Posts by Paradoxagi

There is no new Geoconvert tool included? Or is this now part of the content converter?

Quote from Jetjockey10

why don't don't you try a few as an example?

I can't because I'm still rendering the NRW tiles. My computer is pretty busy doing this and this will take some more days to finish. Once this is done I will decide what to do next so I thought maybe others could join doing this stuff.

There is a USGS tutorial available but instead of using Irfan View for the Tiff conversion I recommend using QGis because then you don't have to do the coordinates files manually but get TFW files instead, which can be read by Geoconvert directly - this is much more convenient to do then.

In theory, as the whole US is available on USGS for free use (as far as I know) someone could simply create additional high resolution tiles here and there, especially if there are only few areas affected.

Quote from EgyAviator

why dont you do small areas over and over instead?

I do level 10 sized tiles and then one by one. I do it this way because I want to do some color correction and a simple one-for-all filter is not giving me the desired results. I'm used to create about perfectly colored orthophotos fitting seamlessly into the surroundings for X-Plane and want to get a similar result in AFS so I can't just do all NRW in one or two tiles. Further, editing one single tile covering everything at 1m per pixel would result in a very large file size and I could not do the color correction in Gimp because I only have 32 GB of RAM and last but not least processing such a large high resolution tile in Geoconvert would take forever if it finishes at all, again I have not enough RAM to process this.

In the end the Geoconvert process is limiting my workflow because I can download and edit my tiles much faster than Geoconvert needs to process them so my approach is not inefficient in any way (I prepared 14 tiles yesterday and Geoconvert is just half way through them by now).

Here's my tiling in QGis, the red tiles ar the ones prepared already for process:

I forgot: If I don't have the grid thus don't know where the tiles borders are I need a lot of overlapping for every single tile to get the lower resolutions without gaps in between. I used overlapping at first and the area effectively rendered (whole tile minus 20-30% overlap on each side) decreased to about 40% and the other 60% was wasted because overlapping means I have to render these areas again and again because they are present in multiple tiles. This is why I decided to figure out how to use the grid and started from scratch. Now it's going really fast.

I could possibly assist here but I would like to have a more stable grid generator which can create a world white afs tile grid for every resolution to use in QGis so I don't need to make use of heavy overlapping to get seamlessly adjacent tiles. Currently I'm using this grid generator (by flight-sim.org community member Vogel69) for my NRW project but it has some limitations and for example crashes when trying to create very large grids. The generator should be able to do at least a global level 11 grid without crashing and also support standard shapefiles output aside from kml output (but others will prefer kml output when not using QGis, QGis just can't import the kml files the generator creates so I have to convert them using an online tool first).

Further, what is the exact coordinates system used by AFS? I'm currently using "EPSG: 4326 WGS84" which works but I was not able to create a matching grid properly in QGis manually using this so there might be another WGS 84 based projection used. If I could create the grid in QGis there was no need for any grid generator on my end.

Quote from EgyAviator

the green is low quality, and the water doesn't look like water.

This means, the imagery needs color correction - is that correct?

SSDs are the most overrated computer component ever.

So, this is all your own custom coded engine?

Impressive work, especially impressive overall image quality. Most so called mordern engines lack of image quality and present lots of grain and blurries all over the place, which in my opinion is simply unpleasant to look at. Your engine creates a very crisp but also flickerfree (with HQ antialias on) image and very natural environment overall.

Quote from FabianT

GTX 760

Das könnte das Problem sein, die Karte hat nur 2 GB VRAM, 4 GB sind Mindestanforderung laut Steam-Produktseite.

Hi Joe,

and thanks for your feedback.

I have worked a lot on the project and think I have now a usable workflow to get the stuff done. After trying different color styles I think the colors as seen on the screens are fine, it's bright and colorful, slightly warm and is matching the vegetation colors closely, my other attempts making everything greener did not do that well.

As for the resolution, I now go for downloading 100cm per pixel imagery and do everything up to level 14 and then add airport areas and other areas of special interest at full level 15 resolution. I think this is the best compromise regarding my workflow and getting the stuff done in time, so I can do everything step by step and I can further optimize coloring later on here and there.

Greetings,

Agi

Okay, I found switching off the beautiful high quality antialias (which is a shame I have to disable it) helped a bit as it leads to the Vsync loss happening less often but I still think there is something wrong with the Vsync because:

• My frames don't go below 60 when this happens (I don't notice any stutter nor does the AMD frame counter show anything)
• The Vsync should come back on it's own after short framedrops or frame time spikes but currently I have to move the camera to the ground and back up again to get it back on

The new gamepad deadzone tweak in the main.mcf file seems to fix both of the obove mentioned issues. Setting this to 0.0 and adding a deadzone using the menu slider again gives me centered controls, the calibration works fine then (but this also means the gamepad deadzone does not respect calibration thus rendering calibration with gamepads more or less useless).

Thank you very much.

This is so called adaptive VSync I guess? Is there a chance to get a classic Vsync as another option?

The situation is that my framerates don't fall below 60 FPS but by the Radeon Software's framecounter when this happens, so I guess there is some kind of minimal lag spike causing this but the VSync does not kick in after the drop is over automatically. When I look down to the ground and back up again it comes back and in the same situation the framerates are reported at stable 60 FPS then. The frame drops are so minimal that I don't notice them and even the frame counter does not report anything, it shows 60 all the time. I also noticed that taking screenshots with the sim's screenshots key (causing a short stutter while saving the screenshot) also kills Vsync consistently every time.

Hi again,

I found another weird issue: My vsync occasionally gets disabled when flying resulting in heavy screen tearing. If I then point the camera straight to the ground and back up again the Vsync comes back until this happens again.

I'm using Vulkan API and my graphics card is an AMD Radeon RX 6600XT with latest drivers (but this also happened with older drivers in AFS2), my operating system is Windows 11 Pro (also up to date).

Cheers

Agi

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RELEASED:

FlyAgi Orthophoto NRW (FlyAgi.de)

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Hello.

I have started to create some orthophotos for NRW in Germany based on freely available open data from here:

Digitale Orthophotos

As I'm not experienced creating stuff for Aerofly FS I think it's best to check with the community if I'm doing this right before I really get started. My workflow is currently looking like this:

1. Set up the WMS server in Qgis
2. Choose a region using a polygon
3. Download a (Geo)Tiff file from that region
4. Edit Tiff file in Gimp (so far color correction only)
5. Reexport Tiff file
6. Process the image with Geoconvert

This all works fine technically but the Geoncomvert process is pretty slow (the Tiff is 1.6 GB in size, uncompressed), especially for the level 14 resolution, this takes about 2 hours to finish - is this normal behaviour or did I feed Geonconvert with bad input? Is there anything I can do to optimize the process and speed things up?

Further, I chose to use a weak 120cm per pixel resolution for the raw image for now just for testing but this looks surprisingly good in the simulator, in fact it looks better than most of my 60cm per pixel images in X-Plane do so I would like to know if this resolution is good enough for the whole project? I don't have much experience with AFS 2 or AFS 4 so I don't know what is considered a high quality orthophoto by the community, I suspect my X-Plane standards probably can't keep up here because the imagery in AFS seems to look much more high res than is other simulators.

Regarding the Geoconvert process I found in the documentation that level 15 should be roughly 50cm per pixel resolution so I came up the following resolutions for other levels:

Level 15 ---> 50cm/pixel

Level 14 --->100cm/pixel

Level 13 ---> 200cm/pixel

Level 12 ---> 400cm/pixel

and so on. Is that correct?

I'm asking this because I found the level 13 images looked still pretty good in the simulator, much better than I would expect from a resolution of 2m per pixel.

Finally I have some screenshots to share and also a download if anyone is interested to see how my results look in the simulator. The scenery currently covers the City of Dortmund all of NRW and the colors are corrected to somewhat match the colors of the surrounding lower resolution textures from the Europe DLC.

FlyAgi Orthophoto NRW - FlyAgi.de

I would really appreciate some feedback regarding this project:

• Do you like the coloring? If I make it more green it will get a greenish tint like in MSFS and also it won't be as seamless with the surrounding lower resolution scenery.
• The current scenery is 120cm per pixel and only rendered up to level 14 - is this good enough?
• Is there any interrest at all?

And, to the experienced designers, some more questions:

• Am I doing this right?
• Can I optimize the workflow somehow?

Thanks to everyone,

Agi

The fuel tank selector in the C172 does not work properly in both position. The fuel, according to the gauges, is only used from the left tank instead of both tanks.

Hello to everone.

I have some controls issues with my Xbox controller (latest generation, a pretty good one) and after investigating I lot a found the following:

1. There is an additional non adjustable deadzone applied so I have a deadzone even if the deadzone slider is set to the full left position. Flying the R22 is much harder with no control around the center position and gets twitchy in ground hover situations so I wish to have an option to disable the additional deadzone.
2. The deadzone in general does not respect the calibration value but always refers to the controllers native center position resulting in asymetric controls (for example roll left feels light, roll right feels very heavy or the other way around). Further, this renders the calibration somewhat useless because it does not help fixing inaccurate center positions most gamepads suffer from (all my Xbox controllers over the years had more or less drift in the center position).
3. Flying the R22 I also tried joystick mode instead of gamepad mode and joystick mode is more accurate and controllable in this case but I lose the second stick's camera controls (in both mode the deadzone issue is present). It would be great to make the second stick available also in the joystick mode.

This is a serious issue for me because I just can't get the controls feel right with my gamepad, especially the R22 is very hard to control this way, fixed wing aircraft are better controllable but still feel weird because of the asymetric inputs. The gamepad istelf is fine, I don't have this kind of problems in X-Plane or MSFS where I can fix the center position and also set zero deadzone.

Kind regards,

Agi