I love these pictures. I'm about to go on holiday to Australia, so I think I'll download some scenery of where I'm going and fly over it to get a better feel for where things are. I spent 2 hours yesterday flying around the area I live and it was great. Much different to going by car or foot as your perspective of where things are gets distorted by where the roads go. I'm still astounded how well FS2 turns flat photoscenery into realistic views - perhaps a slightly finer mesh for elevation data would help as some hills are a bit too smooth and some a bit angular, but I'm not complaining in the slightest. It's great.
Posts by Spit40
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I think the issue is that a single tool combining geoconvert and fset, made by Ipacs would be legally dodgy. Bulk download of virtual earth data is not really legit and even though Ipacs aren't directly profitting from it, they are indirectly profitting as it enhances the value of FS2 to have this tool available. That is why they want to emphasise its for any imagery whatever the source, and no doubt why they also have guidelines for using the legit USGS data.
I think it would be better for us to contribute ideas how they can make our life easier whilst keeping arms length from FSET.
A 3rd party tool that batch runs FSET then calls geoconvert, as well as doing all the file moving would be good. As for sharing results i'm stuck on that. Does anyone want to give the world their FTP server login details?
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Watching this thread with interest. Good luck Raging Beard, show us the way !
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cool ! I'm on it. I suspected as much but didn't want to upset anyone.
edit: actually I'll hold off. I think IPACS might get concerned about the risk of confusing alternate methods of operation. Better to do this sort of thing in a managed way.
FSET, as far as I know is covered by a GNU license, which I believe means it's freely open to modification. https://sourceforge.net/projects/fsearthtiles/
General public licenses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL
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Amazing!
I agree. It is amazing how you can take free flat earth scenery, layer it over a terrain mesh, display it through the window of a very realistic and convincing cockpit (especially in VR) and have it look terrific and very convincing. This technology is so close to pure magic.
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You are north east of london. If you were south west, they'd both be -ve. You had specified area that you had no satellite images for, hence no final scenery.
Related to this, I would also like to know how many decimal places should be used. The wiki shows six decimal places being used but sometimes there are problems if there are more than two it seems.
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Many thanks. I see HB-100 has not visited that website again since 2010.
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Thanks for your feedback.
Found the solution to the error messages. Ok.
I tried your tool a couple of times - but only get an error message from the Geoconverter . Therefore I still have to do it manually. Do not know why it does not work for me - but your tool is a brilliant idea.
I'll try again....
thanks for letting me know. How early did you try it? Its had several tweaks over the last 24 hours. PM perhaps, rather than use this forum.
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Anyone know how to contact the person/people behind this tool? I've searched around the website with the download on it.
I would not have thought they would mind if we made a copy pre-configured with the latest INI file and the right checkbox settings suitable for FS2 conversion and then stored a zip of that somewhere separately, as long as we make sure the original authorship was credited.
(Sorry, i'm a bit fanatical about process improvement. I used to do it for a living when i had a real job.)
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I'd be interested to hear from those using this what the maximum resolution/quality they are finding using fset with virtual earth and google earth.
So far i've been using VE, and did a UK region dowload at fset detail +1.
I then tested a smaller area within at max detail -1
I think i've got the overlap method right, but i don't see any more detail at -1
Maybe i got the overlay method wrong. Maybe VE doesn't go beyond +1 in the UK.
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If its just one download, then just one TMC. If you use my webpage it will make the tmc for you, so you don't need to do anything with coordinates, no decimal conversion, just forget about them.
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Thanks Rodeo. That's good. You say you can put both sets in the same directory. Presumably it makes no difference if they're in separate directories? I'm thinking a useful folder naming convention might be something like this:
myregion_F0_9_11_14
It would remind you it was Fset resolution 0, converted to FS2 levels 9,11,14
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Very cool. Low cost but a serious and intricate looking project all the same. I think for a DIY project i'll do something simpler first. I'll just get my 6Dof linear actuator powered motion platform built.
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Worked it all out
and so here I am taking a turn over Windsor Castle. Sadly I can't tell if HRH is home... not high res enough to determine which is flying, Royal Standard or Union Flag.well done! Glad you got it working.
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Yes, Phil, my thinking is (of course I could be totally wrong) that we should convert only once all those areas together (the low-res and the high-res areas), with the different resolutions and then edit the TMC file with the different layers of resolutions and its respective coordinates. This is my interpretation of what is mentioned in the wiki in the section "Variable levels within a single conversion process" under the Best Practices paragraph.
I'll try this approach in an airport of my area and will report back here.
Cheers, Ed
Thanks Ed. I would be interested in some feedback from Rodeo on this too. It would be nice if its possible to do add-on patches of higher res scenery within an area already covered, rather than have to redo a potentially huge geoconvert.
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If no errors reported then tmc file co-ordinate problem. Certainly what happened to me twice before i sorted the tmc file.
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I'm lost
ideally this is all under the bonnet/hood.if the SDK had a slightly different .bat file we could skip some steps
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Ed, i did two separate conversions and the 2 sets of scenery images are in separate folders under scenery/images. I suppose fs2 doesn't know which takes priority. I'd better read the wiki about different resolutions.
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+1
I created a largish area at FSET +1 resolution and output to Level 13, then downloaded a small FSET -1 resolution area within it, output to Level 14. I was unable to see any improvement. I used Virtual Earth as the source.
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Wasdale in the Lake District, with Great Gable at the end of Wastwater. Off to the right is Scafell Pike - highest mountain in England.
This is resolution setting 1. I'll do a bigger download now at higher res. By the way I've noticed that the bmp files downloaded store the resolution in the filename in case you forget. LP1 =1 LP2=2 LM1 = -1 LP0 =0
