Re: photo

Very interested to know how you get on with photo scenery Jon.

I got the Getmapping photo scenery CD over Christmas and have put a tile
into flight gear.

The CD uses the Enhanced Compressed Wavelet (ECW) image format which is
non Linux at the moment apparently. 

http://www.terracolor.net/ecwinfo.htm
http://remotesensing.org/gdal/frmt_ecw.html

The CD comes with the ERmapping windows program that views & converts
the .ecw file to ESRI Bil + Geospot, Geotiff, .bmp and jpegs.
I ran it OK using codeweavers wine on my Mandrake box and got it to
produce a single 2.1GB jpeg.

Not quite as good as I had hoped for but still good, have hand stitched
a tile over Lands End airfield and the nearby hill carnbrea the last
hill in England. Done by hand the hill and airfield look very accurate.
Some screenshots can be seen here:

http://freespace.virgin.net/mamaloucos.circus/Flightgearweb/index.html

I'm aware that spending a weekend tinkering with one scenery tile does
not provide any solutions for world scenery building, it just looks nice
!

I would'd like to have a go at cutting up the 2.1GB jpeg of cornwall
using the tools David is talking about. One thing I have noticed while
attempting to hand match some higher res gshss coastline with a photo
tile is that unless well matched the coastlines look very bad.

I'm tempted to have a look at the UK visualflight scenery to see how
they've managed coastlines and also to see what quality it is. I've got
a copy of MSFS 2002 here unused because I prefer Flightgear and now
haven't got a windows PC. The Visualflight website has a discussion
commenting on the lowish resolution of their scenery (probably the same
as the CD I've got)

http://www.visualflight.co.uk/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1147

It looks like we're interested in a similar thing here, so more than
willing to help if needed, but unfortunately am not a coder.


Mat Churchill