StuartC wrote in Mon Jan 18, 2021 3:11 pm:http://www.fguk.me/hangar/download/3-scenery/592-scotland-orthophotos-4k-terrain-textures
I missed the public orthophoto scenery release, until I found just now while looking at heli updates on FGUK website
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If the scenery distribution doesn't have a restrictive license maybe the release could be published more widely and added to the newsletter? I added a bunch of externally hosted orthophoto video links to the newsletter a few months ago of unknown copyright (it would be useful to know which ones were from USGS or Sentinel data), which is a bit marginal. I don't think a lot of people potentially testing this on the mailinglist actually have a sample ortho photo set, so they can sign-off when it moves out of nightlies, check integration to WS3, and verify future bug reports/maintainence?. It's probably hard/marginal to announce it more publicly if the scenery doesn't have a license, so the forum will have to do - core devs just using this photoscenery with the ufo to have a look probably doesn't violate any no distribution copyright clause?, as it could be construed for research purposes, although testing FG for bugs using it is technically not research.
It's 1.6 GB compressed, and 4.5 GB uncompressed and already in dds. So people interested can check it out fairly easily, just download and add the scotland folder as a scenery folder.
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Having a look at this sample set:
It seems to work great
I get an interruption at regular intervals as I move the camera(?). This might be just due to big batches of new orthophoto textures being loaded around the camera and transferred to video memory - so it might be a normal thing.
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The first results of this sample set:
EGPH, right at the airport looking towards the bridges:
Instantstreetview.com, showing location. You can also see different photo sources/surveys by the colour of the water around the bridges and bits of the shore:
Instantstreetview.com zoomed in, switches to google's high resolution aerial photo sources. These seem to be summer-ish season photos from air or drone sources:
FG WS2+ALS: The textures and instant streetview images are /really/ close in agriculture pattern, and detail level. Google also seemed to have the right season. These are just the UK localisation, without doing a scotland localisation, or a localisation for this part of scotland. IIRC submitted textures in 2014, and regional definitions tuning by Gilberto/Thorsten, and then further improvements to textures/definitions by Erik recently including texture/soil colour matching:
Photoscenery+ALS detail at same spot. Bright and clear day, the scenery textures appear a bit dark. The effect that is shown is the normal ALS procedural texturing detail on top of the photos instead of the base texture, rather than just a photo like other sims so it's more a basetexture layer swap than conventional photoscenery:
Album:
https://imgur.com/a/c4RdAkRIn this area, the city and industrial textures for the uk are generic global ones I think, so they are slightly different from the uk/scotland local variation. The bare mountain landclass effect also seems slightly generic/plain. There aren't any overlays and such (the original regional definitions are slightly older, except for Erik's tweaks.
If someone didn't know the exact position, orientation, of fields and the exact patches/variations in other landclasses, the WS2 high res textures+mixing approach would be indistinguishable from the google instantstreetview when enabled. The photoscenery base textures would be low res for practical sources(?), - and also often wrong season/light without further manual tweaking.
This sample photoscenery set is very low res. There are I think higher photoscenery resolutions in some sources, but there hasn't been a comparison done to see what detail level is needed to match the current 2048x2048 textures (?) (and the GPU/VRAM needed to load better photoscenery at the same FPS as normal).
This example set is a bit dark in all the spots I've seen, maybe also due being captured in the wrong season. The ALS effect expects summer textures and vegetation that has had plenty of rainfall to grow during the past, but without water/moss on the ground - then it does the seasons, wetness, moss etc. on top. Photoscenery+ALS, from the video where the water indicates it's a brighter day:
Kind regards