The TileProxy project goes public in May.

[Guest Dragonlick]

I would rather think of it as doing an aerial photography sweep where you could fly the plane yourself making your own photographic manuevers, which is what I did, until I mistakenly thought that I could re-do this at any time. Unfortunately, I deleted all of my area files because I wanted to do a re-fly and get it exactly right. But the next time I went to fly, I could not get gargle or virtuous to deliver any files. But as Christian was saying, once you have flown an area and collected the files, you can fly the same area again without using tileproxy and the scenery is not re-loaded online. The only time tileproxy seems to load anything is when it is something that has not been loaded before. Another great achievement that Christian has given us. My only question is wondering if there is any way to beat the 404 limitation or is it dependant upon the time of day or night???

[Guest cbuchner1]

actually it's a 302 limitation - and it seems to be entirely random when this will hit you. Maybe it's the moon phase or the mood of the administrator. ;)A safe bet might be to go down to a conn=10 setting for the network module.

[maxymaxy 0]

Christian,If I fly over the same area over and over again, will tiles that have previously been low res. gradually get overwritten with higher res until that area is all hi res (17)?Once an area is 'done' where in the scenery folder do I go to save it, for backup purposes? Is there any way to determine from the folder/tile names where the tiles belong in the world i.e. like lat/long?

[Guest cbuchner1]

There is a thread about "missing areas in TileProxy" that covers the coordinate system and has a nice graphics that helps in understanding the arrangement of subfolders inside the "TileProxy Photoreal World" folder.Backing up of that folder is possible. And Tiles do get replaced by higher res versions as needed (i.e. you fly close nearby) but it is difficult to get highest resolution coverage on a large region. You have to do really sophisticated flyby patterns (maybe on autopilot) at slow speed ;)

[Guest Dragonlick]

A method for gathering hi-res scenery in an area that I use is to use slew mode to position myself at each small section that I want. Then use the Tilde key (shift+') which causes a scenery re-load. This usually gets stubborn areas pretty nicely. After you have collected an entire area (assuming the server will let you finish) you can then fly it and FS will pick up the tiles as needed from your hard drive instead of online, albiet the ones that you may have missed still getting downloaded online. If you have plenty of RAM, that will help speed up the scenery re-loading process, which can be time consuming. I would also recommend setting the processor memory usage cache to System cache rather than Programs. This supposedly causes the cache to store data, such as textures, etc. rather than programs and some of your scenery will re-load much faster. It's just better in general for FS, I think. In Windows XP, just right-click on My Computer and select Properties, then Advanced/Performance Settings/Advanced then under Memory usage select System cache.Hope this helps some of you.

[Guest Dragonlick]

>>actually it's a 302 limitation - and it seems to be entirely>random when this will hit you. Maybe it's the moon phase or>the mood of the administrator. ;)>>A safe bet might be to go down to a conn=10 setting for the>network module.>Christian, how does one set the conn=10 parameter and is that the max # of connections it will make to the server?

[Guest cbuchner1]

the conn argument is part of the module_config string and must be separated by a pipe (vertical delimiter) character from the remaining string. Careful, the very long module_config line must not get broken into two by your text editor's word wrapping. This absolutely needs to stay a single liner.module_config="conn=10|server=..."For the technically inclined:That's the number of simultaneous web requests to the server, the rest is queued before execution. The server connections may stay open longer (due to the HTTP Keepalive mechanism) and this can result in more than 10 open TCP connections overall.

[Guest Dragonlick]

Hello Christian,The new beta 4 works fantastically! and I have been having great results with it. So far, here is my wish list (haha) for future. btw, I used to do scenery programming under Safari Fliteware, a company I formed back in the mid 90's. So I know how hard you are working and how much commitment it takes. I truly hope that you get something back for all of this and I thank you again for such a great pioneering effort. I can see so much potential for this as a way to provide vast scenerys without the limitations of CD's or DVD's. So here are my questions to date:1) Would it be possible to have a GUI that could talk directly to fileproxy with options such as turning on and off the internet read/write functions? So that writing new scenery could be turned on or off?2) is there any way to control what level of scenery gets pulled from a service? What I would like is to be able to have giggle earth provide ONLY the low-level sat photos and not the higher res aerial for example. This would be great for making wide spread scenery using less storage...such as for using faster jets, etc. I have had pretty good results flying a 737 using low max_lod values even as low as 1 and uses less memory and less service hits. I also set the texture resolution down to 10m/pixel which helps and you really can't tell much difference while flying at high alts anyway. But I can't seem to find a way to stop g**gle from using those aerials that look terrible when overlaid on top of the low level sats. Any ideas?3) When I am flying, I notice that after a while, FSX seems to get pretty lazy about putting up new scenery and I usually have to initiate a scenery refresh. Yes, I realize that I am flying at 400 kts but FS seems to give up. Is there any setting that would make FSX a bit more aggressive at putting up scenery?Thank you so much!Rob

[Guest Tashunca-Uitco]

With SP1 , I encounter problem with scenery loading . I tried many tweaks explained here , but nothing to do .When I am flying , I must pause the sim end ask for a refresh , it's independant of the speed of the airplane .With RTM and Beta 4 , this problem doesn't exist .With SP1 , the terrain engine seems to be most different and gives blurry problems .

[Guest cbuchner1]

regarding 2)Virtual Earth has a good global sat layer at low resolution. It is not patchy at all.3) FSX RTM has some trouble updating its scenery. Tileproxy needs to print about 500 Tiles being accessed per second during flight(see console window for that readout) to update terrain fast enough for just the Ultralite at 60 MPH. It seems that FSX SP1 reads too many tiles in the far distance before any close terrain is updated.To keep up with jets, several thousand tiles per second would have to be read. I don't think this rate could be reached, as each tile is an individual file on disk. And each read access goes to the filesystem layer.I also found a bug in Beta 4 which loaded too much high res far out from the plane and made tile loading less efficient. The next release will fix this. The bug is only triggered when using FSX SP1 and enabling the preload functionality in the INI file.

[Guest Dragonlick]

Thanks Christian...2) Ok, so how do I get Virtual to give me ONLY the sat layer and no hi-res? It seems to always put some hi res down directly under the plane no matter what I try.3) Yeah, I realize that FSX would never keep up, however, I am trying to run things at this very low res and having fairly good results. It appears as tho right after a scenery refresh, if you start to fly right away, you can see that it begins loading new textures right nearby the aircraft, then moves further out until finally it is way out in the distance, correct? But once it has gotten far away, it seems to only load about 10 tex/sec. I realize this has nothing to do with TileProxy. But FSX is just leasurely goofing off (so to speak) while I am reaching the end of the scenery that was loaded and it is as tho it is not even trying to load critical scenery, such as the next area I am flying into which has nothing at all. I suppose that at very low speeds this does not occur. But I am having to do a refresh at short intervals. I hope that MS will look into that one.One of my goals with TileProxy right now is to start collecting a library on CD/DVD that might include one set for each state (for example) of low res sat scenery. At least it will be FAR better than just having the MS default.Q: Is there any way to allow the MS default scenery to show thru places where there are no tiles (empty space)? I have put some of my purchased photo scenery above the TileProxy files (in the FS Library) and that seems to work ok, but would be nice if scenery that is lower priority could be seen to fill in the blank areas. Is this possible?Also, do you have any plans to make a GUI for TP or is that even possible?Mainly, I am pulling out my hair trying to get just the sat level and nothing else...it seems there must be a way. Haven't tried VE for that purpose yet tho.Thanks and sorry for all the questions. I spend hours working with TP and you have no idea how exciting this is for me.

[Guest cbuchner1]

2) Try max_level=13 in the INI file for the Virtual Earth ServiceAlternatively (or additionally) max_lod = 11 in the TileProxy section on the top. That limits the resolution of the tiles on disk and saves space.3)the "show through" is impossible to do dynamically as I have to define beforehand what is "transparent" and what is photoscenery. It's a definition of land class and that is pretty static. It's basically impossible to do that based on which tiles have been downloaded. I am having a hard time switching the entire photoscenery definition to transparent (i.e. TileProxy OFF) and have FSX recognize that.Christian

[Guest Dragonlick]

Yay!!! Christian, you are a genius! Thank you! I set the levels as you said and even went one notch lower on the max_lod and it works perfectly!!! Now the only trouble is that even tho these files are so small, a 10 meg set of tiles takes 10 times that much on the hard drive. I know that is because of the cluster sizes as the BMP files are all less than 1k each now. I know that there is a way of including texture files inside of a bgl now (as with MegaScenery for example) but that is beyond my scope I think.Thanks again, Rob

[Guest cbuchner1]

I am thinking of clustering many small BMPs into what I call a "flat file". But that's an enhancement I don't expect to see before Beta 6 ;)

[Guest Dragonlick]

Now That would be a serious improvement for sure. Not only for size reduction, but may help improve load times too maybe...Any chance of allowing the user to specify a rectangular area lon/lat for the scenery they wish to build where outside of that region, TP could return transparent tiles? This would help in building layered scenery at least, but is it possible?Well, at least I know where I will be all weekend this week, haha!Can't wait for the next beta, they just keep getting better. Thank you Christian!