Posts by qwerty42

  • Image tile coordinates

    Quote from vogel69

    I think to add a function to generate grid from a .ttc files folder (folder "Images" of the scenery)... may be could be usefull to check if all .ttc files with all level are done.

    here a screenshot of the feature (you can hide or show grid for each level):

    - Yellow: AFS2 Level 10 Grid

    - Red: Level 12 Grid of my scenery "Images" (.ttc files) folder

    [Blocked Image: https://tof.cx/images/2018/02/26/8e580609e294c41a423b4fcf3f1c8088.jpg]

    Yes please!!! This would be really useful! Also, I don't want to get greedy, but if it could also detect masked .ttc tiles and show them in a different color, I think that would also be a really cool feature.

  • Aerofly FS 2 VR Hands Have Arrived!

    Quote from TomB

    This does not work so easily when you have a combination of RW and VR, i.e. real yoke (mounted at your desk) and virtual hands.

    Fair enough. Until some finger-tracking VR gloves or something similar are available, I think we'll have to choose either VR hands or actual hardware controls (or maybe a hybrid with one hand being VR and the other holding a flight yoke/stick).

  • VR Hands Update Bugs- POST HERE

    Not sure if this is a bug per se, but I don't think it was happening before the most recent update. It's not a big issue either, just wanted to get it on the list.

    I have throttle, mixture, and prop speed mapped to analog controls (sliders and knobs) on my HOTAS. If I have these set at a certain position in flight, then back out to the main menu, go to the location map, pick a new location, and then re-enter the sim, the position of the throttle, mixture, and prop speed no longer match up with where they're set on my HOTAS. They also don't re-sync to the correct positions until I move each of these control axes fully in each direction, almost like it's recalibrating their full motion.

    For example, I'm flying and have my throttle at max, mixture at medium-rich, and prop speed at minimum. I back out to the menu screen, go to "Location", move to a new spot on the map, select it, then back out to the main menu again, and then go to "Start." When I re-enter the plane, the throttle in the plane will be at minimum, and prop speed and mixture will be at max & max rich, even though on my HOTAS they should be set at max throttle/min prop speed/medium mixture. These controls do not start responding correctly until I cycle each of these axes to their limits.

  • VR Hands Update Bugs- POST HERE

    Quote from lenidcamper

    I've noticed something that I do not believe is VR Hands related but only appeared after the latest update.

    Coming in for a landing with either glider when you get within a meter of the ground the plane just drops the last meter while the pilot camera position does not.

    You end up looking out over the canopy during the run out. Does not happen with the powered aircraft.

    Very weird. Can anyone else reproduce?

    Stu

    I've seen the same thing with this one.

  • Aerofly FS 2 VR Hands Have Arrived!

    Quote from Raging Beard

    I just wheel my chair back a bit from my desk, sorted :)

    I can't help but laugh at this... Maybe I'm not understanding their desk-hitting issue entirely, but isn't this the obvious solution? :/ VR isn't really intended to be used seated at a desk in front of a keyboard like conventional 2D gaming. The virtual world needs space to exist, so you have to make room for it. Adding a non-linear movement ratio to the VR hands relative to the position of your real hands would not only be pretty hard for your brain to sort out, but defeats the purpose of VR, where spatial position is supposed to be preserved to real-world scale. If your hands are hitting your desk, scoot your chair back until you've got plenty of room, and then press the view re-center button, presto, fixed! :)

  • Aerofly FS 2 VR Hands Have Arrived!

    Thanks for the update! This feature will probably bring many more users from the VR world to AeroFly.

    I have one little issue to report: the toe brakes on my rudder pedals no longer work, as long as my Touch controllers are awake for the Rift. If you go to the controller setup screen it still shows them mapped and responding properly. It appears that as long as the touch controllers are awake and active, it steals the brake control for the analog stick instead of sharing it with whatever else you have mapped to brakes. Definitely a problem if you want to use VR hands + a hardware set of rudder pedals.

  • A bit blurried vision with VR

    Quote from EGPF

    ...

    I'm assuming you have made sure you have the latest drivers installed for your hardware, particularly the graphics card and have tried adjusting the lens slider located on the underside of the headset - that alone can make a vast difference.

    ...

    Just wanted to echo this. There is a 'lens adjustment' screen you can go to with the Rift where it shows you green crosshairs and gives you instructions on how to adjust that slider and also make sure it's optimally aligned to your eyes. Having this set properly makes a huge difference in perceived sharpness.

    If it's adjusted correctly, the center of your vision shouldn't necessarily look blurry... it should just look like you don't have quite enough pixels there for it to look sharp like a modern phone or computer monitor, if that makes any sense. In other words, the pixels that are there should look sharp, it will just look like there aren't as many as you'd like :)

    I agree with very much with Jeff... after you get used to it you don't really notice lower resolution as much, and for me I could never go back to 2D sim flying. The sense of depth and scale, being immersed in the cockpit, being able to look around in every direction, knowing by eye how far off the runway you are... it's a completely different experience.

  • Image tile coordinates

    Hi uli057,

    Yes, it is the masks that create issues. If you have any tiles that include masks, then you can never add scenery adjacent to those tiles that completely fills the area until you delete the masks and replace the masked tiles with complete ones. Please see my post here where I tried to explain what is going on: Scenery Loading Distance Also the reply further in that thread from Rodeo gives more detail

    I haven't had a chance to test out vogel69's tool yet, but as far as I'm aware it does give you the correct tile coordinates for AeroFly. Also, if you look earlier in this thread, I posted an Excel file which will also calculate the exact coordinates for AeroFly tiles at any level, and that one I know for sure works because I've been using it all week :) Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, your solution already exists.

    Edit: Just to clarify, if you're using the excel tool I posted, the workflow is like this: (1) Get the lat/long coordinates of any point inside the area you want scenery for. (2) Enter those coordinates into the tool where it says. (3) Specify the level you want it to give AeroFly tile coordinates for (9-15). (4) If you want a larger area than a single tile, you can add those with the boxes in the input section. (5) Click the big blue "Copy" square, and then in FSET click the "P" button which will paste those coordinates into FSET. (5) Download the area in FSET at whatever download resolution you'd like (e.g. -1 for really detailed areas, 1 for larger areas)

    The thing to remember when using this tool is that you can generate complete tiles for any level above what you specify in the tool. For example, if you specify a tile level of 9, then within the coordinates it outputs, you can generate complete tiles of levels 9-15 with no masking/gaps/overlap. If you specify a level of 12, then you can generate complete tiles of levels 12-15, etc.

  • Image tile coordinates

    If you're referring to the green colored grid that appears in FSET when you select an area, that grid unfortunately has no relation to AeroFly's internal grid. I think this probably confuses a lot of people using geoconvert for the first time, and maybe should be made clearer in the wiki.

    This gets a little confusing, but the reason for all these tools we've posted in this thread is that AeroFly has its own structured internal grid it uses for its scenery tiles, and if you want to use geoconvert efficiently for an area, ideally you'd download only the pieces of scenery that exactly fit AeroFly's grid. This prevents wasted download time, and also prevents needing to use masks for partially-downloaded scenery tiles ('masks' in AeroFly are separately generated files which block out the incomplete portions of scenery tiles, which creates issues of gaps between scenery if you have adjacent scenery areas).

  • Image tile coordinates

    Hi all, I think having this available in Google Earth will be truly the best solution, but if it's useful to anyone else I made an Excel tool that works similarly too. You can download it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/zv3clcl5i6v5…_v1.6.xlsm?dl=1


    When you first open it in Excel, it will have a sheet that tells you how to use it. Click the tab at the bottom that says "User Interface" to get to the actual tool.

    Here is a video tutorial as well:

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    The way it works is you can give it any coordinate in latitude and longitude, and tell it what geoconvert level to use (9 to 15 but it works from 0 to 16 actually). It will then calculate the NW and SE corner coordinates of the AeroFly grid cell that contains your coordinate, at the specified geoconvert level.

    You can also tell it to add more cells to right/left/top/bottom to expand the area, and the final output coordinates will always be snapped to the AeroFly grid at the level you chose. The purpose of the tool is so that you can download precise areas in FSET without ever having to use masks, and without downloading extra scenery that you don't need if you're working at high detail levels. It also has a button for copying that will paste directly into FSET (note you'll have to enable the macro for this to work). You can also use this tool to precisely repair some of your scenery if (like me) you made a bunch using masks that you now regret! ^^

    As far as I know it all works correctly but if you run into issues let me know. Hope it's useful to some of you!

    EDIT: link is back up, fixed error with pasting into GeoConvertHelper, double-checked math, protected cells to prevent accidental edits.
    EDIT2: V1.2 fixes a compatibility issue with older versions of Excel. Should work for Excel 2007 and newer now.

    EDIT3: V1.3 fixes a bug occurring if you gave coordinates that were *exactly* on the intersection points of the AeroFly grid.

    EDIT4: V1.45 adds a button that lets you paste coordinates from FSET to the input boxes with one click

    EDIT5: V1.5 fixes a pasting error from FSET with certain longitude values

    EDIT6: V1.6 corrects for an FSET bug when pasting on systems that use commas for decimal marks (1,00 vs 1.00)

  • Scenery Loading Distance

    Thank you so much Rodeo, you are awesome! That is incredibly helpful. :thumbup::thumbup: I really appreciate you taking the time to write that all out, and I do apologize if you've already posted that info in other threads and I didn't find it there first. That answers all of my questions and more!

  • Scenery Loading Distance

    Ok, I'm pretty sure I figured out the issue, and it does indeed have to do with the masks. But the problem isn't that you *shouldn't* use them. The problem is that unless you're converting a huge area, if you don't use the masks, you might not end up with any level 9 imagery converted, and only a fraction of the level 10s you need as well. This causes you to see the 'popping' scenery because the long-distance images (level 9) simply don't exist.

    I may have some details wrong, since I'm guessing at the inner workings of AeroFly, but I'm pretty sure this is the run-down of the whole issue:

    - AeroFly has its own world mapping divided up into separate rectangular segments, which are *quite* large at level 9.

    - When you run geoconvert, it builds the scenery at each level [9-15] into separate files. If it doesn't have enough image area to fill an entire tile, it won't write anything for it in the output scenery, unless you DO have masking enabled. In other words, you might tell it to geoconvert at levels 9-15, but you only end up with tiles at levels 11-15 because your land area wasn't large enough to fill an entire level 9 or 10 sized tile.

    - If you don't have any level 9 tiles as a result of the above, you won't see any scenery texture until you get close enough that it starts using tiles from the higher levels. That's why it doesn't appear until you get close, and why it "pops in."

    If you do use masks, you won't have this issue, it will work. This is because if using masks, it will convert partial areas of a level 9 tile, and then create a mask file to 'hide' the rest so the default AeroFly texture shows through.

    BUT... it's still not quite so simple, because the masks themselves can create problems if you convert one area with masks, and then add adjacent scenery later again using masks. This is because (for example) if you already had a mask that blocked out the upper half of a level 9 tile which was previously incomplete, and then you add new scenery to the upper half of that tile which is also incomplete with its own corresponding mask, you'll end up with two masks which now block out the whole piece. End result, you again see nothing for level 9 and only get the scenery popping up after you get close enough to see the unmasked higher levels. (This doesn't quite happen this way in reality, because those two masks would have the same file name and it would only load one of them, but you'd still then have an area that was blocked by whichever mask it actually loaded, leaving an untextured band in the middle of your converted area until you got closer).

    So what's the fix? I think there are two options:

    1) You can choose to never use masks. But, you need to check the output in the scenery folder after your geoconversion, and see if you even have any level 9 tiles at all after conversion. If you don't, you'll need to grab an even larger region of imagery using FSET, and then redo at least the level 9 conversion with the same coordinates using the larger set of imagery. This will be a little bit of a guessing game to find the image area that is large enough to generate all the level 9 tiles you need without using masks. The other consequence of this is that you will have areas at the edges which only have level 9 imagery, without the higher levels, unless you re-do all of you levels every time.

    2) You can choose to use masks, which actually seem to work fine in AeroFly as far as I can tell. However, if you do, you will run into issues if you convert adjacent areas at different times. This is because you will now have mask files that will block out portions of the adjacent areas where they meet, and I can't think of any clever way to remedy this. Since the texture for a given tile will always have the same file name, if you converted up to the edge of your old area and again used masks, you'd now have duplicate file names and duplicate masks, and AeroFly will pick one or the other when it loads initially. The end result is you'll have an untextured stripe between your two adjacent converted regions, and you can't get rid of it unless you reconvert those tiles with masks disabled and then delete the mask files.


    I'm pretty sure what I've written here is all correct, based on my testing and observations, but if any of the devs with more in-depth knowledge can clarify further please do so!

    EDIT: anybody reading this and having the same troubles, see this post by the one and only Rodeo: Scenery Loading Distance

  • Scenery Loading Distance

    Quote from Oldar

    You described my situation exactly. Anything I made before the late November program update does not do this. Stuff made after that update does.

    Yeah, it's very strange. Honestly if I wasn't seeing this behavior on my own setup I'd have a hard time believing it ^^ The fact that it seems to not happen with scenery created/added before a certain date, even though the tools being used for conversion give the same output now as they did then, is really bizarre. That's why I suggested maybe there is some sort of 'map loading cache data' hanging around somewhere that could explain it, although I've dug around in all the typical folders where this sort of thing might live and haven't found anything outside of the aerofly folder in My Documents. I've tried removing the config files within that folder so it can rebuild them, which had no effect.

    I will keep poking around until I find something that can explain what's going on. It seems too strange a coincidence that both you and I have previously-converted scenery that doesn't have this issue, so I will keep focusing my troubleshooting on what's actually different with the older files. I have a couple more ideas to try that might sort it out.

  • Scenery Loading Distance

    Well, I am now having this issue too. The really weird thing is, I converted an area of scenery back in Sept last year, and I get no loading pop ups with any of that. I just converted some more scenery yesterday, and I am seeing the problematic pop-ups with the new areas. The old area still works perfectly.

    I also notice that when viewing the Location map, the texture fill-in of the old (working) area appears more quickly than the new areas. In the map view, the new areas don't appear until I zoom in further, and sometimes they are still unreliable even after zooming.

    I converted the newest stuff with the latest SDK. As a test, I then re-converted one of the areas with the old SDK I used last time. Comparing the file hashes of the output files, they are identical, so it appears to be unrelated to the version of the geoconvert tool.

    I tried it with both the GeoConvertHelper tool, as well as manual command line conversion. I checked through the .tmc file carefully and everything looks correct. The scenery was converted with levels 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14. I also tried re-doing it and including level 15.

    Another thing that seems to be happening is that after I launched AeroFly, and flew into the areas where the new textures should have been, they would appear when I finally got close enough. After I finally got them to 'pop-in', most of them continued to be visible even after flying away from the area. Even more strange, it seems like this persists after exiting the sim and then re-launching. Is there a persistent cache somewhere of map info that is storing the loading information? If so, perhaps this is somehow causing or is related to the issue. This might also explain why my old scenery is still working while the new stuff pops-in...?

    BTW, I did find a bug with the GeoConvertHelper in the process of doing all this checking, but it's not causing my problem. When it creates the .tmc file, if you are using the "Advanced TMC File Settings" tab instead of the "Detail Level" tab, it swaps the coordinates for [lonlat_min] and [lonlat_max] in the tmc file. It does not have this issue when you just have the Detail Level tab selected. Since I was using the detail level tab, this issue wasn't present in my tmc file, and just to be sure I also tried re-converting the area manually and double-checking the .tmc file and it didn't help. After more testing I can't get this to happen again. Possibly I had some invalid entry somewhere that was causing it to happen, but as far as I can tell now it seems to be working correctly and I'm unable to reproduce what I saw.

  • Denver at night

    Quote from kenventions

    There appears to be a VR issue at night with the dark/black graphics layer for things like lakes and vegetation.

    If I'm over Denver at 6:00 UTC heading west and I nod my head up and down slightly (like you do sometimes when listening to music) the lake surface moves up and down while the surrounding area doesn't. It does it too while looking at the mountains - even the cockpit shadows bounce around when I do it. During the day, it doesn't do that.

    This may be limited to WMR headsets because the SteamVR drivers are still maturing. I'd be interested to hear if any Rift/Vive owners can re-create the same issue. This issue is probably contributing to my Denver@night blurry comments because any time I move my head, all the black terrain areas are doing this temporary shift.

    FYI - I found this short video of Denver at night from the air - https://youtu.be/3LYOtRPdOu0

    Ah... That is a problem inherent to the OLED screens used in current gen VR devices. You can see the same issue on some phones and tablets, one example being here:It has to do with a lag associated with very dark OLED pixels switching from black to an illuminated state. The reason you only see it over the lake is (I'm guessing) the lake is nearly black. I can't comment on other VR HMDs because I haven't tested them myself, but in the Rift they do some tricks with pre-driving the pixels to minimize it somewhat. It helps but doesn't take it away completely.

  • Denver at night

    Quote from kenventions

    Rob, I'm guessing you're using a monitor versus a VR headset. I just tried Denver at night in VR and it's just too blurry for the resolution of my Samsung Odyssey even with RS = 1.33 . I have the Monterey add-on which looks nice in daylight but I remember trying it at night and had the same issue.

    Today, we trade resolution for immersion with VR headsets and it's worth it when the content is well lit, but when most of the pixels are dark it's not. Hopefully the Odyssey2 will have 3200x2880 OLED panels to narrow/eliminate that gap.

    Hmmm... I'm curious about this, and wonder if it's something specific to the Odyssey. I fly at night all the time in the Rift and I think in some ways it actually is more immersive than daylight flying. When you say it's blurry, do you mean the appearance of the items like runways are no longer crisp enough to see clearly? Perhaps it's a difference of how near-black levels are treated in the different HMDs?

  • Video tutorial: runway design with AC3D

    Quote from clayton4115

    can someone please tell me how i can fix this

    Hmmm... I'm not sure quite what happened here but it looks like your 'outside area' mesh for your runway has gotten messed up--the cutout was made narrower than your actual runway and one of the square surfaces appears to have been deleted. You can fix the hole but it's hard to explain in words and I think would only create confusion. The best option is to use undo until it goes back to normal, but if it's too late for that I can make a video that shows how you can fix a hole like that.