Tileproxy5 - Water blend masks

[Guest buzzle74]

Hi all, I have created some nice waterblend masks for my home town and they look great with tile proxy 4. They dont however seemed to be working as well in tileproxy5. Im new to all this so Just wanted to get some help if possible with the follwoing- To create the water blends Ive been loading up the 1024x1024 bmp files created by tileproxy and then creating a mask where the water needs to be and then resaving as DXT3(4bit alpha channel) format so i can get a transparent blend. This was working in tileproxy4. What im no sure about is- should i just save these bmp's as SU/LM or WI (at the moment saving all 3) versions and is working mostly. Seems to be random which extension tileproxy will create for certain areas.- Can u just apply the blends to the 1024x1024 bmps or is there a more appropriate method?Any assistance would be greatly apreciated as seeing these transparent waterblends is amazing.(fsx_kml is great for creating the freeways too). Many thanks

[Guest cbuchner1]

Uh oh.. the filesystem filter driver definitely assumes DXT1 format. Using DXT3 would screw up things royally inside the driver.I may consider DXT3 in future versions, if I find a good way to create the blending in the first place...

[Guest buzzle74]

lol.. fair enough, thought i might be pushing my luck but anyway heres some screenshots which shows the potential of water blends..

[Guest craig1998]

awesome job there! so you incorporated water from FSX into tileproxy? Looks really good.

[Guest cbuchner1]

Answering a previous questionSP=SpringSU=SummerFA=FallWI=WinterHW=Hard WinterIt depends on the season you fly in which tiles get created.Well what he did is he defined manually where he wanted the water and how strongly the water should blend with photoreal terrain. A pretty good accomplishment.The problem is that buzzle74 can't use the TileProxy program/driver with these tiles anymore, as they have grown in size (different compression efficiency of DXT3). The tileproxy filter driver simply assumes a DXT1 compression of the tiles. The DXT3 tiles may be slightly bigger and have the MIP levels at different places in the file. So simply said: Tileproxy can't properly support this file format. I wonder why it worked for him in the Beta 4 release at all. ;)Christian

[Guest buzzle74]

ok thanks for the info.. Actually i realise now that it only works when tp is not running. ie using the bgls to reference the already created bmps. This no longer works in tp5 because of the .on feature.. but it all makes sense now and can see how to make it work.I guess the dream would be to be able to create some coastlines using some kind of offline process. i guess you would have to read lat/lon from a quality vector coastline and then loacte the relevant bmp and then the relevant pixel within the mask and turn in on. then fill as either land/water.. (glad im not a programmer)But even still i think to get water quality that matches tileproxy terrain u would have to create your own mask manually near the shores and lakes especially.

[Guest wyoming]

anyways.

[Guest cbuchner1]

I am doing some research into water blend masks right now. The NASA SRTM V2 data contains a huge vector database of coast lines of seas and lakes and rivers at a 30m (1 arc second) resolution.Tileproxy could possibly download the required parts of the database on the fly and generate blend masks based on this. It will require a lot of extra processing, but fortunately this would only be done for a few tiles that are next to the coastline.But it can never be as exact as the masks you created manually...Christian

[Guest buzzle74]

Thats great to hear!..somthing special about flying with these blends. Was wondering if there might not even be an option for the fs community to create their own kml poly lines using google earth for the regions they love to fly which reflect more accurately the vector points. I guess this depends on the accuracy of the NASA data. Maybe placing these kml files in the relevant tileproxy photoreal folders or converting to bgls etc.. Either way would be great to have the option and i guess they could also be used for the shoreline animations.. Anyway good luck.. also one thing i noticed was the 1024x1024 bitmaps where almost double the original using dxt3 format. so from 683 to 1300kB

[Guest Challenger604]

cbuchner1 Do you ever envision what your product will look like when it's done?Will the water be right?Will the ability to DL tiles make it possible to run a Lear without refresh?Will all the ini files and cfg files be automatically be created?Will unused files be automatically deleted from our computers?Do you think all this and more is actualluy possible?Thanks

[Guest cbuchner1]

1) Water is "right" with 30 meter accuracy only...2) No learjets for now. They are too fast.3) Can't ship an INI files for commercial services working. So that manual editing step will remain.4) Yes, cache management will make sure your folders don't grow indefinitely.

[Guest Challenger604]

I meant by the water being right. Meaning it is not like land. Meaning the float plane will float.I forgot to add night lightingI dare mention seasons .. I know that is not possibleAnd I wonder about some sort of agreement with a map service which might make an ini file possible..Anyway just thinking outloud and thanks for the response.

[Guest cbuchner1]

Yes, the float planes will work again. That's the main reason I am doing this - also it solves the white tile in water issue (with google and msn mostly)

[Guest buzzle74]

Should look pretty impressive. cant waitOne question, if i wanted to make my own bgl from the tiles to play around with how would i determine the lat/lon of a given tile(top left) and the pixel/degree spacing of the tiles. Many thanks

[Guest cbuchner1]

Check the subroutine FS_Tile_Coords() in the source code of Tileproxy.It takes a tile's filename and outputs top left and bottom right coordinates (as well as the season and LOD level).Christian