What color is your water in Fly!2?

[Guest captbulldog]

How big is the scenery? I have an idea.

[michal 44]

>Michal >You're using inland water as examples of ocean water blue - >doesn't work. I live pretty close to the ocean at an >altitude of about 100 ft. I see the ocean everyday from a >'final approach' perspective :-) >On clear sky or small cloud coverage ( a majority of days ) >the the sky is blue with clouds that look just like Fly!2 >and the water is deep blue. That is fine but "deep blue" does not mean "neon-blue" and the latter has nothing to do with real water. And neon-blue is what you tend to get in FLYII.Also your final-approach look is a shallow-angle view which indeed can have a lot more luster. Water from altitude when looked at higher angles has much more saturated color, less reflection.Another point - most of my flying is above land and what I want to see is a good inland water. Deep-blue rivers are much further away from reality than grey oceans.Michael J.

[Guest]

PrestonI've been working on just 1 quarter Globe tile (255-170NE to be exact)-that's Heathrow and Northolt (plus a couple of GA fields Denham and Elstree not currently in the Fly!database).However I'm tempted to get more of 'London Zone' out-by that I mean that I'll include the next tile along (000-170NW) which includes London City out to Southend. That includes North Weald with Stapleford.The decision I guess is down to Avsim server space and 'users' ability to download biggish files. Lots of UK guys still on 56k modems.What do 2 quarter Globe Tiles with 'water' and 'night' included add up to when podded and zipped?I've got Heathrow and Northold accuurately lined up now but alas 'City' is now 'in the water' and North Weald's westerly runway is too low and that's as far 'East' as I've gone.I'd therefore have to issue a DEX file to reposition them, taking care to correct any navaids as well.Oh well worth it be able to 'Fly over the UK' at last!

[Guest]

PS-I see now that 'The Big Island' Hawai scenery recently uploaded was 193Mb when zipped-surely Avsim can't take too many of those? Also how do you get to 'process' that in PhotoShop? Todd's Terrascene was very clever in 'stitching together' lots of small files without needing a graphics program.DT

[Guest]

This topic is quite interesting to me. I've seen water in a variety of ways in FlyII...some more realistic to my untrained eye than others. I'm working on scenery for San Diego and would like to get realistic looking water for my area. I came across this photo of a San Diego beach next to a bay. What do you think of the difference in water color? I admit this could be some strange characteristic of the aerial photo, but that ocean water sure looks like a kind of unnatural light blue. Compare it to the bay...a dramatic difference in color! I'd love to hear more clear explanation (not just ranting and raving) about what affects water color. It might help me choose the right colors for my scenery.

[Guest Colins2]

Hi David,193mb, Bah, that's nothing :-)A full Globe tile when rendered can run to 800mb or so, just for 1 TGA image. Photoshop will open it for editing without problems, but extremely slowly. Once it has opened it and swapped it out then editing is OK.Paintshop pro, however, will not open images that large unless you have vast ammounts of RAM.The slicing and podding routines greatly reduce this huge file size, but a full globe tile with night and water can be around the 400mb mark.I have opened a TGA of just over 900mb with photoshop on a 1 gig Athlon and 384 mb ram. (more out of curiosity, than anything else)Colin

[Pascal_LSGC 298]

DavidWhy not upload a jpg file with a TS project file? User have then to convert the jpg to tga (many free programs do it, a good one is IrfanView, only 700kb dowload) and lauch the ready-made TS project.That has been discussed before in this forum, but only Paul Van Roy used this process for the Netherland scenery.I made some tries, you can have files 5 times smaller without any loss of quality.Best Regards!Pascal

[Guest]

I think thats a great idea, Pascal. I've been working on a few scenery projects (none are complete) and wondered what I could do to share them here. I hadn't considered converting the TGAs to JPGs. Thanks for the idea!

[michal 44]

Dan,This photograph is clearly missing some colors (look at the quality of the ground textures) - I would not use it as a reference.It is better to go to your local bookstore and look at some books with lots of aerial photography. It doesn't have to be exactly San Diego.Michael J.

[Pascal_LSGC 298]

Dan,In my opinion, this beautiful blue has been added with image editing.We must know that most of the satellite or aerial images are "corrected", even (and especially) in books where you have beautiful landscapes, and it's not always clearly stated. And it's exactly for the reason we are discussing here: in people's minds, the water IS blue, and NOT dark grey. So let's show what people want.The phenomenon of reflection and refraction in water is quite complex, and I can't go into the details here. Basically, the smallest the angle of the viewer, the more the water reflects light. When seen from a vertical position, there's pratically no light reflected from the sky. We get the color of the light captured by the water and filtered by it. This light can takes many different hues, depending on transparency and particles floating there.I agree with Michael on this point, from up, the water can be blue, but very deep and not light blue, because it's NOT due to sky reflection on the surface, but to light REFRACTION into a transparent environment. And more often, the water tends to be very dark, or greyish green rather than blue. And I don't even speak about the surface (waves...)Fly! II doesn't take into account this natural fact, and simply reflects full or part of the sky color. It's quite realistic for far water, not for what pilots see just under their feet.There is one exception however: if the water is very transparent, not too deep, and the sand is nearly white, the water will appear turkish blue (tropical waters).To temper this a little, I must admit that we look more often at the horizon than at the "nadir" from the cockpit.Hope I was not too long!Pascal :+

[Guest]

Pascal,I saw your post and got curious. I just tried converting the day, night, and water mask tga files from the Big Island to jpg files. Doing this and zipping them would have reduced the size of the AVSIM upload from 193 MB to about 100 MB. The reduction was probably not any more than this because the water mask was so large and much of the island at night was dark so the overall size was greatly reduced when I sliced and podded the scenery. Each file (before zipping) was 1.15 GB. Converting to jpg resulted in file sizes of 95.5 MB for day, 16.9 MB for night, and 12 MB for water (all before zipping).Don

[Pascal_LSGC 298]

Hi Don!In fact I made a mistake in my calculation. It was just a fast try, and I forgot to compare the jpg and the pod ZIPPED. I realized afterwards that the POD can be more compressed than the jpg. I tried again, and I got a file a little more than 2 times smaller (and not 5x) with day scenery and water mask. This seems to comfirm your results. Nevertheless, this is interesting, if users accept to make their computer work a little before they get the scenery.I have also tried different methods to compress the unpodded files in the data folder, without any better result.Pascal