Kapowsin Field

[Christopher Low 5,325]

I was busy upgrading Kapowsin Field last night, and I noticed two things.1. The contrast between the resolution of the terrain textures around the airfield is striking when compared to the resolution of the textures just to the south. The difference is obvious when using FLED, and proves that not all of the Seattle scenery region is at 4 metres per pixel resolution.2. There's a bloody sailboat just to the east of the southern section of the runway ! What on Earth is a sailboat doing here ? It's definitely part of the default scenery.Chris Low,ENGLAND.

[Guest glidernut]

Chris Low,I see no contrast between the resolution of the terrain textures bitween Fled and FU3! At Kapowsin Field or anywhere els.See snaps, the first is as seen by in Fled, the second is as seen by FU3.glidernut.20584.jpg,20586.jpg

[Guest glidernut]

Hear thay are.

[Christopher Low 5,325]

No John, I meant that I noticed the line of demarcation when I was using FLED. The lower resolution terrain textures start just south of the airfield.SCREENSHOT 1........sailboat at Kapowsin Field.SCREENSHOT 2........the red line shows the boundary between the low and high resolution terrain textures. The white circle indicates the location of the sailboat in screenshot 1.Chris Low,ENGLAND.

[Guest glidernut]

Chris Low,Where you hav drorn a red line, I can also see a line on the gound,both in Fled and in FU3. But this line, "see my snap of where your red line is" is just one of thousands of lines cuveringand cris-crosing all of every terrain in FU2-3.I can see no diferance in pixel resolution, on ither side of the line,In Fled or in FU3.But I can understand how you feel about the Seattle textures.I feel the same way about the Sanfran textures.glidernut.:-wave

[Guest jonpoint]

Chris,I know what you mean. There are a few 'wastelands' in and around Seattle. What makes them obvious is the quality of the remainder! IMHO, the sources for these images were probably 4m/pixel originally. It appears that the resolution has been downgraded during the conversion process. In fact, they look like someone has saved them at a lower res, then up-sampled them - hence the 'dirty' look. Either that, or spilled electronic coffee on them!This may have been a mistake, a by-product of the terrain mapping development OR, in reality, a lower res. I don't believe the latter however, as the 'bad' areas are tiled in amongst 'good' tiles and I believe the source images were much larger than a tile!I think we should invite Andre to comment as his knowledge of the process may shed some light on it. Andre?PS How are the models? Any use?:-waveJon Point*************************(effyouthree@hotmail.com)*************************

[Christopher Low 5,325]

Jon,Thank you for that. Now can you explain what I mean to glidernut ? I think he just assumes that I have been taking a few too many class "A" drugs :-lolHe must be blind if he cannot see the difference :-)Chris Low,ENGLAND.

[Guest Quaxo]

Chris, concerning "lower-res" areas in Seattle... I remember finding a big area long ago, in the SW corner, which was in lower resolution. I checked the cpd files, and found that some files, which were present in level 1, were missing in level 0. I assumed I had somehow "messed up" my FU3 install, but didn't bother to reinstall. But now I can think that this is a common problem... Can you check in your Seattle maps folder, if the number of L1 files is equal to the number of L0 files?Cristian

[Guest glidernut]

As Cristian sed, Do you hav any mising ?Iv got in CDROM Seattle MAPS,100 l0,s with one l0BLANK.CPD100 l1,s with one l1BLANK.CPD100 l2,s with one l2BLANK.CPD303 in all.Iv got in REGIONS SEATTLE MAPS,100 l3,s with one l3BLANK.BIN100 l4,s with one l4BLANK.BIN25, l5,s with one l5BLANK.BIN9 , l6,s with one l6BLANK.BIN4 , l7,s with one l7BLANK.BINOne or tow other points werth menshoning hear, are that in optionsI have the TERRAIN DETAIL and DISTANCE CLIPPING set at HIGH.And all is OK, no low resolution of sum terrain textures.But I remember when I had a leser graphics card, and the abuv setingswas too much of a frame rate hit too maintain.And If I changed thes setings thay did not alway take efect imeadeatly.But I found out that I could usualy get the changes to take efect mor imeadeatly by inshooering that thes lines in the cfg file was at the topof the cfg file as oposed to the botom or anywhere els.Even so, I still on ocasion could see the odd bit of terrain texture being rendered a little quiker or slower than its suroundings.And sumtimes the rendereing of this or that bit would seem to get stuk.Could this be what you are seeing in fled ?glidernut.:-wave

[JimmiG 244]

Rearding blurry textures, the San Francisco region also has a few of those. Check the mountains in the SE part of the region as well as the area around Santa Rosa airport. They are certainly not as sharp as e.g. Downtown San Francisco or the mountains to the SW.I don't think this was an accident. Maybe the tiles were originally of a lower res but LG upsampled them all to 4M/pixel? Maybe they did it to save space? It sounds unlikely that someone would accidently downgrade the resolution without noticing.They're still not as bad as the textures in the original Fly! though so I'm happy :DTextures being blurry for a short amount of time while they are loading is a completely different issue. On slower PCs it can take quite a while for the textures to load into full detail but if you wait long enough, they will. All the textures were sharp even on my old K6-2 and 16MB Voodoo3 card :)

[Guest R_Driscoll]

The SanFran mountains to the SE also had the biggest problems with cloud cover - you see patches of pale, blurry bits at strange places. I don't remember any cloud obscurations in Seattle.

[agtim 0]

Hi all,Just remember that the base material for FU2 are from 1996 and for FU3 from 1998 as monochrome pictures colorated under time and cost pressure. Beautifull pictures as for UK, Switzerland and Denmark was not available at this time, but result is still better than Fly! or FS200x.I remenber flying near Seattle over gray and white areas and not realizing that this are streets and houses.The cpd resolution is a pixel killer, that's why we use the .bin down to level 0 for UK and later for Switzerland also. :-wave agtim

[Christopher Low 5,325]

John,I have excatly the same number of each file that you quoted.Try loading some airfields in FLED. You will know which ones are in an area of lower terrain texture resolution by using the ZOOM controls. The jumps in magnification are more pronounced in an area of lower resolution. Try Bergseth Field and Ranger Creek. Now try Kapowsin Field. There should be an obvious difference.Chris Low,ENGLAND.

[Guest R_Driscoll]

What does "cpd resolution" mean - is this some compression algorithm?Could WINZIP be used to reduce the number of disks required for distributing UK-South, since WINZIP is loss-less compression?RobD.

[agtim 0]

Hi Robert,we do that all the time, but .cpd are the FU3 compressed megatile mode as in the original distribution. See www.agtim.ch/fu3/ for more info about it. :-wave agtim