an aritificial aerodynamical (or sometimes mechanical) effect to warn the pilot, may be difficult to model accurately for each aircraft.
Anyway, we should first concentrate on the normal flight domain for a start.
Cheers
Antoine
I remember the good old times driving GP Legends cars with a FF wheel.
Whenever I would release the wheel in a curve, it would strongly oscillate, even worse than your yoke in the video.
But such a clearly underdamped setting was necessary to get a strong, immersive, force feedback effect in a curve, without overdamping when cornering or recentering the wheel...
You simply didn't release the wheel in a curve (which you'd never do IRL) and it was ok, that was my best compromise.
As the case may be you will need to reach a similar compromise with the available power in your FF system.
Eventually, that's really a question of feeling.
Keep up the good work.
Cheers
Antoine
+1 on this, although I never liked so much the XPlane rather messy approach.
I'd prefer a nice structured file, with clear priority settings and easy activation/deactivation ticks.
FS' scenery.cfg may look tricky to edit from Notepad++ - it's not even supposed to be, but free tools like Scenery Config Editor make scenery management very convenient and powerful.
My 2 cents
Antoine
@ Antonie
FS Force pug-in used in the video actually supports "damping" feature but I didn't turn it on because I simply don't know what it represents.
I was messing around with the ForceTest program where you can test and feel individual forces and I didn't recognize what am I looking for in Damping.
It would be great if someone could describe this force a little..
Damping can be seen like a friction that stops (damp) oscillation.
[Blocked Image: https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZvsSz.png]
In your video, when you turn your yoke and release it free, it quickly turns back to equilibrium and overshoots in the other direction, then progressively damps the oscillation, a little bit like the light blue curve in the above figure.
Technically, the controls would recenter more or less according to the purple curve, without overshoot, or a very slight overshoot like the orange curve.
But the real control column behaviour, driven by aerodynamic forces of control surfaces in a flow is probably not so easy to reproduce without a very fast and strong mechanism and IRL you don't release the controls like that in flight.
So, I assume you'll want to find an optimum to have a realistic feeling while flying with the yoke in the hands, without exaggeratedly slowing down force response...
More about damping factor : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damping_ratio
Cheers
Antoine
Independantly from that I suggest not to go below level 9.
This has been told by IPACS and we nether mentioned levels 5 and 7 before.
Rodeo
They're featured in the sample tmc that was provided to me by IPACS, as well as a level 15.
Anyway, levels 5 and 7 work just like level 9, enables seeing your coverage in "location" menu without zooming in. But I don't need them otherwise.
Cheers
Antoine
It is an estimation of the necessary required workspace needed for resampling.
I assume you're not using FSX/P3D's resampler in this case, then you should ignore it.
Cheers
Antoine
Wow, very nice indeed.
It could need a little bit more damping in roll but it must be already a huge improvement compared to static spring-centered yokes.
I never understood however why people using FF make it shake on ground roll. Of all of aircraft I've flown IRL, none of them had the stick or yoke connected in any way to the undercarriage.
Some aircraft like the Piper Cub or Super Cub feature non-balanced elevator controls, meaning that on ground without airspeed the stick wants to move full stroke forward.
Thus, when landing, especially on grass, you need to hold firmly the stick to your belly to prevent shocks from moving the stick forward, which may quickly become a "no future" situation...
But you have no such shaking effect on ground roll.
It's a little bit like in Baaaa Baaaa Black Sheep, with the control column strongly shaking when firing the machine guns...
Anyway, I like the airflow centering, allowing for realistic trimming.
IPACS approach has been very dogmatic so far on FF topic, hope they'll reconsider it in the future...
Cheers
Antoine
I actually didn't do any blending, That's just part of the photoimagery downloaded. I guess I set the space to download out to sea enough that you can't notice the end of the photoimgaery flying low along the coast.
I used Virtual Earth (which is actually from Bing). When I used to do the same thing with Ortho4XP for X-Plane 11 I found that Bing (Virtual Earth) was a lot more reliable than Google. It has less colouring differences between tiled areas, less clouds and clearer detail overall. I'm using 2m resolution (level 2).
Thanks for the info. Darn, it means you were just lucky with original water photos (;-) Congrats anyway for the awesome result. Base material photo quality much depends on places and in some cases a very nice quality area can be neighbouring an ugly set of aerial photos, or even worse, poor quality satellite imagery. Even in Europe, especially on mountainous ground. Even when we purchase official aerial imagery, there's sometimes a huge load of work to achieve an acceptable result...
Cheers
Antoine
Thanks to you users who are carefully debugging this issue. It is now time for the iPACs devs to step in and help. Could one of you users provide a simple example that shows the stripes and provide it to the developers?
Thanks
If you have an email or a ftp where we can upload our data I'll do it.
Anyway, as Frui stated, it is very easy to reproduce : try making a small square tile next to Geneva and you'll get it.
In my case, for a start I'm working with 16'384x16'384 pixels BMP orthophotos, I didn't add yet any alpha layer for scenery blending.
Take 1 of them for instance : img_396_124_100_1.bmp* (you don't need my orthophoto to test, just create a 16'384x16'384 pixels BMP in Paint or whatever, paint it in a bright colour (red or yellow will do it) and save it with that name).
NW coordinates:
LON 5.6250000000
LAT 46.4062500000
SE coordinates:
LON 5.8593750000
LAT 46.2304687500
x pixels size 0.000014305114746
y pixels size 0.000010728836060
Try compiling in levels 9, 11, 12 and 13 (pretty fast) and you'll get it very soon.
As Frui wrote, if you only compile in level 14 you won't have the stripes => they're apparently related to lower level compilation, but the tile won't load in the sim unless you're getting very low.
By the way, when working with tiles touching the Swiss DLC in the Geneva area, in level 14 the Swiss DLC still has priority over the handmade scenery. It means the ugly blurry "beyond the Swiss border" textures of the DLC will show up above any other scenery. I didn't try compiling in level 15 though, don't even know if it exists (was there in Torsten's original TMC file).
If I compile levels 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 all together, I only have stripes in some zoom levels in the "location" menu, but there's obviously a bug here.
*Note: there's another bug with file names, I think it is related to "_" (underscore) in default names. If the file won't compile, try replacing "_" by "X" in the names and it should work.
The problem is, FSET and many editors use underscores in the files names to enhance readability.
This bug is even easier to reproduce, but I was also told I'm the only one seeing it despite I reproduced it on 2 different PC's.
I can provide more info on that if wanted, but let's start with the stripes phenomenon.
Hope this helps
Cheers
Antoine
Can we make the solution simpler by just using one level, and let it be shown at any height? I think all other flight sims, such as FSX, just use one level, and they probably do this with a reason.
No, in FSX/P3D, we have also LOD levels (MIP mapping). Due to them there is sometimes blurriness...
Note that with level 14 only, you never see your textures in the "location" display. Not very convenient to check your coverage consistency...
I've not tested yet until which altitude you keep seeing your level 14 textures when flying...
Cheers
Antoine
Let me emphasize again that the stripes appear NOT in the GeoConverter scenery, but outside it.
Exactly. But not systematically in the DLC, sometimes also in the default low level terrain.
Asheroo, I love the water blend you achieved, congratulations ! Awesome place I would love discovering in AFS2 (no chance to get down under in the near future IRL unfortunately).
What sources did you use? Was there a lot of correction needed?
Cheers
Antoine
Please be noted that it is not the GeoConverter content that has stripes, but the DLC area that is immediately outside it. Outside this abnormal area, it is normal again, and it is still DLC area.
In your case yes, but in some other cases it is the default low res terrain that gets damaged.
I still haven't totally understood the behaviour of this bug, it seems also related to the compilation levels you choose (note that you can also compile in levels 5 and 7 for instance, for more default low level ground texture to get replaced...
Below is a test example in the French area close from the Swiss DLC, but without contact. I guess the strips are linked to a scale mixup in the compilation. See below my test square.
EDIT 2 ghosts of a what appears to be the lake d'Annecy are visible in much different scales in the strips zone. Look at the GoogleEarth screenshot below to have a feel of its position and relative size. One of the "ghosts" is probably the original lake (located in the low res default terrain zone).
The test area, with the Lac d'Annecy much further down right.
[Blocked Image: https://u93773613.dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/AeroflyFS/Area.jpg]
I reported the same phenomena (plus some more) to IPACS during the beta testing phase, but in the Geneva region (ie. not related to elevation).
To make it short I was told the tool is perfect and I'm the only one to experience bugs, so they would discard by feedback.
Now it appears we're a few only ones...
Cheers
Antoine
Many thanks. I see HB-100 has not visited that website again since 2010.
Roland (HB-100) had decided since the very beginning to definitely stop any FSET development at V1.0, and make all sources available free for anybody to go further if they wanted.
So, technically, should you want to do any modification/further development to FSET, you just need to download the sources and go ahead, provided that you have some C# knowledge.
I fully support IPACS decision to keep out of that business. The Geoconvert tool is the AFS2 equivalent to FSX/P3D's resampler. It enables people who do have orthophotos to build a ground scenery, nothing more, nothing less.
Where people get their orthophotos is another issue, but IPACS cannot risk getting involved in a tool like Ortho4XP.
Cheers
Antoine
Just wondering how picky the beta testers are this week? Bit more relaxed hopefully.
Just check the download section (;-)
Have a nice geoconverting weekend !
Cheers
Antoine
Display MoreI think he meant the urban areas, all buildings look flat. And J van E is right here of course.
But this is my roadmap pushing IPACS
After geoconvert has been released we may sort out all questions around usage.
Let's get airports into aerofly.
How's about the xref library and the 'autogen' buildings?
It's clear, we cannot reach the target tomorrow, it will take time and I accept that kind of progress.
Exactly, that's something that needs to be done as a next step.
In the meantime what I would appreciate seeing from you is detail pictures of the compiled scenery corners, both when "standalone" in the middle of default low res satellite ground texture and also at places where there is an overlap with an existing DLC, for instance your scenery patch between LOWI and the Swiss DLC.
It looks like the LOD level during compilation defines the priority, for instance resampling up to level 14 obviously gives priority above the Swiss DLC, while with level 11 the Swiss DLC keeps displaying on top, but there are odd things too...
Thanks in advance.
Cheers
Antoine
