Accurary and problems with the water masks: Screenshots

[Guest cbuchner1]

I am going about 250m from the shore line. A decrement of 1/255th in alpha with each pixel on 1024x1024 pixels textures. I am also dithering the alpha channel with the Floyd-Steinberg algorithm to make it look smoother.I am now blending to a dark blue shade (RGB 0x00, 0x10, 0x20) while decrementing the alpha value. The results in FSX not displaying its default water classes. But the overall result is more consistent.

[Guest cbuchner1]

I made the blend radius configurable. The screenshots I posted today in the Avsim screenshots forum and in this forum used a blend radius of 500 meters around land.Ideally the blend radius should depend on the image content. The more details there are, the longer the blending should extend. But how would I distinguish details from surface effects (wavecrests, water spray) from underwater detail?Another problem is with FSX accessing the photoreal tiles one by one. So the tiles are not really independent from each other. A land tile will blend into neighboring water tiles. Since the blending spans tile boundaries, I have to consider some extra surrounding radius (context) around each tile loaded. This drives the processing time up because I have to scan much more pixels.Christian

[nudata 10]

I wonder if you are approaching a situation that will make Tile Proxy more difficult to use for some part of the user community. By this I mean that Tile Proxy's advances will consume more and more resources eventually placing some of its utility functions (such as FSX water) out of reach of some PCs. Obviously, the primary appeal of the program is its ability to provide a real-time photographic view of the world. This is an extremely important development and one that has caught the interest of Microsoft. The question is how to sustain the original premise and also add new utility functions without requiring a very expensive PC to see the full beauty of the results. We already have that exact situation with FSX so adding yet another program, with similar needs, on top of FSX may become a problem for some.There may be two distinct types of users of Tile Proxy. One flies about enjoying views from all over the world. But they never delete anything and thus are content to use very large amounts of disk storage for photo tiles, etc. They occasionally focus on some area but really like to explore the whole globe.The other segment of users focus on a few areas that interest them for a variety of reasons. The make forays into other areas but spend much of their time enhancing a few primary sites. As you add enhancements the first group will need ever more processing power and storage. No problem, since that is an obvious requirement of their goals.The second group really needs all the enhancements you can dream up since their goals are focused on a few areas. Here there becomes a need to offer post processing to improve selected areas. The FSX water addition is a good example. As you say it may become a processor impact unless some other approach can be found. Assuming it does hit the CPU then the ability to post-process off-line selected areas becomes an attractive alternative. Two things accrue from this. One is the ability to reprocess the collected images into FSX BGLs and reduce the impact on the PC. The other is that advanced image enhancements are now easily enjoyed without nasty stutters or blurred textures in a real-time flight. One other advantage is that once a selected area is in FSX BGL format you can now add Autogen using the Annotator adding more depth illusion for low level flights.I would also argue that the first group of world travelers would also benefit since they may find that they want a "base" of operations for various areas of the world. Thus someone who adopts Tokyo as their base for Asian "exploration" may want to dress up the Tokyo area as much as possible with as little impact on the PC as possible.So, as Tile Proxy advances I am suggesting that consideration be given to moving some functions to a post-processing status where real-time may become a burden/compromise for the user.Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke

[Guest cbuchner1]

Oh well, the post processing is optional and can be turned off. I've tried to use algorithms that aren't too slow.For example the postprocessing of a 1024x1024 tile (highest resolution) requires FSX to process 2048x2048 pixels right now and it typically takes about 1 second to perform the blending.Overall this additional procedure only adds a few seconds to the initial terrain loading. As for the impact during flight I haven't made a lot of benchmarks yet.

[Guest wolfram_ravenwolf]

>So, as Tile Proxy advances I am suggesting that consideration>be given to moving some functions to a post-processing status>where real-time may become a burden/compromise for the user.I second that, as I always did, but I know Christian's vision for TP is an online tool. But if you prefer offline creation and usage of scenery, I'd recommend giving FS Earth Tiles a try. I believe both tools complement each other very well, FS Earth Tiles for static scenery (your home base, for instance) and TP so you can fly anyhwere and still have photo scenery.Here's the link: http://www.fspassengers.com/forum/read.php?f=9&i=4634&t=4634I hope both tools keep growing and learning from each other... :)

[Guest cbuchner1]

OMG he's quick. He even tried out water blending. He sure provides what you guys have been asking - so stop bothering me to make an offline version. lol.I am ahead of him when it comes to determine the land/water boundaries. After all, I've got 52 MB of highly compressed NASA data backing this ;-)