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Guest 3cffts

Fly! II scenery is too dark

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Guest 3cffts

I have just installed an ATI Radeon X1650XT 256mb PCI-E graphics card in place of an ASUS EN7600GS card. The rendering of TerraScenery is noticeable improved. Particularly with MIPLEVELCOUNT=3. Much sharper images ... and the response of the sim to the controls seems much smoother than the old card. However, While I can change the contrast, brightness and saturation using the ATI control panel, and generally the monitor responds predictably to new settings, the new settings appear to make very little difference to the display of Fly II scenery ... it remains too dark, being only slightly brighter than before the change... even if the ATI panel settings are set so that it is impossible to see many colours on displays other than FlyII.Does anyone have any experience similar to the above, and any suggested fixes to the problem?Brian

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Guest Colins2

Brian,There are 2 solutions depending upon what you are doing.If you are creating TerraScenery then there is a tweak for the default TerraScene textures to brighten them up.If you are flying over the default Fly!11 scenery then there was a ROTW fix for the default textures.It wasn't so much a fix as replacement textures for all those contained in GLOBE.POD.I'm at work right now and don't have the files to hand to be more specific. I will try and find the info for you unless Randall beats me to it that is :-)The downside is if you fly over other people's scenery that wasn't created using enhanced textures. The 'tweaks' won't help in this case, I'm afraid.CheersColin

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Guest 3cffts

Hello Colin: I have partially solved the problem with another driver for the graphics card, such that the Terrascenery is almost as light as it was with my previous card. But if you have a solution for lightening all my existing Terrascenery, without having to re-render every globe tile, it would be most welcome. I really like this new ATI card for the quality of the graphics compared to the old card... much sharper Terrascene images!Brian.

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G'day Colin,About a couple of years ago I purchased Jak Frearon's textures for Fly! II but at present they are just gathering dust as I didn't know what to do with them.I would also appreciate if you could tell me how to incorporate them from CD into Fly! II please.Cheers,Roger

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Guest Colins2

Brian / Roger,Sorry for the delay in answering, I've been busy at work and now I'm home, I'm getting caught up with the decorating and other general maintenance :-)I also purchased Jak's textures after a few years hounding him on the HITW forums!As far as I can remember, you simply unpack the textures into your TerraScene directory. Then you can select them when rendering.The other 'fix' that I mentioned earlier is simply a new set of textures in the 'Globe.pod' It is basically a new version of globe.pod and I just unpacked them into the Fly! directory as per the instructions. Fly then finde thaes textures first and uses them rather than the podded ones.I must confess that I rarely use Fly! now - nor any other sims. I just don't seem to have the time any more. I had a big burst of enthusiasm with Fly!Mesh but the response / feedback was absolutely nil, apart from Chris Wallace with whom I had a lot of correspondence and who wrote the QTR coding/decoding routines.If anyone is interested, I had a way to regenerate the basic QTR files that make up the default terrain. My routines also flatten airports correctly! These were going to be used in Legacy but I haven't had much to do with that project either lately and don't know the current status.If you want to know more specifics let ne know and I'll see what I can dig out.CheersColin

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Guest 3cffts

Hello Colin:I have not forgotten about Fly Mesh. My last scenery project was with 7.5 DEMs which I understand are not compatible with Fly Mesh. However, I have another scenery project in mind for the fall for which I expect Fly Mesh to come in handy. With the 7.5 DEMs I never did get a satisfactory flattening of an airfield that crossed globe tile boundaries, but have put that project aside while working on another.I have found your Fly Mesh documentation of great help in understanding how Fly terrain is put together and still refer to Fly Mesh.Thanks for great work.Brian.

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Hi Brian,That's great news!I'm glad someone uses it.I didn't code for the USGS DEMS as I figured that there were enough programs out there doing that already.I concentrated on STRM and GLOBE / GTOPO data as this was available almost world wide. Also, the coarseness of Fly!'s mesh made this data sufficiently detailed for creating default terrain.It is always going to be difficult when you cross a tile with an airport. This is really due to the coarsness of the mesh as explained in the Fly!Mesh documentation.The default airports should be sorted if new QTR files are created though.CheersColin

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Guest 3cffts

Hi Colin:I would have thought that rendering two adjacent globe tiles as one project would have flattened the airport, but that did not happen. Would that not be the same as doing two adjacent Qtr tiles?I have often wondered if the .tga file with elevation information could be imported into a visual format and the elevations flattened. Have you ever heard of this being done?Even with these minor inconsistencies I still think that Terrascenery is just great!cheers,Brian.

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Guest Colins2

Hi Brian,You would think that it should work, I agree.However, I seem to remember people having problems with that function.I don't think I ever rendered 2 adjacent globe tiles in one go.Strictly from memory here, I don't believe that the Fly scenery import routines use previously imported dem data properly.I don't know exactly how it worked, of course.Just a thought but have you tried generating the tga file and just importing the image.Once that is all sliced up and working seamlessly using the default base mesh, then import a dem sufficiently large to cover both tiles.I don't know if it will make much difference but it might be worth a try.CheersColin

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Guest 3cffts

Hi Colin: Thanks for the suggestion. I will try generating scenery without the 7.5 DEMs, and then import the 7.5 DEMs and slice. It will be interesting to see if that makes for better flattening.First I have to fix the fan on my new video card ... it has developed a high pitched whine ... and is driving me crazy!Cheers, Brian.

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G'day Colin,Thanks for replying. I think that most of us have eased back a bit in our use of Fly! II and have also found that life's priorities have changed. Nevertheless I still manage to do a little bit of fly!ing on a pretty regular basis, but I'm retired .. :-rol I think I follow you regarding the use of Jak's textures with Terrascene as I have had one go at making custom scenery for Sydney but made such a hash of it that I can't fiqure out how I can upload it to the library. It was completely hand done in Turbocad as a heap of shapefiles and then imported into terrascene where textures were allocated to the shapefiles.The CD from Jak doesn't have any instructions, only a txt license file.Cheers,Roger

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G'Day Roger,That's exactly what I meant.When you allocated textures within TerraScene, you could / can use Jak's textures instead so long as they had been unzipped into the appropriate folders within the TerraScene structure.The other point to note is that TerraScene doesn't give you many options for allocating textures to shapefiles. I haven't used it for a long time now but TerraShape should solve this problem.(And I know you were using that!) :-)CheersColin

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G'day Colin,Of course it was TerraShape I was using to allocate the textures.A million apologies mate ! I must have been having a senior moment :-)They seem to be occuring on a far too regular basis lately :-lolCheers,Roger

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