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Photoscenery?

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Photoscenery?

Postby planefan89 » Sun Aug 16, 2020 5:35 pm

I have looked thoroughly at the "Photoscenery" article on the FlightGear wiki, but I do not understand some things. I would like to make photoscenery for the whole of Hong Kong.

The article is:
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Photoscenery

Some things I don't understand are:

-"This method places the photo texture on top of the normal scenery. It requires PATCHES TO BE APPLIED to the fgdata and SimGear sources."
I have clicked on "PATCHES TO BE APPLIED" and all it takes me is to some obsolete ( I think) brest photoscenery.

-"Note: Step 1 to 5 can be done by the photoscenery perl script from the FGScenery tools, when the imagery is obtained via a Web Map Service (WMS)."
how do you exactly run a perl script on a mac?

-I have also tried the "Texture materials" approach, but, when I try to go to fgphotoscenery.square7.ch, I get this message that says "Vulnerability Blocked" and the site can't be reached.

help, please.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Hooray » Sun Aug 16, 2020 6:29 pm

most approaches require patching/rebuilding FlightGear/SimGear from source - anything else is using the materials-based approach.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Parnikkapore » Mon Aug 17, 2020 12:55 pm

Do you know of any photoscenery that works with current FlightGear? I've tested the Brest one, but it displays as a hole in the ground.
There are free alternatives to (almost) every program you encounter. You just have to find them.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby nathaniel515 » Mon Sep 21, 2020 10:29 pm

I recently started working on patches that add photoscenery support to modern FlightGear. I have instructions here: https://github.com/nathanielwarner/flightgear-photoscenery

Let me know if it works, and if you have suggestions! Right now, you have to provide satellite orthophotos manually, but I'm working on automating this.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Johan G » Mon Sep 21, 2020 10:54 pm

nathaniel515 wrote in Mon Sep 21, 2020 10:29 pm:I recently started working on patches that add photoscenery support to modern FlightGear.

If you have not already done so, you might want to also post about it on the developer mailing list, as most core development is discussed there. :wink:
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby nathaniel515 » Mon Sep 21, 2020 11:15 pm

Thanks Johan, will do!
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby V12 » Tue Sep 22, 2020 9:02 am

New life for FG ! Amazing.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby vnts » Tue Sep 22, 2020 2:05 pm

New life? It certainly adds an option :mrgreen: , and maybe it can make undeveloped areas look better (when the sun is in the right position for shadows in the textures for that area, unless shadows are removed before). But it doesn't work the way people intuitively want to imagine/desire when they hear photoscenery.

See youtube videos of the new sim from Microsoft in areas without trees like Iceland [1] for limitations of the approach (The game studio making it probably don't imagine the next game using the openworld technology will need an entire world, or it will be set in a fictitious world like the last game using the tech, so they used satellite photos. These took up a lot of space - complete scenery made from 2 petabytes of info, and is perhaps at higher quality than FG can find under GPLv2 compatible license. Probably also why they added trees to make scenery look better in Iceland even though there's hardly any left and reforestation is slow due to cool temperatures.).

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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Thorsten » Tue Sep 22, 2020 2:38 pm

New life for FG ! Amazing.


Has been there on and off in (so far) at least four different implementations

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Photoscenery
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Building_Fli ... ntegration

The usual problem is - no photoscenery with compatible license = coverage and distribution problems. Still not solved.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby vnts » Tue Sep 22, 2020 3:12 pm

Thorsten wrote in Tue Sep 22, 2020 2:38 pm:..distribution problems. Still not solved.

Hmm yes - bandwidth for all that data is another problem if the idea is to automatically download from FG's servers(?) - especially with discussion on the mailing list about losing a Terrasync server due to too many connections. Actually, the need for a fast connection with Microsoft's sim, 50 Mbps at high settings for current sub-sonic craft, might be at least part of why the new sim had a massive lack of supersonic craft at release (well, in addition to using a FDM based on 3d art like YaSim that can't take in CFD/windtunnel data and likely breaks down at transonic+ regimes, as well as the usual opportunity for DLC revenue if MS are actually trying to get away with no fast craft at all in the base sim).

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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby dom_vc10 » Wed Sep 23, 2020 3:20 pm

Would the idea in the end be something like tielproxy? http://edtruthan.com/tileproxy/tutorial/
I used this quite some years ago in FS9 and from what I saw FSX was even better due to the higher resolution that could be displayed. You certainly did not need a 50mbps internet connection. The tool was basically downloading the photoscenery from whatever map provider you set up. It would then cache the tiles. I am not sure sure what the licensing issues are but your using your sim to browse the map service rather than a web browser. Google seems to let many apps access map data. For FG I suppose if there is no data stored on any of the FG servers and FG does not contain any map data it could be ok? All that would be provided is the software that will download the data.

I think it would be a nice option to have in FG but again I can see some very strong arguments as to why it's not so great but choice is the best :D
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Thorsten » Wed Sep 23, 2020 6:21 pm

I guess you'll generally find that services like Github, SourceForge, ArcGis or Google are fine hosting and providing content to the two dozen people who experimentally use the feature for FG - as soon as 10.000+ users start regularly pulling TB-sized downloads, they'll pull the plug.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Hooray » Wed Sep 23, 2020 6:46 pm

nathaniel515 wrote in Mon Sep 21, 2020 10:29 pm:I recently started working on patches that add photoscenery support to modern FlightGear. I have instructions here: https://github.com/nathanielwarner/flightgear-photoscenery

Let me know if it works, and if you have suggestions! Right now, you have to provide satellite orthophotos manually, but I'm working on automating this.


As has been said, this would be best discussed on the devel list - however, just for the sake of completeness, there's the long-standing idea to use the original photoscenery patches and turn those into a so called canvas "placement" mode. A canvas in FlightGear is just a placeholder for a property-driven texture (RTT/FBO) - a canvas supports a handful of drawing primitives, which can be organized by grouping them and hiding/showing them as needed, and applying arbitrary transformations and effects.

For such a canvas texture to show up inside FlightGear, so called "placements" are used - under the hood, this works via the equivalent of a texture visitor, to replace a static texture with a dynamically generated.

For the time being, we have placements to map these canvas textures onto aircraft/scenery surfaces, but also to render them inside GUI dialogs and standalone GUI windows (think popups/tooltips).

A dedicated geographic placement would mean that any canvas texture could be applied onto the terrain mesh.

For additional background info, see: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Devel ... y_Overlays

The reason why I am mentionig this capability is that you mentioned the issue of fetching/caching imagery - and this is something where a canvas based approach could be pretty handy and enormously flexible. For instance, one of the drawing primitives supported by the system is called "Canvas image", which can be used to display raster images - which comes with the capability to dynamically fetch imagery in the background, i.e. automatically:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Snipp ... e_tile_map
http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Image
Image

We also have optional support for a number of web APIs to fetch charts (e.g. OSM), for use in avionics:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/FG1000
Image

Again, all the code is already integrated and working - which is to say that canvas based approach would provide all this for free.

To be on the safe side, it would make sense to discuss your plans with people involved in more or less related efforts (namely Scott/VPB, Thorsten/ALS, Fernando/Compositor)

PS: Whenever people point out distribution issues, the usual idea is using a decentralized torrent based approach.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Thorsten » Wed Sep 23, 2020 6:52 pm

PS: Whenever people point out distribution issues, the usual idea is using a decentralized torrent based approach.


And James answer to that one is that it works fine for Linux people, but unless you can explain it to your Windows-using grandmother on the phone, it's unlikely to be endorsed by FG.
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Re: Photoscenery?

Postby Hooray » Wed Sep 23, 2020 7:04 pm

Let's be clear, most people suggest to integrate a torrent library (like rtorrent), rather than running a standalone torrent client just for fgfs - thus, the kind of integration that's been previously suggested is to integrate torrent functionality analogous to how Multiplayer/TerraSync and FGCom are integrated: as an optional integrated capability, that is configurable in-sim.
The main issue that senior contributors (like James) have been pointing out over the years is that this could look suspicious to some Antivirus/Firewall software on Windows - but other than that, it's indeed a sound idea, not just for Linux folks.
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