Posts by RobW

  • Some specific questions about the upcoming GeoConvert tool

    Hi folks,

    I'm excited by the information that I have read so far about this tool. If I can find some appropriate, legal data, I'm going to start making some .bmp and .inf files in preparation for the GeoConvert's release.

    A couple of things I'd like to know - from anyone who has tested this tool - so I get this right:

    Question: What size areas can the IPACS tool work with? Is it happy with a group of .bmp files making up a 1 degree by 1 degree block?

    Question: What resolution can the IPACS tool work with? In FSET, I usually turn the compression off, and use download level 0 where possible, which is 25 cm per pixel.

    Question: What resolution (cm/pixel) is the highest resolution scenery that is already in AF2 (Utah, for example)? I'm guessing that its not as good as 25 cm per pixel (based on download sizes), but would be interested to know.

    Question: There are two main 'artistic' settings in FS Earth Tiles - brightness and contrast. Default is:
    Brightness = -6,
    Contrast = +12

    I find that with high-resolution, high quality source material, changing the settings in the .ini file to 0 and 0 work best in FSX and P3D. Does anyone have any experience with this AF2? Particularly in terrain with natural shadows, such as mountains, the contrast increase can lead to very black areas (which are of course baked in to the photoscenery). With high-res data, I also think these manipulations lower the quality.

    Question: Is there any way to convert .bgls that have already been constructed to the IPACS format? I'm guessing not, but I havent kept most of my bmps and inf files from previous projects, so a way of converting the .bgls would save me a year of work! :)

    Final comment: water masking. With FS earth tiles, a good way to do this is by drawing paths in Google Earth. This is a pretty good project to collaborate on, as it is easy to share a google earth .kml file. I've spent a lot of hours drawing water mask lines, but this is time consuming and I've still only covered fairly small areas. So, when IPACS adds water, it would be great if the scenery tool could be made to work with the water masks produced by FS Earth tiles.

    Kudos to IPACS for moving to provide us with some tools that I'm sure will add enjoyment to our simulation sessions.

  • ORBX says "2017 is going to be epic! - large area regional projects will blow minds"

    "Online stuff" is usually better the the photoscenery that you can buy from commercial vendors. In the US in particular, odd colors are pretty rare in modern data sources, not like a couple of years ago. Go to Africa or Sth America and yes, finding tiles is a nightmare. Western Europe is pretty good too, it all fall apart when you head over to Greece or further east. But UK/France/Germany/Switzerland/Spain etc have very decent data.