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Hawaii Photoreal Development


Colin S

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Much appreciated :) Super thrilled that we got permission to use this FSX scenery to supplement the existing stuff for X-Plane, but it's still almost all original work for ground textures around the airport (pavement, runway, etc). Anyone care to help me solve what this means at the end of the log.txt file? I'm at a loss.

 

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: PING-FILE ERROR!

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: setjmp(png_ptr->jmpbuf

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: Custom Scenery/HP_Lanai/ORTHO/14-8-4096-2048.png

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT:

0:01:06.192 E/SYS: THREAD FATAL ASSERT: ..\HLutils\TEX\TEX_png.cpp:86

 

Probably an obscure PNG sub-format.

 

Open it with a tool that can tell you detailed information about color channels, compression and other meta-data.

 

Try converting the file into a standard RGB(A) 8 bit per channel format using Photoshop/whatever and see if X-Plane will load it.

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Since I can't develop lanai and my partner is on vacation so I can't start Molokai at this time, I've spent the last hour doing some research. Check this out:

 

Kona_HI_54Oct1.jpg

 

will be modelling Old Kona Airport as an airport if I ever get to the Big Island - just remember, the more airports, the merrier. I won't include it as an ICAO coded, true X-Plane airport, but it will be there for you to land at. Lots of incredible information from this website: http://www.airfields-freeman.com/HI/Airfields_HI_Hawaii.htm#kona

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Ohhh do you have the same problem that Xplane shows objects in wrong place? i thought it's just me as I asked in some forums and nobody suffered from it.

Did you file a bug report (if not i'll do that , if yes no reason to file a report on the same bug)?

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A quick update first: On Tuesday, my partner will be sending me the files to get work started on Molokai. I should be mostly done Lanai by that time. I am still experimenting with forests, but I expect that the initial release of Lanai will not include forests, perhaps trees along the coastlines to add some depth but the actual forests would take away from the flying experience. ATTR_LOD has given me something to work with, but it still looks a little weird. Colour matching forests to the trees in the orthophotos is important... and almost impossible. Anyways, here's a screenshot of an early morning landing.

 

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Hey everyone,

 

I'm dreadfully sorry about this, but there will be some minor delays in starting Molokai with some technical issues experienced by my partner on the other side of the planet. In the meantime, I'll try to get as much done with Lanai as I can so that release can happen... maybe even before April? Cheers! 

 

Just so you know... Lanai Airport is done. What I'm working on now is the custom overlay scenery for the rest of the entire island - houses, hotels, custom forests (that's the most important and difficult one at this point), and possibly some road stuff. What I want to make everyone aware of is that I realized something dreadful about 10% of the way through working with the orthophoto placement (much to late to fix it due to the amount of calculating required): none of the roads on the island, save about 3km worth of them near the airport, line up with the orthophoto, so there will be no dynamic world on the island. I will do my best to avoid this with the future islands, but I've gone too far with Lanai to fix it and there is no downfall other than the lack of moving traffic (which, admittedly, shouldn't be a huge problem on Lanai considering how small the population is in real life). Keep up the support, and cheers to the very few who have taken time to donate!

 

:) 

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  • 1 month later...

Hi all who care in any way about flying around in beautiful Hawaii! Yes, it's still happening... but slowly. I have had lots on my plate but I now have a while to work tirelessly on it. My girlfriend has to finish an essay that should take her no more than a week and a half, so I'm hoping to make some serious progress on Molokai and finish and release Lanai (possibly elsewhere). Thanks to everyone who has donated and I can't wait to get this release - it's actually looking pretty cool!

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  • 1 month later...

YES! I'm still alive. YES! I'm aware that half the outsourced image URL's to my ghost-tumblr account are dead because Tumblr is a jerk like that. YES! Lanai is still being developed. My job is insanely hectic and disorganized. However, I am finding time here and there to get more done with Hawaii Photoreal, and my partner is messing around with Mesh Tool. Just learned how on earth forest files worked today, and I'm seriously disappointed by two things:

 

1. LOD does not exist. This means that I can't make forests that add detail to orthos at close range but leave the beauty of orthophotos to do their job at a greater distance - pretty big deal on the islands of Hawaii.

2. Every forest looks like a plantation. All trees, no matter how insanely huge your random number is (anyone who does forest files knows what that means), appear in columns across the landscape.

 

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Looks really nice.

 

I think forest files does have LOD..

you can see it here:

 

http://developer.x-plane.com/?article=forest-for-file-format-specification

From the Web page specified, see second paragraph.LOD

<max lod>

This defines the farthest distance the trees can be seen. Lower values cause forests to disappear faster but result in faster frame rate.

[X-PLANE 9] In X-Plane 9, the LOD command is ignored; X-Plane calculates the viewing distances for all forests based on user settings. X-Plane will attempt to draw the forest for as long of a distance as possible, with a density approaching what is specified in the scenery file.

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Basically, LOD is controlled user-side anyways, by the user's settings of "draw distance".

 

Having the scenery developer hard-code a distance may not be the best solution anyways, to cater for varying end-user hardware capabilities.

 

Unless it's something like grass, which I have engineered to disappear at the point where it looks perfect to disappear and would look bad to continue existing (mostly anti-aliasing and alpha-blending issues)

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hello everyone! Some updates:

  • Lanai will be released without forests or custom city object layout. It just wasn't looking very good.
  • Molokai will hopefully be released with forests and city object layout.
  • I've gotten my hands on hi-res TIFF format elevation data so I'm going to stick it in Mesh Tool and see what happens, but not for Lanai. I'm sick of this island. Just kidding, I love the place, but I made too many mistakes that would take forever to correct early on that have been mickey-moused into working over the months, so the new mesh wouldn't even line up with it.
  • Lanai will be uploaded next Thursday. This will possibly be the last Hawaii Photoreal to be uploaded first to X-Pilot.

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So, my partner in crime Javier (who made the original FSX sceneries) sent me the coordinates and sped a process that took me a month with Lanai (two textures in FSX) up to ten minutes for Molokai (three textures). Anyways, here are some early, low-resolution previews of Molokai. Maybe I'll try to pump out Niihau before August is over since it has no airports at all and will be about the detail of Kahoolawe.

 

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