New project: Tile server for MS FSX based on Google Map...

[saabpilot 0]

Hi Christian,A really interesting experiment which I will follow intensly in this thread. If it works ok it will have a major impact on our FS simming experience.BestBjorn

[Guest cbuchner1]

In my thread titled like "some ramblings about the new FSX SDK RESAMPLE.EXE" I analyzed the new resample tool and the compression they use. Yes, the tiles are always embedded.Looks appears that one cannot disable the compression, therefore there is no way to tell where exactly in the file a particular tile is located and there is no way to easily replace an existing tile inside the BGL - as the tile would change size (being compressed at a somewhat different efficiency maybe). The only way to force no compression would be to patch the RESAMPLE.EXE executable.But the new RESAMPLE.EXE compression is really effective, as it is in some ways similar to JPEG 2000. And by keeping everything in one file, the access is much faster. I am seeing some severe performance hits with my Samba implementation when a photo scenery consists of several thousand tiles and more.The drawback of the new compressed BGL format is that the tiles have to be decompressed on the fly and to be recompressed into DXT1 (or whatever compression DirectX graphics cards use). This is quite similar to what my tile server has to do, except that mine caches the resulting DXT1 compressed tiles.

[beatle 0]

Hey Christian,<>Actually, the overhead of doing IP over 1394 makes a connection over that wind up being about as fast as a 100Mbit connection most of the time (unless they've made some changes to the IP over 1394 spec in the last few years anyway :-> ).And YES, your mac has a 1394 port, since Apple was one of the original 5 companies that came up with Firewire (the original Apple name for 1394) and associated protocols (of course, those 5 companies are also the reason that wide spread adoption of 1394 was held up for almost 2 years, due to licensing issues, allowing USB to gain major market share both in installed ports on machines and in peripherals that would hook to those ports :-> and why 1394 is now mostly a niche interface).Tim

[Guest cbuchner1]

Back to plain old debugging - a problem seens be in my code or rather in libcurl - don't know yet. It's crashing on me in one libcurl subroutine under rare conditions. So by trying to make things run faster I actually made things run less reliable. Likely my own fault though. That's life. :)I have taken some Grand Canyon video captures with fraps at some small resolution. They pretty much prove that everything runs smoothly. I am trying to upload some of these captures to youtube, but the file size is tremendous (next to no compression is done by fraps). UPDATE: D'oh! Youtube doesn't like the codec used by Fraps. So I will have to recompress before uploading. Fine then, postponed till tomorrow!

[Cessnaflyer 56]

Very interesting project anything new on it?

[Guest cbuchner1]

Private life has been taking precedence during the past days. I can't keep burning the midnight oil for weeks and weeks.

[Guest cbuchner1]

MSN Live search maps are now supported. The coordinate system is somewhat different. Again this is organized in a quadtree, but the full vertical axis is used and it applies a different projection on that axis.The MSN tile servers do not require any authentication and no particular handshake or protocol. They simply give out JPEG files on request. Hence you could almost assume that these servers are "public". ;) However there may be a difference between the map data that is available through the 3D Active X based browser control (beta version) and the 2D JavaScript based mapping engine. After all, in an ActiveX you can do funky cryptographic stuff natively on the CPU and protect the licensed satellite data much better.At first glance, accessing these unprotected servers appears much more legal than using libgefetch from the gaia 0.1.0 distribution which actually worked around a cryptographic safeguard. I'd rather demo this setup with the virtual earth servers than with libgefetch.The Grand Canyon appears in B&W color only (USGS photo material?) and is quite boring though. No match to the images I posted earlier.Christian

[Guest cbuchner1]

Gaia 0.1.0 and libgaia seem to have been locked out by Google by setting some kind of filter. Well, I'll play with Virtual Earth for a while ;)

[scott967 62]

Guess now we know if Google is watching the bandwidth thru there.scott s..

[Guest cbuchner1]

Regarding Virtual Earth in US territory:zoom levels 9-13 contain a pretty amazing color layer for much of the Earth. This resolution is fine enough to get a realistic terrain display from the typical cruising altitude of a jetliner.Starting from zoom level 14 and above, the Virtual Earth data turns all grey (USGS aerial survey, public domain), but starting from this zoom level you can obtain quite a good resolution that is suitable for flying much lower. I am going to take the color from level 13 and tint the zoom levels 14, 15, 16 with that color information.Let's do some image processing to improve the data set!

[Guest cbuchner1]

I did another testflight in Grand Canyon. 76 more photos hace been added to the corresponding flickr photo set. This time I added exterior views as well. I flew in different regions of the Canyon and the texture colors varied greatly. Some parts appear more realistic than before, other regions are more cartoonish. I even found a village far down in a sidearm of the Canyon.http://www.flickr.com/photos/71882461@N00/...57594419190685/Fast forward a bit, the new photos got appended at the end.I shall post some test shots of MSN Virtual Earth soon, but these will be taken from high altitude.

[Guest Langeveldt]

Wow, good work.. I'm really looking forward to something coming out of this, but am a total n00b when it comes to scenery design.. Do you forsee a time (hopefully in the not too distant future) when your average FSX user will be able to take advantage of this streaming technology, or like putting man on the moon, will it be something that just shows off "what is possible" and of no real benifit to your average joe??PPL - Algoa Flying Club (Port Elizabeth, South Africa)FS5, FS98, FS2000, FS2002, FS2004, FSX user :)

[Guest cbuchner1]

To turn my prototype (that currently works with FS2004 and FSX) into a reliable and legal product usable by everyone a few extra steps are required:* One of Google, MSN Virtual Earth or NASA would have to agree to provide terrain tiles to end users ("the average flightsimming joe"), which may require some extra licensing deals with whoever provides their high resolution satellite data. Alternatively a large FS addon developer would have to step in and license satellite data and install a server infrastructure on their own. This might turn out to be a major cash expense which probably requires a by paid-for access on a subscription basis.* I would have to provide my Linux/open source based streaming tool in a virtual machine (e.g in VMWare Player - which may be a problem, as it requires a second CPU core and lots of RAM which many don't have) or I could rewrite my existing project into a native filesystem driver for Windows. This might require at least 3 months of extra programming work but performance would be much better.To make this technology available to everyone on the long term as a standard feature of FS XI or XII, I we need to convince Microsoft to consider adding an API for dynamic terrain in future simulator versions. The current terrain loader from a hard drive filesystem should be the standard plugin to that API. A dynamic terrain streamer (like mine) can then be provided by third parties and developers - or even my Microsoft themselves possibly as part of a subscription scheme to an online service. I think Microsoft have a feedback address for Flight Simulator which is tell_fs@microsoft.com - You can inform them that you really would like such an API for dynamic terrain added.Christian

[Guest Langeveldt]

Fair enough, good luck anyway and KEEP us POSTED! Suddenly Flight Sim seems less enjoyable for me now when I realize what it could be like! Kind of like when a whole new version comes out and you are stuck with the old onePPL - Algoa Flying Club (Port Elizabeth, South Africa)FS5, FS98, FS2000, FS2002, FS2004, FSX user :)

[Guest cbuchner1]

Milestone reached! I've obtained global coverage, had to create roughly 2730 BGL files covering all land mass of the Earth. I've tried the default flight from Friday Harbor - it looks awesome!Before the flight actually commenced, the tile server had to generate about 65000 (!!!) tiles, for which about 40 MB of data had to be streamed from the Internet. I think I can get that number down by reducing the maximum visible distance in the simulator settings.