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Earth map tiles for Flight Simulator Games

EPONA48

EPONA48

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46
Country
finland
Did everybody noticed this little annoyance. You can't use google earth maps as earth for ANY games tiles because it is against their Terms Of Service. If you use them you will get banned forever from map services and receive nice corporation letter for lawsuit. Google is using that DMCA law for their protection mesaures.

My question is: Is there ANY open source map places without these corporation TOS policies?

You should make this info about Google policies as STICKY thread. Just a friendly reminder here :)
 
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This has been common knowledge in the flightsim community for years... and in fact discussions about copyrights and TOS are discouraged at FSDeveloper. Get a lawyer if you need a legal opinion.

ARCGIS has sources that seem to be free of odd restrictions. Imagery from the USGS or other US sources are free of these restrictions, as far as I know.

Some countries do have other free data. Canada may have free imagery.

Dick
 
Thanks for the info. I have question: What is that ARCGIS program?

I Downloaded that OSGeo4W what you suggested in sticky. Maybe that is useful program.

Also I got this program called Wilbur64 terrain tool.

Question 1:
In what files are stored those flightsim2004/FSX ground textures?
Roads and rivers are in different pictures. Are those ground pictures stored in pieces?

Question 2:
In which program I can open/modify this folder .BMP pictures?
Flight Simulator9/Scenery/World/Texture

Question 3:
Is this true? All terrain textures and buildings are placed on .bgl mesh file?

Anybody. Give me hint how to make ground textures.
 
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Instead of worrying over making new groundtiles, why not just make photoreal?

Dick
 
34FS00DE said:
My question is: Is there ANY open source map places without these corporation TOS policies?
Click to expand...

The closest thing to this is the USGS Seamless tileserver.

Some of the elements you mention are vector scenery based, rather than tiles.

You may open xBMP files with imagetool or with dxtbmp.

It may, however, help if you explain exactly what it is you are trying to do.

My observation is that the questions have varied terminology, and I'm not sure I understand exactly what you want to know. Indeed the different questions relate to Vector, Lc tiles, Mesh and 3d building placement!

These are separate scenery elements, and to address them really answers the question ... "How do I make Scenery?"
 
Here is my request. Just answer questions 1 and 3 please. Nothing more. Is this clear enough?

I want to edit these bmp files in texture folder:
example this file
Flight SImulator 9/Scenery/World/Texture:
001b2su4.bmp (Is abbreviation su for summer?)
002b2wi1.bmp (Is abbreviation wi for winter?
002c2hw7.bmp (What does this abbreviation mean?)
004b2fa2.bmp( Is abbreviation fa for fall?

Question:
I see this folder contains general bulding and sky textures:
Flight Simulator 9/Texture
Is this true?

HUGE PROBLEM:
When I try to run Sbuilder for FS9 in windows 7 I get this error message:
Run time error '13':
Type Mismatch.
What is going on here?
 
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Did you try opening the said files with either of the tools, I mentioned above?


Sent with Tapatalk for iPhone
 
Hi,

You might want to be a little more patience and try to suggestions given here.

The textures you want to edit are landclass textures, so that is not related with the earth tiles which are used for photo scenery. It might help if you tell us what you want to achieve, instead of asking different questions all the time.

For the sbuilder issue I would check the sbuilder forum. It is a problem that has been discussed before.
 
I have opened those landclass textures with DXTBMP program. They are usually 256x256 size pictures.
Arno :You are writing about earth tiles. Are they different picture files? Tell me this.

That Sbuilder problem. No luck in forums. That error code is related to Visual Basic files. Maybe some compatibility errors there.
 
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If you make photo scenery with resample, the resample tool will create textures for you. These are also 256x256 and have a name that corresponds with their lod tile. These textures are usually found in the local texture folder of the scenery, not in the main texture folder.
 
That runtime error didn't solved yet.
My question is:
What sizes are those earth tiles in sceneries? I mean size in pixels. Like 256x256 or more?
 
In fs2004 the terrain textures are 256x256 per lod tile indeed. That gives you a resolution of around 4.8 pixels per meter.
 
Arno:
Thanks for that reply. No I'm ready to make some land tiles. I will publish some of them in that pictures forum section.
About that ARCGIS program:
Is is made by ESRI and there is also a program called ESRI City Engine. You can make WHOLE cities with that program.

Here is address for ESRI:
http://www.esri.com/

Same in finnish language:
http://www.esri.fi/

Here is web page for City Engine tool
http://www.esri.com/software/cityengine

I don't know really what this program is for. See for yourself.
There are two versions: Advanced and Basic version.
 
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Yes, ArcGIS is a well known GIS tool. But since it is quite expensive you will see that many FS developer prefer to use cheaper options like GlobalMapper or QGIS.

I know about the CityEngine tool, but I don't think it is so useful for FS. It will make a big 3D model of the entire city. While for FS it would be better to have separate buildings and the terrain elements would have to be turned into terrain scenery.
 
Can those land terrain tiles be bigger then 256x256?

Am I correct about this:
All those extra buildings are placed by that autogen program?
 
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