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Cannot load background image?

U

UnitedExpress4180

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us-colorado
I have been trying for close to an hour to get an image to load into ADE. I have checked that it is the right size, and the right format. It works when I do a straight import, however if I try to add it by manually entering in the corner coordinates it say it can't load it. Help! :eek:
 
What is the error - does ADE crash? If so there is a known bug that causes a latitude or longitude out of range error when using coordinate entry. We are working on a fix for the next update. Until then images can be added and adjusted for size and position in ADE by not using the corner coordinate option.
 
It doesn't crash upon this error. It just refuses to let me enter the coordinates manually. If this won't be fixed until the next update, is there a place I can download an older version of the program?
 
UnitedExpress4180 said:
It doesn't crash upon this error. It just refuses to let me enter the coordinates manually. If this won't be fixed until the next update, is there a place I can download an older version of the program?
Click to expand...

I am not sure I understand the problem then - can you provide some screen shots?
 
Sorry, what I meant was that I can do everything else normally. All of the other features work, but I get the error message "could not load image" whenever I try to import a photo and set the corner coordinates. It behaves the same as it would if the file were simply too large to import (even though it's not. I've tried doing this with a file as small as 100kb and it still wouldn't work).
 

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Can you please email me the image and also the coordinate values you are using and I will try and get a fix in the next couple of days. Email to jon AT scruffyduck DOT co DOT uk
 
Thanks I received the email. However you sent me the screenshot of the error - I need the background image you wish to add in ADE.
 
Ive had this error before when loading a very large image at 7200x5400. It was a bunch of 800x600 tiles merged together 9 times making it 7200x5400 I had to reduce the size and the error disappeared.
 
Whoops! Sent a new one :P

kevintampa5 said:
Ive had this error before when loading a very large image at 7200x5400. It was a bunch of 800x600 tiles merged together 9 times making it 7200x5400 I had to reduce the size and the error disappeared.
Click to expand...

I tried doing that but no matter what resolution or format I use it just won't import. I've tried jpg's, png's, bmp's, etc, and a variety of resolutions from 512x512 all the way up to 4096x4096.
 
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Okay, so after a little bit of experimentation, I've discovered something I didn't expect. As it turns out, the file size and resolution are not the problem here. Nor is the airport itself causing the problem (I tested this with several other stock airports and it worked at all of them). I believe that the problem is in fact being caused by the physical area that I'm trying to make the image cover. KDEN itself is a very large airport, covering around 10 square miles (as it turns out, this is considered to be extremely large for an airport in terms of the number of acres it takes up. My theory is that ADE has some sort of limitation where images can only occupy a certain size area, and KDEN happens to exceed that size? My testing would seem to support this. I tried setting the coordinates manually, first on a small area, then I gradually worked up to larger and larger geographical coverage, until finally it stopped allowing me to import. Sadly, the size it allowed me to cover fell well short of reaching even the ends of all the runways. Maybe this has been documented and I just missed it, but regardless, is there a workaround? If not, it appears that I will not be able to rework this scenery, as I primarily need to add the image so I can find out what size to make the custom ground poly in gmax. Without this capability I can't continue :(
 
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UnitedExpress4180 said:
Okay, so after a little bit of experimentation, I've discovered something I didn't expect. As it turns out, the file size and resolution are not the problem here. Nor is the airport itself causing the problem (I tested this with several other stock airports and it worked at all of them). I believe that the problem is in fact being caused by the physical area that I'm trying to make the image cover. KDEN itself is a very large airport, covering around 10 square miles (as it turns out, this is considered to be extremely large for an airport in terms of the number of acres it takes up. My theory is that ADE has some sort of limitation where images can only occupy a certain size area, and KDEN happens to exceed that size? My testing would seem to support this. I tried setting the coordinates manually, first on a small area, then I gradually worked up to larger and larger geographical coverage, until finally it stopped allowing me to import. Sadly, the size it allowed me to cover fell well short of reaching even the ends of all the runways. Maybe this has been documented and I just missed it, but regardless, is there a workaround? If not, it appears that I will not be able to rework this scenery, as I primarily need to add the image so I can find out what size to make the custom ground poly in gmax. Without this capability I can't continue :(
Click to expand...

That is what I would expect. I think a lot of folks would use several images covering smaller areas. ADE does not have the limitation but the graphics engine does. It is a matter of how many pixels are required to cover the area you are showing. File size is itself is not the real issue - it is the memory required to display the image - so the bigger the image area in ADE the more memory is needed to display all the pixels.

So one method that would work currently would be to divide the image into several covering smaller areas that the graphics engine can cope with.

In the meantime I will go back into the code and see if I can stop the issue. We did change the code to stop CTDs when the graphics engine ran out of memory and maybe that could be relaxed a bit. BTW don't confuse RAM available to out of memory errors - unfortunately the underlying graphics generates out of memory errors for all sorts of other conditions.
 
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So if I crop the image into four sections and import them separately I can make it work, then? Sounds reasonable. I'll see if it does the trick.
 
UnitedExpress4180 said:
So if I crop the image into four sections and import them separately I can make it work, then? Sounds reasonable. I'll see if it does the trick.
Click to expand...

Work out the largest size you can safely add and go from there. But yes essentially create several images. Have them overlap slightly to help with registration and alignment.
 
Okay, so I've played around with it a bit more and now it seems that the problem again comes down to the area covered by the photos. I have split the original into several parts and backed each of them down to a 1024x1024 resolution, but now I can only import 3 of the images, and the program (I think) runs out of memory by the time I get to the fourth and will not let me import it. I would go to lower resolutions, but my concern now is that as it is, I can barely see the taxiways and whatnot in the photos, and if I reduce the resolution much more then everything will be so obscured I won't be able to place any of the taxiways/runways accurately in ADE.
 
Loading is based only on the size of the image being loaded and not the images already loaded. I really need to look at the code again :o

I am not an expert here on actual design (I am really just a programmer) however I think it is pretty unusual to have images that extend far beyond the airport itself. This really needs someone with much more experience of using background images to come into the thread.

It is also possible to hide images from the display area but that won't affect the memory used by them. At the moment there is no way in ADE to load/remove images on the fly.

I am out of the office today but will try and look at the issue of image size and loading again this evening.
 
OK I have done some research here and the issue is all about the amount of contiguous memory (that is a single block) that can be found to accommodate the size of the image.

ADE resamples an image to get it to match the size required by the user. Generally this is a good thing since it stops images larger than the displayed size wasting memory. for large areas however memory must be allocated on the basis of width x height x color depth. So for example an image sized to 10,000 x 10,000 (that is effectively 10km square since ADE uses one pixel per meter) using true color needs a single block of almost 400Mb memory.

It is difficult to catch this since it is not possible in advance to know the largest chunk of contiguous memory that a user has (which is why some users get problems at one time and some doe not get problems at all).

However I can catch it better and also I will experiment with different color settings to see if the color can be acceptable while reducing memory requirements for larger visual image areas.
 
See my other post about images. We have an option to reduce the color range as a way to reduce memory usage to some extent.
 
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