White Square/Tile In Photo Texture

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boleyd
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White Square/Tile In Photo Texture

Post by boleyd » Mon Dec 31, 2007 11:50 pm

Most, but not all, of the photo textures I create show a white square as illustrated in the following picture (screen-weenie). The square does not show in the original background area, It appears after the Add Map Background process (using 16x from a 14x zoom.



Dick Boley near 5G8
[img]uploaded/boleyd/2007123116521_CaptureWiz020.jpg[/img]

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Luis Sa
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Post by Luis Sa » Tue Jan 01, 2008 6:02 pm

Hi Dick,

Can you revisit the region at the target zoom to make sure that the tile is downloaded?

You could take note of the name of the tile (status bar) and see if it is present in the cache. If yes, then delete that tile and revisit the map.

Happy New Year,

Luis

stephanbauwens
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Location: Belgium

Post by stephanbauwens » Tue Jan 29, 2008 8:26 am

I have the same problem:

e.g. I show the background in zoom 11. Then I start "add map from background" with zoom 13. The resulting map is full of white space except for the area where I showed the background at zoom 13 before.

It seems that the process "add map from background" only loads the tiles that are already on the disk. Is there a way to force the download for the whole area?

Stephan

boleyd
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Post by boleyd » Wed Jan 30, 2008 2:24 pm

I have not had the white squares recently. I do not know why.... I probably changed something, found that it worked for its purpose, but never related it to the white squares.

Dick Boley near 5G8

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Luis Sa
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Post by Luis Sa » Wed Jan 30, 2008 10:18 pm

Hello,

You need to "visit" the area before at the target zoom so that all tiles are placed in the cache.

Regards,

Luis

stephanbauwens
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Post by stephanbauwens » Thu Jan 31, 2008 9:43 am

Yes, I understand that you need to visit the whole area that you want to capture. But it is very difficult to know which tiles have been loaded yet in the cache and which tiles are not in the cache yet.

e.g.: I'm looking in zoom13 with view background and then I want to load the background at zoom15 in a map. It's very difficult to look at the 16 zoom-15-places to fill the cache with the tiles needed for the whole map that I see in zoom13. It's worse when I would try to load the background into the map at zoom16 then I would have to look at 64 places in zoom16 before loading the map in zoom13.

My question was: wouldn't it be possible to force the downloading from the server into the cache for those 16 or 64 tiles that are needed to fill the map? Like a "refresh" button or something like that.

Another thing that would help is a navigation aid that scrolls the viewer exactly 1 screen to the left, right, up or down and keeping the background view. In that case I would only have to scroll over all the screens to download the tiles before loading the map. Now the only thing I can do is center the screen at a new position which I have to calculate. This is taking a lot of time.

Do not misunderstand ! Your program is simply fantastic. I did some scenery capture from satelite pics a few years ago using FS2004SDK and I got a lot of headache calculating the right coordinates, scales and positions to fit those pics together. Sbuilderx does all that hard work. The bgl I managed to produce is fitting very accurate in the FSX scenery.

Stephan

Stephan

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Luis Sa
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Post by Luis Sa » Thu Jan 31, 2008 11:48 pm

Hello Stefan,

Yes, I can change that. I am at this right moment working on the the support to generate Generic Buildings and I will take the opportunity to revise that problem. Meanwhile there is a Tile Downloader tool here in this forum that can assist you in that task.

Do you think that I need to revise the way tiles are cached? I mean: is it necessary to create a structured folder scheme in opposition to what is presently implemente eg all tiles in the same folder. I assume that SBX can slow down when searching for the presence of tiles in tha cache.

Kind Regards,

Luis

stephanbauwens
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Location: Belgium

Post by stephanbauwens » Fri Feb 01, 2008 9:05 am

Hello Luis,

The way the tiles are cached is very good. I can allways see the filename in the background view. I wouldn't change that.

I've been searching for that downloader tool, but it's shareware and in the trial version the max zoom is 13. And I don't want to pay for a tool that will probabely run into the google error message (the one that says that your computer has been infected with a virus that attacks the google server)

But your tip about downloading the tiles was very intresting. In my search I found this: http://modestmaps.mapstraction.com/trac ... onventions
Now I understand what those strange 'trtqtqtrtssqrsq' strings mean !!! Maybe I can write me a little script that does the job for me and fill the sbuilder cache with all the tiles I need. I could even insert some waiting pauses when I expect google to block my requests.

The tip in another thread about a transparant polygon is also worth trying

Tnx very much! I'll let you know when I'm getting results

Stephan

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Luis Sa
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Post by Luis Sa » Fri Feb 01, 2008 1:40 pm

Hello,

The programme I was referring to can be found here. Read until the end of the topic.

http://www.ptsim.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1218

Regards,

Luis

stephanbauwens
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Location: Belgium

Post by stephanbauwens » Sun Feb 03, 2008 2:23 pm

thanks !!

that program does exactly what I asked for.



Stephan

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