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FSX Skewed background image <fixed>

  • Thread starter Thread starter Taylor
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Hi Gary,

Sounds good. And thank you. As I'm sure you know, I have my plate full just learning the basics. I was aiming to keep the learning workload to a minimum, but what the heck, I've got the time for it and there's no rush.

Taylor
 
Hi Taylor:

The initial test compile of a local area high resolution terrain mesh BGL is ready for you to download; I've sent you a link in a PM. ;)


PS: Think of it as a "MASH-mesh" (...or was that a "mesh-MASH") ! :D


Oh, and here's a screenie of how the custom terrain mesh looks: :idea:

r9t892mtqysbr096g.jpg


GaryGB
 
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Hi Gary,

Wow, the detail is amazing. I'll have to relocate the helipad and fix the mesh so it blends, same with the creek. This is awesome :D
garymesh.png


How large of an area does this cover? I don't want the file sizes to be ginormous or anything, but there is a lake to the NW of the camp with a small island in the middle that doesn't show up on this .bgl. I'm thinking I might want to extend the creek around the mountain to show the water source. Not a big deal at this point though.

Thanks!

Taylor
 
Here's a screeny with Malibu Lake in the background. Looking at satellite images of this area at different times of season shows Malibu Creek with and without water...sometimes it's a creek, sometimes it's a ditch. So, if we want to be uber technically correct (which I'm not real interested in) there needs to be a seasonal variation applied to the land class/water class map, no?
malibulake.png
 
Taylor said:
Hi Gary,

Wow, the detail is amazing. I'll have to relocate the helipad and fix the mesh so it blends, same with the creek. This is awesome :D


How large of an area does this cover? I don't want the file sizes to be ginormous or anything, but there is a lake to the NW of the camp with a small island in the middle that doesn't show up on this .bgl. I'm thinking I might want to extend the creek around the mountain to show the water source. Not a big deal at this point though.

Thanks!

Taylor
Click to expand...

I'll take a look at the data set this weekend, and will see if "portions" of that potential 4GB fully-decompressed size can be better localized to cover only the more scenic areas up to the borders of the urban areas at ex: road edges, so that the non-urban areas can be shown without an otherwise immense terrain mesh BGL file size.

In theory one might still see a good result in FSX at run time using 40% compression for terrain mesh, but I'd have to check and see if the preferred existing 2 Meter mesh details are lost or distorted if a 40% compression is used in the BGL.

I'm guessing since you "don't want the file sizes to be ginormous", we might be setting a goal of having a terrain mesh BGL size of less than 500 MB (..or perhaps even smaller ?) :scratchch

On a practical basis though, even with the fair-sized surrounding area already covered in the initial mesh file, it was only around 6.5 MB in size, so we should be able to easily cover much more of this interesting scenic area without incurring a huge terrain mesh file size hit. ;)


Taylor said:
Here's a screeny with Malibu Lake in the background. Looking at satellite images of this area at different times of season shows Malibu Creek with and without water ...sometimes it's a creek, sometimes it's a ditch. So, if we want to be uber technically correct (which I'm not real interested in) there needs to be a seasonal variation applied to the land class/water class map, no?
Click to expand...
Correct; this can be done using a graphics application ex: Photoshop / Gimp / Paintshop Pro / PhotoPaint etc. to edit copies of the original aerial imagery to create the seasonal variations ...and if desired, the optional night texture (aka "LightMap").

CAVEAT: When editing the copies of the original aerial imagery, one will need to NOT re-size the pixel dimensions of the BMP files, so that they can used with the same original Geo-referencing TXT file (which SBuilderX writes into the downloaded tile folder along with the original aerial imagery BMP file).

Hope this helps ! :)

GaryGB
 
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