Gray boxes and black lines appearing in scenery

[Mojave]

I mentioned these issues in a different unrelated thread.

I'm creating photo scenery with SBX using the VirtualEarth server for tiles. In general the scenery looks great, but I am getting a couple anomalies that I don't understand.

I get this gray box usually once in all my scenery files - the shape varies a little, but it is always a long rectangle with a little chunk taken out somewhere. It is in the bitmap created with the map function in SBX. I can patch the spots but it is quite a bit of work.



I also get these thin horizontal black lines wherever two scenery files meet. These I can only see when I am flying directly over the area. I can't see them when I am a little north or south. And they "move" along with me as I fly west to east. They DON'T appear vertically where scenery files meet. I can patch this as well, but it means creating extra scenery overlaps and is messy.

[meshman]

The gray boxes are a sat provider problem, where the imagery says it has downloaded, but hasn't. You can get down and dirty and start working your way through the Tiles folder to find the offender, but the new layout introduced in v313 may make that a bit of a chore.

The black line? Are your SDKs up to date, past RTM? If so, I'm not sure what is causing the line. You might try making the source images overlap each other a little bit. I do this with photo source, having a smallish overlap. But I'm not utilizing SBX to generate the work.

[Mojave]

Thanks for your quick reply.

I thought if there was a tile download problem, they would be white squares. I have had that a few times and simply reloading the background has caused the missing tiles to be downloaded. And, if I delete the scenery and start over fresh, the gray rectangles appear in the same place without fail.

I'll check my SDK to see if it's up to date. I have used overlapping as you have suggested and it works, but would rather not have the extra step, of course. Mostly, I just want to find out why this is happening.

Thanks again.

[luisfeliztirado]

The gray areas are definitely damaged tiles - I get them all the time with my slow connection.

The best thing to do is just delete that tile and re-download. To get the direct path to that tile, follow the instructions in the Help file:
New function: To find the absolute path to a tile, position the cursor over it, right click, and select Tile Path to Clipboard from the menu. You can then paste the path in an Explorer window to find the tile.

Once you have pasted the path, the tile will display and you can confirm that it is, in fact, defective. Delete it and download again.

As far as I can remember, Lance is also correct concerning previous versions of the SDK tools that created those black lines. It is important to copy the new versions of the tools into the SBuilderX directory when updating the SDK or the old tools will be used by SBuilderX.

Best regards.
Luis

[Mojave]

I add a map from background. I see the gray areas and right-click on one, but the menu does not have a Tile Path to Clipboard option. There's a properties menu, but that is for the entire map.

I'm also not finding anything in the help files about getting the absolute path to a tile.

EDIT: I see that view background must be checked and then you get the Tile Path to Clipboard option. So I delete it. Add map from background again, but it isn't downloaded. Adding map from background a third time results in another corrupted tile. Hmm