MSFS Aerial Images (Airport Background)

[Bjørn_H]

Hi all!

I've been trying to compile an image for my airport in different ways now with no luck. (or some luck). What is the expected timeframe for a compilation of a rather large image?

My image is 10092x6918 (including the blank areas included due to airport being aligned roughly 120*. I'm using referenced jpg pictures in Global Mapper which is the reprojected to Mercator-WGS84. I first exported this directly to Bing maps from GM as .png and to make transparent (also tried not transparent). When set to zoom level 5 as was succsessfull in compiling the scenery, but ended up with the bluish-green imagery. (guessing due to missing alphachannel).
This first result with zoom level 5 gave me 19506 tiles. During the compiling proccess the "tmp" folder created by the packagetool produced around 300.000 tiles during the compilation. The whole compilng took roughly 6 hours to complete.

I now have a project running with zoom level 20 at 43216 tiles. Have started and stopped the compiler several times as it'did not seem to be working. But when I saw that it was feeding files to the tmp folder I've left it running. now probably aroudn the 24 hour mark and has generated more than 1.000.000 tmp files and counting.
(Edit: I cancelled the process. the everlasting copilation produced 1.247.212 tmp files..... /Endedit))

I've tried compiling inside the simulator several times, and different pictures, but it just crashes, so now I've just draged the .xml file on to the fspackagetool.exe and compile that way. It works to some extent...


My next attempt will be to export from GM as geoTiff, add alphachannel in photoshop and try the tiling tool before compiling the result.. But this seems as quite some extra steps as I prefer to do most of the work inside GM...

These I believe are based on Bing formatting and cannot be changed.

BTW I started scanning this thread and what a complicated process. There's a much easier way by using something like Global Mapper or QGIS to process out to Bing format. Input data, output data, run through the SDK tools and done.

Have you been able to successfully export from GM with an alpha channel. My exports just end up bluish-green.

 

[=Hollywood=]

I haven't tried with an alpha channel as yet, be aware that if you edit in photoshop you'll lose the geo headers, so when you prep, make sure you have it write out the .PRJ and .TFW (world files) that way you can re-combine the headers after you're done editing.

 

[Bjørn_H]

I haven't tried with an alpha channel as yet, be aware that if you edit in photoshop you'll lose the geo headers, so when you prep, make sure you have it write out the .PRJ and .TFW (world files) that way you can re-combine the headers after you're done editing.

As long as the only thing you do in PS is to add layers or erase stuff you don't need, but make sure not to change the canvas size there are no problems Anyhow when using the tiling software you use the .map file anyways.

So far it seems to work when using the tiling software. Doesn't even seem to need to add the alpha channel to the tiff. So I guess this must be the way, and not direct export from GM unfortunatly.