Maps2Bgl - Offline alternative to the program TileProxy

[rightseater 0]

Indeed your technique is correct, but I'm afraid that FS9 does not react well to this type of masking. I'm guessing it just makes that section of the tile black. This would work in FSX I believe. However, you can still blend with the surrounding default scenery to a very good degree. I do this with Photoshop by blending a screenshot from FS9 of the area I am working with, with the tga image. I simply white out the area of the tga file that needs masked and impose it over my FS9 screenshot of the same area. With that said, I am working very hard on a program that might help us to mask the tga files for FS9 with a bit more ease. I am not much of a programmer, but with my brother's help I may accomplish this soon.

[desertwind 0]

The following screenshot is an FS9 satellite view of a small area around Big Sur, CA that I created as a test. Only 3 .tga files were created and are marked as TGA1, TGA2 and TGA3.TGA1 was all land texture, TGA2 a mixture of coastline and water, and TGA3 all water. I left TGA1 and TGA3 alone and attempted to create a mask for TGA2. As you can see, basically TGA2 is 'missing'. I believe the mask I created masked the ENTIRE area, not just the water portion, although this may not be the case.If you develop a utility that will dumb down this process and make it accessible to the clueless masses (i.e., people like me!) you will have made many new friends in the FS9 flight sim world, I'm sure. Best of luck with your development; I'll be glad to volunteer as a beta tester. I have many years of beta testing experience for Microsoft, like every time I install the latest flavor of Windows! ;-)Tawni http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/188456.jpg

[rightseater 0]

Yes, I see how that could be bothersome. Until I can come up with a better way, I have been masking by converting the tga files to bitmaps, than whiting out the area I want, and transposing the bitmap over another bitmap with FS9 default water textures. Below is an example of how it looks. This example was done very quickly and obviously not of great quality, but with a little effort I manage to make it look good.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/188458.jpg

[Guest gunnarmd]

Hi,I experimented some time ago with the alpha channel. I described the mask simply with text:http://www.g-daehling.de/fsbilder/serie4/37.jpghttp://www.g-daehling.de/fsbilder/serie4/38.jpgTextures Copyright © by Google

[rightseater 0]

Indeed, masking can be difficult with FS9. However, I have found that I can create a decent mask by whiting out an area of the tga image and posting it over another texture. It takes time and a steady hand, but the results are pretty good.Gunnar, Perhaps if you have some spare time you could describe the process you used to create the breathtaking scenery you posted in this thread. I am sure that you edited the tga images but have struggled to duplicate your success. I use PSP, PhotoShop, and IrfanView to broadly enhance the colors and submit fine detail, yet I can not quite get to your level. Any thoughts?-Jeremy

[Guest gunnarmd]

Hallo Jeremy,I naturally selected places, for which the best pictorial material is available for these photographs. The first two pictures are from Luzern in Switzerland. There I worked on nothing. However I reduced the zoom shot factor in the external view to 0.7 . The airplane departs thereby naturally. With the tools F1-View I have to change I the distance again reduced without the zoom shot factor. By this one proceeds sharpens the texture strongly improved.With the next two pictures (BMP for FSX) I increased the contrast by 20 percent and decreased the brightness by 10 percent. I accomplished that with IrfanView. The selected muddled depends naturally on the existing pictorial material. With IrfanView one can tile all with the same walked automatically works on. Sometimes also easy helps to resharpen, in order to obtain better results. For the determination of the optimal parameters one can save time for much. I copy the .bat into one test.bat . I edit these in such a way that only two to three tile are compiled. the original pictures in temp the file safe I into another directory. Now I can do very fast the two or three tile to change, which start test.bat and regard me the result in the FS. I copy the original pictures again back. Now all pictures with the determined parameters in IrfanView are changed. Afterwards the correct is scenery.bat started. I hope I could to some extent express itself. Do not write in English language is easy for me in such a way.

[rightseater 0]

Gunnar, m

[Guest gunnarmd]

Hallo Jeremy,you can write in English. To read I know the English language completely well. I leave myself also from babel fish help. Obviously this translator rotated somewhat.:-) Write in English falls me heavily.

[rightseater 0]

All,Shown below is a rough idea of the results of water masking in FS9 by using the 24-bit conversion I spoke of earlier. It takes some time and can be a bit tedious, but it is worth it in the end. Obviously it would look much better with addon water textures, but the default textures are much better than what you get from the online maps. Notice how masking allows you to keep the beaches and other goodies around the shorelines.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/188487.jpg

[desertwind 0]

Jeremy,That looks wonderful! I will definitely be interested in reading your tutorial on the mechanics of your technique.Tawni

[rightseater 0]

Tawni,Let me give you a quick rundown on how I did that. That way you won't have to wait for the manual......which I am incredibly sorry for delaying. First I create a bitmap image the same size as the tga image I want to mask. In this bitmap image I copy the default water textures found in FS9/Scenery/World/Texture (there are plenty in there, so I choose the one that best suits the area I am masking). I copy the default water texture into my blank bitmap image and continue to copy and paste lining the images along the borders until I fill up the entire bitmap image.Then I white out the areas of the tga image that I want to mask. If you are careful you can keep the beaches along the coastline. Then I copy the tga image over top of the bitmap image allowing the water texture to show through where I have performed the white outs. Finally I save the bitmap image as a 32-bit tga file (making sure it is renamed properly)and I am done.In my manual I will explain in great detail with images, but hopefully this will help until then. By the way, there are other ways to mask the images, but I will have to evaluate them further before speaking in any detail.-Jeremy

[rightseater 0]

Before I head off to bed, let me give one quick piece of advice if you are working on water masking. Make sure to go back and edit the coastlines, especially in areas where beaches and regular ground meet. Below is a screenshot of some editing I did to Aruba last night. By whitening up the beaches a bit I think it gives a more authentic feel.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/188492.jpg

[desertwind 0]

Here's a more general scenery question, but it relates to my scenery created using maps2bgl and might be helpful to others as well so I'll post it here.When creating scenery areas, I assume it's good to have some 'overlap' (data redundancy) to avoid gaps in coverage between areas. However, when selecting areas defined in your *.kml files, you never really know in advance what physical area is going to be created once the the tga files are processed. You might have just a little overlap or you might have a lot. This made me wonder if there's a performance penalty if you have two adjacent areas that share substantial amounts of redundant data. Does FS9 try to load the textures twice in the overlap areas, or just the one with priority in the scenery library?Also, how much scenery does FS9 attempt to buffer prior to flight? It seems to me that my scenery load times are getting longer as I add more areas. I expected this to some degree, but wonder if there is a 'limit' or 'cap' or will load times increase proportional to the amount of scenery created for a given area?Tawni

[desertwind 0]

Hi, Jeremy~Thanks for that preview; I'll try your technique this evening and let you know how it goes. Tawni

[desertwind 0]

I haven't gotten around to optimizing the image quality at this point; I'm having too much fun creating areas I've actually flown in (when I was an active private pilot) and taking them for a looksy in my dorky default Skylane. I am absolutely tickled silly by how fantabulous FS9 looks even with the patchy gamma and multiple resolutions contained in the satellite imagery. It'll probably bug me later, but for now I'm happy as a clam on an sandy sea shore.Speaking of sea shore, another thought popped into my head. I know many of us use Flight Environment. Will it be compatible with photoscenery masked using your technique, Jeremy? Tawni