Photo Scenery Maker Help

[Guest ryebred]

I have been trying to create my own PhotoScenery in FSX using Photo Scenery Maker. First I went to this url..http://www.ptsim.com/sbuilder/gmaps.asp?La...556&Zoom=14I clicked on the 1600x1200 window and saved the image as a bmp. I opened this bmp in Photo Scenery Maker and specified the coordinates on the page above as the North, South, East, and West Boundaries. Then I go to the Scenery Generation menu and select Run Whole Process. I am then presented with the error "Texture Resolution is too HIGH. Please check texture resolution and try again." I tried zooming in more to zoom 15 on the Google Maps image and then took a screen shot from that and entered the new coordinates but I still get the error. Can anyone advise what I am doing wrong? Is there a better method for importing Photo Scenery into FSX using Photo Scnenery Maker?

[Guest ryebred]

Well I managed to get things to work using SbuilderX instead of Scenery Maker and using the SBuilderX Tile Server plugins. The only problem is if I create more than 4 maps in one project than SbuilderX gives me the Error can not display map popup and all of my maps dissapear and I can not redisplay them without shutting down and restarting the application. I like to have at least two or three maps on the screen so I can see where the boundaries are and add the next one immediately adjacent to them for seamless photo scenery of the entire area. Does anyone know what causes this error? I tried cleaning up my work directory but I still get it. I ended up starting a new project and importing one of the maps from the other project and made it work that way but it would be nice to have a better debug message.

[Guest luissa]

Hello,Did you try Add Map from Background in the File Menu? Here the message that will be displayed in the future version:When you press OK a map will be created, saved in the /Tools/Work/ folder and added to the display. If the size of the map exceeds your system memory the map is not created. Otherwise "Show Background" is turnned off and what you see in the display is the map. You can Zoom out to select the map. Once the map is selected, you can compile the project to generate a photographic scenery.Maps take much system memory. If try to load maps that exceeds the capacity of your system, the display of maps is turnned off.Kind Regards,Luis

[Guest ryebred]

Hi Luis,Thanks for your reply. Now that I am getting the hang of it, I really enjoy your tool. Thank you for your efforts in developing and maintaining it; it is much appreciated.I am running 64 bit Vista and have 6GB of RAM. The BMP files of my maps in the work folder are each around 140 MB. I am not sure if that size expands when they are displayed/opened in SBuilderX. With all 4 open that would be 560MB. After I added the 5th the total would be around 700MB. Now at this point, I got the error and my maps disappeared. However, I clicked save on my project, shut it down and reopened it and all my maps where there just fine. Thinking it was just a fluke I went ahead and created a 6th map. Same things happened but only now, whenever I shut the program down and open it back up again and load that specific project, I get the error right away. So it seems for me, 5 maps is my absolute max for one project. Not sure why though as it would seem the size of all files totaled up is way less than my system memory. If I look at task manager just before adding the last map also, I am not even using half of my available RAM.Ryan

[Guest luissa]

Hi Ryan,SBuilder crashed when one opened big maps. So I put an error trap that issues the error message that you refer to and turns off of the maps display. I would be very interested in knowing the size of the maps that cause problems. Note that maps take 4 bytes per pixel and the total amount could be much greater than what you see as file size. May be you could open the task manager and see the amount of memory being used as you load your maps. I think that the error appears when you approach the limit of your system memory.Kind Regards,Luis

[Guest ryebred]

Hi Luis,Here is a screenshot to show what my task manager looks like. You can see I am only using 55% of my system memory. However, I have a theory as to what is going on. In order to run Sbuilder on a 64 bit system, I had to apply the 32 bit patch that was described on your forums. 32 bit systems only recognize 3 GB of memory. I am wondering if 3GB is the hard limit with Sbuilder, even though I am running on a 64 bit system with 6 GB of RAM available.On a side note, I have seen this error with only 2 maps and 1GB of memory usage but I can always close the program and open it back up in those situations and then it works fine. I have also seen it pop up randomly from just scrolling around viewing the background image so it seems there may be something else going on in those cases.Thanks for your help.Ryan

[Guest ryebred]

One other thing I noticed from playing with the task manager. If I have three maps open and my memory usage is 2.5GB and then I select one map and delete it, my memory usage is still 2.5GB. If I then save my project and close SbuilderX and open it back up again and load the project then it only uses 2GB. So it seems when you delete a map that it is not freeing up the memory resources.Ryan

[Guest luissa]

One other thing I noticed from playing with the task manager. If I have three maps open and my memory usage is 2.5GB and then I select one map and delete it, my memory usage is still 2.5GB. If I then save my project and close SbuilderX and open it back up again and load the project then it only uses 2GB. So it seems when you delete a map that it is not freeing up the memory resources.Ryan

Ryan,Your observations are very useful to me since I am revising the tool. I will look again to memory management when dealing with maps.Thanks,Luis

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

Hello Ryan,Please see this thread where I hope that I gave an explanation that comes close to the truth!http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtopic=82163And the reason why you can re-start SBuilderX and load all 5 or 6 Maps without memory errors is probably because you are only using the memory that the bitmaps occupy and no longer need the space for loading the original jpg files and the working room for converting them to bitmap format. Since that is much less memory being used, you avoid the problem.Best regards.Luis