New Photo Scenery Instructions?

boleyd · Post by **boleyd** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 7:02 pm

Just saw the new SBX photo-scenery instructions on AVSIM. They are very good - THANKS!

The instructions seems to imply that you can load a set of picture tiles from one of the servers at a specific zoom level. Then, by using the select box, and the zoom selection, a higher resolution background map of the selected area will be made. I have never found this to work. If I select an area and then select one of the zoom levels above the bottom one I get a blank map.

Before making a selection and a zoom level button I have to manually scan around the desired area at the zoom level I want. As an example, if I look at an area, in SBX, at zoom 14 I may actually want Zoom 16. This requires me to manually drag the picture around until I load the zoom 16 pictures from the server that cover the target area. SBX does not do this for me.

Often the result is you probably miss something at zoom 16. To fix this you must reset to a background image and then drag over the missed white areas. For all but a small area this is time consuming. I may be missing a step and therefore causing this extra work.

The ideal would be for SBX to automatically load, from the server, the selected area and not require a manual drag & load to get the server picture tiles.

Dick Boley near 5G8

Luis Sa · Post by **Luis Sa** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 7:32 pm

Hi Dick,

The tutorial is by Luis Feliz Tirado. I hope he catches this thread and discusses the matter with you.

But in fact you should get what Luis describes!

You also must know that if SBX adds the possibilty of loading very large areas, then I antecipate all sorts of questions and problems by users that do not have a powerful PC.

It is very easy to write a separate programme (possibly from the same folder where SBuilderX.exe exists to take advantage of cached tiles) that takes 5 inputs (plus the name of the image server, plus the name of the destination file) and creates a bitmap. The 5 inputs would be : Nlat, SLat, WLon and ELon and Zoom.
Then people would add it to SBuilderX if needed.

Kind Regards,

Luis

luisfeliztirado · Post by **luisfeliztirado** » Mon Nov 19, 2007 9:44 pm

Thanks for pointing out this potential issue, Dick. Confusion is one of the inevitable results of communication.

This is what I wrote:

"You would do well to pan around and obtain the images for the entire coverage of your project. Also, it will be easier to zoom in to your area, and to create custom ground textures, if you obtain images of your project at various zoom levels."

and

"First, you should zoom out so that the entire area of your choice is visible in the SBuilderX workspace...Any part of the selection for which there are no tiles will display in pure white (RGB values = 255,255,255) and will serve as a Null Value, that is, will be completely transparent and display the underlying terrain."

So, you are certainly correct that I could have been more explicit on this point.

But, then, if a tutorial covered everything, people would never participate in the forum - the community would die!

Best regards.

Luis

Luis Sa · Post by **Luis Sa** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 3:49 am

Hi,

I understand now. I could add "tile downloading" for missing tiles after you press the OK button of the selecting window. On the other hand, if you want to be sure that nothing fails, you should span the region beforehand at the target Zomm level.

I will consider this a future revision.

Kind Regards, Luis

Adino · Post by **Adino** » Tue Nov 20, 2007 11:05 pm

[Luis,

Can you add that "5 line program" also i your new revision?
thx alot

Luis Sa · Post by **Luis Sa** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 2:31 am

Hello,

Yes I can. I am runing it at this moment:

See what happens if I press GetMap? More than 333 thousands tiles are downloaded!

I am worried about that if people starts to use it as robots! Do you understand? Suggestions welcomed!

Luis

boleyd · Post by **boleyd** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 3:38 am

Yes, the server impact is very obvious. Other servers may "google" theirs in response. Obviously there has to be a limitation. SBX should be able to predict the number of tiles that would be down-loaded with this process. Although I do not use TileProxy that offers realtime tile loading anymore it was also a concern there as people flew around an area.

Restrictions on the max tiles and the delay between requests were used when I last used it. If you used this approach it would have to be locked. There are people who would put in a series of 9's just to grab everything they could with no regard to the eventual server restrictions imposed on their fellow simmers.

Perhaps we (SBX users) could experiment for a short time using the manual area scan to see if a consensus can be found to protect the server assets but avoid the need to drag/scan a larger area at a high resolution.

Dick Boley near 5G8

Luis Sa · Post by **Luis Sa** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 11:39 am

Hello,

As you see a 468,736 x 466,176 pixels image uses 4 bytes for each pixel which means that a memory of more than 800 GB would be need to handle such a picture.

So may be I read the system RAM and limit the size that I can download.

Regards,

Luis

boleyd · Post by **boleyd** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 12:37 pm

That is probably another good way to set a baseline to manage downloads. My RAM is only 1gb which is ok for the areas I "fly" in - rural. Right now I have 515mb available. XP-SP2.

Most of my photo-scenery is from Terraserver using the JD Cox program for acquisition. Typically, from that source, I create 200mb JPEGs. However, I have created 400mb JPEGS when getting 0.25m/pixel pictures for areas around an airport. I never really looked at the tile size Cox gets with his program.

Dick Boley near 5G8

rhumbaflappy · Post by **rhumbaflappy** » Wed Nov 21, 2007 3:54 pm

Hi Luis.

I think you should restrict the size of these downloads. I think reading available ram would work, but simply resticting this to 2 GB may be even better, as that would allow a user's virtual ram to be used.

We could cause a big problem with the various servers if this was left unrestricted.

Dick

Adino · Post by **Adino** » Thu Nov 22, 2007 1:46 am

I agree completely, Luis....lets give it a try with the 2 GB limitation.
thx a lot for such a great program!

Luis Sa · Post by **Luis Sa** » Thu Nov 22, 2007 1:55 am

Hello,

Thank you for the tips. I will try during the weekend finalize what I have. 2GB seems a reasonable limit.

Kind Regards,

Luis

Luis Sa · Post by **Luis Sa** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 6:11 am

Hi,

I changed the "Add Map from Background" to include another level of Zoom that corresponds to 112 x 80 tiles = 8,960 tiles. The generated image will have the size of:

width = 112 x 256 pixels
heigh = 80 x 256 pixels

that is 28,672 x 20,480 pixels which corresponds, if a pixel is 4 bytes, to 2,348,810,240 bytes. So I think this is more useful than the basic programme that I was trying to finalize.

http://www.ptsim.com/sbuilderx/sbuilderx_2gb.zip

What I need is to force the download of a tile if it does not exist in the cache folders. See:

http://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7524

Kind Regards,

Luis

EDITED ONE DAY LATER

Hi,

Here is a small programme that can download up to 20,000 tiles. But I never tried it with more than 200 or 300! So I really do not know how it goes when you try to download 19,999 tiles!

http://www.ptsim.com/sbuilderx/getbackground.zip

Place the EXE in the root folder of SBuilderX and then run it.

Regards,

Luis

Adino · Post by **Adino** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 11:58 pm

Thanks Luis!
I will go try this out.....based on your comments this should work differntly from what have been discussed, right?

Adino · Post by **Adino** » Wed Nov 28, 2007 4:50 am

I got this when trying to run the "GetBackground tiles" tool:

What am I doing wrong??