FWIW I've checked the following things with the AID and TMC files.
- Lon / lat used not lat / lon
- Using masks set to true (for now)
- TMC region coords output with 2 decimal places
- Write TTC and Raw set to true
- Output folders for TTC and Raw specified
- Steps per pixel in AID expressed as decimal not with exponential sign
v0.2 is now available ... https://github.com/nickhod/aerosc…s/tag/v0.2-beta
I've fixed several issues I spotted with AID and TMC files, but Geoconvert still refuses to output anything. 
Soooo frustrating!
TomSimMuc The localisation issue should now be resolved. Can you try stitching again? That error is usually related to being out of memory, but I couldn't reproduce it. I've improved the way memory is managed when cropping stitched images, let's see if it works now.
vogel69 Thanks for the spotting those. Now resolved. Unfortunately it didn't make Geoconvert output anything
@pkaser That's now fixed
edpatino Thanks. Yes, masks are set to true
For v0.3 I'll add comprehensive logging so people can just post logs here.
Thanks everyone. Just setting up a clean Virutal Machine now to see if I can reproduce these issues.
I've attached a sample TMC file and AID file so people can have a look without need to run the app. (Txt extension added so I can attach here)
Quick screenshot of the current UI to make it clearer what this is all about, for those who didn't see it previously.
Hi everyone,
I've finally made the first release of AeroScenery; the easy to use scenery generation tool for Aerofly.
It would be great it people could test it out and let me know any feedback.
You can download AeroScenery 0.6 here (click the msi file)
https://github.com/nickhod/aeroscenery/releases/tag/v0.6-beta
Then follow these steps to give it a try
1) Download and install AeroScenery. Download the Aerofly SDK if you haven't already
2) Start AeroScenery (you'll find it in the Windows Start menu once installed
3) Click Settings in the top left and copy the directory of the Aerofly SDK, e.g. C:\aerofly_fs_2_sdk_tools_20171123\aerofly_fs_2_sdk_tools
4) Click somewhere over land on the map to select a tile
5) Select Google as the image source
6) Select a zoom level depending on how long you're willing to wait
7) Under "Generate AFS2 Levels" select the AFS2 Levels you want to eventually output
8 ) Under "Actions" select "Choose Actions to Run"
9) Select "Download Image Tiles" and "Stitch Image Tiles"
10) Click Start
AeroScenery will now download all the tiles and stitch them together as large PNGs.
Now to run Geoconvert
11) Deselect "Download Image Tiles" and "Stitch Image Tiles" and select "Generate AID / TMC Files" and "Run Geoconvert"
12) Click Start
GeoConvert should now open and process the images into ttc files that can be used with Aerofly
Hey guys. I'm still here! Thanks for your patience.
Sorry I haven't been able to finish this off completely yet, "real life" work forced me to put it on hold for a few weeks. I'm back on it this week though. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait.
I wont attempt another "it will be done by ___", because my work and business is hectic but I would say it's 85% complete, so I'm almost there.
nickhod has been quite silent recently about aeroscenery.
Cheers, Ed
Hi!
Still working away on it and almost finished. "Real life" software work got in the way this week unfortunately.
As soon as I have a version ready to test I'll post it here,
Aeroscenery always works on one level 9 size tile at a time so this probably wont be an issue. (But obviously you can select which levels you want to run Geoconvert on). So if you have 4 tiles selected, Geoconvert will be run 4 times.
The hardest part is defining the problem areas. They don't fall neatly into image tile boundaries and often have blended edges.
Once you know that the rest is relatively straightforward:
1) Create an image with the problem areas removed, transparency in their place
2) Create a transparent background image with just the problem areas
3) Measure the RBG / HSL of image (1)
4) Adjust RGB / HSL of image (2)
5) Put the images back together
This library would do all those steps, http://www.aforgenet.com/framework/features/
Maybe its edge recognition classes can find the problem areas too, we'll have to give it a try.
Sure, I'll hop on the Ortho4XP topic and I can also help in the documentation.
Great! I should say, it doesn't have to follow Ortho4XP at all. The general questions are:
- Where can we get high res elevation data for each country
- How can we download that in an automated way
- Per source above, how can it be imported into Aerofly in an automated way
I just haven't had time to look at it.
This is still unclear to me and yet undocumented.
Cheers
Antoine
Could you shed any light on this?
I can try to lend a hand in some smaller tasks if you are interested. I'm not a pro at C# but I've worked with some GUI programming before.
Happy to have any help. The source is here...
https://github.com/nickhod/aeroscenery
I'm probably OK with the image part of things, but I'd like for the tool to do higher resolution terrain / elevation data also, in the way that Ortho4XP does.
If you wanted to research what Ortho4XP grabs for elevation (if you speak Python) and document it, maybe write some test code that would all help.
Code for OrthoXP is here (well, a fork) https://github.com/voyageur/Ortho4XP
When AeroScenery is out in a week or so, there will be some documentation work to do also.
I've just bought Orbx Innsbruck (been meaning to for a while) so I'll use this "fill in the gaps" scenario as a test case for AeroScenery.
If I can create some pleasing results without a major amount of work I'll stick up a YouTube video showing the process.
I'm still not clear how Aerofly decides what to show on top if it has multiple scenery files for the same grid square, for the same level. I believe it does load all of them. (?)
Assuming it does (I might be wrong) if you could get things to layer in this order
OrbX Lowi
Swiss DLC
AeroScenery Austria download
There would be no need to create transparency, since the transparency of OrbX Lowi and Swiss DLC would blend into the downloaded scenery "underneath".
Therefore the big challenge is to tailor cut masks according to the existing sceneries and then edit the colors of the aerial photo textures he can gather to both match the Swiss DLC and Orbx's LOWI. No automated tool can do that for him unfortunately.
In that case (when AeroScenery is released) select the grid squares between Switzerland and Innsbruck and let AeroSecenrery generate some 12k px PNGs from your chosen image source.
Edit the PNGs, make the bits you don't need transparent, tweak the colours as required.
Run AeroScenery again and let it run GeoConvert.
It can't fully automate the process but it will be much easier than with FS Earth Tiles.
Very nice tool.
I don't know if was mentioned before, but sometimes water areas do not have imagery in Bing (and sometimes in Google either) and the resulting images are shown in white in those areas. One should have the possibility of editing those images applying alpha layers and saving them after editing, all before the geoconversion process takes place.
Cheers, Ed
Yep. Two points on that:
There's the option to select which tasks you want to run. If you want to clean up images manually just don't run the Geoconvert task the first time.
I'm working on something that detects when I get a placeholder image (or no image) for a water area, and then making that area transparent in the PNG I create.
This reduces the necessity for manual editing. (Manual editing would make the graduation of coastline smoother, but the automatically generated images will have transparency out of the box).
Where can or where will we be able to download this from? And I will gladly donate for this tool!
Thanks for the interest.
AeroScenery is coming on pretty well. I have it downloading the correct tiles from Bing and stitching them together into larger pngs. I'm now planning to add support for Google from the start.
I'm hoping to do a first release sometime next week. I'll start a new post here when it's ready.
Exactly, you'd better stitch images together.
Regarding image editing, the point is to leave the user the possibility of editing the stitched images if he wants to, i.e. not deleting them.
Ideally, the GUI could have a switch to choose whether to automatically geoconvert or not after download, and another switch for clearing the images or not after geoconverting.
Cheers
Antoine
OK, I've made it so that each step of the workflow can be enabled or disabled. I think that should cover everyone's needs, and it's useful for testing.
A beginner can just click "Start" and have some nice scenery installed. Someone who wants to edit can stop before GeoConvert runs, do the edits, then let it run GeoConvert and copy the scenery (or do that manually).
Thanks for the input.
Hi nickhod, a typical FEST picture is written concenated with a typical file size of 700MB, 13000 x 19000 pixel.
This size can easily manipulated with photoshop or Gimp, even 5 of those at the same time. So I would make the pics bigger then 4096 pixels.
Thanks!
Pleased I realised this now. I've not done much with AFS2 scenery yet, so I'm doing this kind of 'blind'.
I'll play around with stitching 48 tiles into a square image size of 12,288 px.
Trespassers made a good point about allowing for manual editing.
My original plan was to just create an AID file for each 256x256 tile that I download. I can't see how it's feasible to do any manual edits with a load of tiny images though.
I'm thinking of stitching things into 4096x4096 or 8192x8192 images first and running Geoconvert on those.
Anyone have any thoughts on that?
Scenery making is not just a matter of projecting raw orthophotos into AFS2, otherwise everybody would do it.
Geoconverting may look quite tedious to those who haven't actually tried it out, but you just create an AID file for your aerial orthophotos and a tmc file for the zone and launch. No rocket science...
Your tool will make this step easier, but cannot spare the manual editing... (;-)
I think it depends of people's expectations. If you want commercial quality scenery, you'll have to manually edit things, if you want good enough scenery you can probably get away without.
The person who downloaded the Channel Islands at 25cm pp from Google said he deleted it later, so I'm willing to bet not a lot of time was spent editing. To me it looks amazing.
My motivation for developing AeroScenery is that I'd like to download a lot of the UK in that level of detail.
Is this really possible to obtain with Geoconverter ?
Why are you talking of jpegs? I'd suggest to work with BMP's instead and, of course save and keep the raw material (images) before geoconverting them.
In most cases you'll need manual editing (color matching, masks, defects correction, etc.)
Thanks! Many image tile sources have tiles in jpg format only. I'm going to convert these to png as Geoconvert supports that and it's lossless but compressed
If an image tile source offers lossless, we'll use that.
For many parts of the world, Bing aerial images are good enough to use without manual editing.
I'm snapping tmc file coordinates to AFS2 grid squares to avoid the need for transparency.
