nagging problem with sceneries

[Guest]

I have a whole pile of terrascened quads, and "mostly" they work fine. But I have a nagging problem:Every single one of them works fine if I teleport to some particular spot and just fly around. Mostly I can also fly to neighboring quads with no problem. But if I try a longer flight, spanning multiple quads, eventually my carefully TSed quads don't show up, and I get the default ground-control terrain. Then if I fly over more quads, eventually they'll come back.Now, the funny thing here is that (1) It can happen to any quad, and (2) all the quads it happens to are fine when I check them by teleporting there and flying around, or teleporting to a nearby quad and flying into them. Because of (1), I don't think it's a simple conflict with another POD or something like that.Any ideas, or approaches to debug this? It's pretty weird to be accustomed to flying over area B, but when I fly over it on my way from A to C it doesn't show up!

[Guest]

PS - I wonder if this is related in some way to my "Fulltex" problem. I have to extract the "fulltex*" files from the terrascene-produced POD and place in the in the right data directories. If I don't do that, I get lots of crashes out to the desktop when running Fly over those areas with messages that it can't find those files, even though they really are in the pods.

[Guest]

Even more data: although I'm not 100% sure of this yet, it sure seems like this is happening on exactly every other quarter-globe tile, as I fly along.Whatever, it's quite annoying when trying to make a long VFR flight! Sure wish I could have at it with a debugger, but that's apparently not to be :(

[Guest Fly II Pilot]

Are all of these tiles part of a single scenery, in the same POD and therefore being loaded by a single .scf file?Alejandro AmigorenaCheshire, CTFly! II Beta Team MemberAthlon XP 1800ABIT KR7A-RAID768Mb RAMMSI GeForce 3 Ti 500 64MBSB Audigy GamerCH Flight Yoke USBCH Pro Pedals USB

[Guest]

Hi Alejandro,The pods are one globe tile per pod (4 quarter-tiles). So it's not some enourmous amount of tiles in a single pod or anything like that.Most of the pods are around 400 Mb total, including water and night textures.I believe I have seen this within a single POD: part of a globe tile is OK, and another part from the same POD is gone. (But obviously present in the POD itself, since I can teleport there and see it just fine).It's weird, but very frustrating!I don't think it's a lack of RAM on my system or anything like that, since I have 1 Gb of RAM installed.

[Guest]

Hi MadMax,I had exactly the same problem as you with two very closer cities (about only 45 miles), So I decided to make both cities in one only scenery. This "bug" always happens when you have two scenarios very closer or if boundaries coordenates crossed one each other.My advice is not to render cities with less than 80 miles from one to another or if you want, render many cities on a single file. Also you can use SCENERY HELPER by Elrond Elvish utility for Fly! 1.0 to help you to get boundary areas for your scenarios or use Fly!'s 1.0 Editor to view if your scenarios are showing correctly or not before import to Fly!'s 2.0 editor.Hope it helps,Keyton Cabralhttp://www.aerovirtual.com.br

[Guest]

Hmm - well I can't very well put all of Washington state in the same POD :(I got the boundaries for the globe tiles just through the snap to grid tile feature of Terrascene...

[Guest]

MadMax,You can render many main airport/cities of Washington State since they have some distance beetween then. You can make small PODs (slicing only a small region) for each scenario too. It will render faster and the file won't be so big. :-)Good luck,Keyton Cabral

[Guest]

But that only gets me the little rendered areas around the airports. Seems to kind of defeat the purpose, IMHO, since I'm trying to generate continuous terrain for the whole state, and TS-ed areas (even between cities) look a lot nicer than the default terrain, which is fairly bland. Disk space isn't a problem (so far).I hope there's a way to fix this. The TS docs had some warning about making sure you render on globe or quarter globe boundaries so that you wouldn't run into problems with adjoining terrains, but I seem to have that problem even though I've placed everything on globe tile boundaries :(PS - this is exactly the sort of thing that makes me wish Fly could turn into an open source project. If I had the source and a debugger, maybe I could come up with a fix.

[Guest]

"But that only gets me the little rendered areas around the airports."Hi Max,Well, Joao Pessoa city has about 1 million people and his extension is a little bit huge. Here my SCF file: ---- scenery set name ---- SBJP generated by BR FLY! ---- coverage area lower left ---- 09 06 35.4 S 35 51 33.8 W ---- coverage area upper right ---- 04 55 04.3 S 33 02 48.8 W ---- load lower left ---- 09 26 35.4 S 36 11 33.7 W ---- load upper right ---- 04 35 04.3 S 32 42 48.8 W ---- pod file ---- SBJP.PODThe POD file is about 30Mb and you can see a lot of rendered terrain. Maybe it is enough, but I'm not sure how big are the cities that you want to make it.Good Luck,Keyton Cabral

[Guest]

It might work for one city, but I'm trying to do all of Washington state (and eventually the entire western seaboard of the US).My TSed data for Washington state (not even counting Oregon) is about 10 Gb, so around 330 times the size of your area. Each individual grid tile is around 400 Mb, plus or minus. I would consider 30 Mb to be quite "little", since it only takes a few minutes to fly to the edges of it.With smaller areas, it isn't very much room to fly in before I run out of scenery and into the default terrain, which I find pretty bland. Fly generally copes quite well with all this data, with the single exception of every other quarter-globe tile disappearing! Grrr... Except for that, the scenery engine seems very much up to the task.It's so close to working great... just this little problem.

[Guest]

"With smaller areas, it isn't very much room to fly in before I run out of scenery and into the default terrain, which I find pretty bland."Yes, you're probably right, but if you divide all the Washington State in many scenarios (like I did with many brazilian cities), you will fly! over rendered scenarios almost all the time, specially next to the cities. I see no reason to render only ground scenery if there is almost nothing to see far from big cities (except if you have elevations like Grand Canyon) or if you're in cruise altitude. That's only my opinion. ;-) Anyway great to talk with you to change some scenery hints and please let me know if you find a solution for your problem.Take care,Keyton Cabral

[Guest Fly II Pilot]

John:First, please sign your messages. It makes it so much easier to reply. I just hit reply, thinking that I would find your name in the body of the message but it wasn't so I had to go back out, go to your profile and look it up.Now, regarding the scenery. If you're going to have continuous coverage then you might as well have a single POD for everything. Then it has two overlapping sceneries, Fly! II doesn't handle it very well and that's why you find that the scenery sometimes disappears.If you don't want to unpod and repod another option is to put all of your POD files in the shared scenery. In that case you won't need the SCF files since Fly! loads everything in the shared folder anyway. However, I don't know if this could have any impact on performance.I haven't tried merging two .SCF files or extending the scenery coverage and loading two .PODs within the same .SCF file. Just an idea...Good luck!Alejandro AmigorenaCheshire, CTFly! II Beta Team MemberAthlon XP 1800ABIT KR7A-RAID768Mb RAMMSI GeForce 3 Ti 500 64MBSB Audigy GamerCH Flight Yoke USBCH Pro Pedals USB

[Guest]

Sorry 'bout the name, I'll try to remember from now on :)One problem with making it all the same POD is that this data lives on a FAT32 partition, which has (if I recall right) either a 2 or 4 Gb limit to the size of files. My terrains wouldn't all fit.I suppose I could reformat the disk under NTFS, but with files bigger than 4 Gb I'd worry about whether every piece of code holding offsets to within PODs was 64 bit clean. If anything was trying to hold offsets in 32 bit integers, it would wrap. Has anyone out there successfully used PODed sceneries over 4 Gb in one file?Thanks for the ideas... Maybe I'll try putting them all in "shared" and see what happens! I have about 10 Gb in WA, 8 Gb in OR, and some more coming along for CA, so hopefully there is something I can do...JohnG/madmax

[MGS 0]

John, I'd just like to ask this. Did you render and slice the quarter tiles separately, and then pod all four quarter tiles into a full globe tile that has the standard globe tile boundaries?