How to make Polygon Overlays

[Warmbrak]

Hi everyone,

This is more a question than an answer. I learned from Ola that orthophotos can be placed using OverlayEditor. I tried doing this using WED 1.1 Beta, but ran into this problem.

Can anyone please explain how to go about placing an orthophoto using OverlayEditor? Any tips or pointers will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Simmo W]

I've only done one for kmpi, but found it scarily easy. obtain and edit your image as required, save your png, create a .pol in text editor referring to your png (copy text from a known file), make the scale as needed (25 by 25 works ok). get into oe, bring the draped poly up and stretch carefully, using the runway as a guide. I placed 4 dummy objects on the corners of the runway as a guide, so I could detect dimensions of it. if there is an easier way, can't wait to find out! there is a more technical method in we'd. but this method seemed quicker to me

[Warmbrak]

Thanks for the feedback Simon. Whilst WED was skewing my images, it did create the .POL files so at least I have that. Using Windows 7, what would you recommend I use to open/edit .DSF files with? I see screenshots of folks editing them on a mac, but when I open them with notepad/wordpad they contain binary characters?

I will give this a go in OE. All my images are georeferenced, and I hope that I can place them to specific coordinates without having to visually stretch something to make it fit.

[Simmo W]

Warm,  I ain't never gone near dsfs yet! over to others on that one! dsftools etc too in depth for me' right now

[Warmbrak]

Success! I found my .pol file in OE and added it without any problems. Had a hard time getting the polygon points placed accurately, so I saved the .dsf and got to work. My original images have world files associated with them and are 2048 x 2048. Thanks to the wiki on world files, I managed to calculate the exact corner coordinates for the overlay polygon.

I then downloaded the DSFTools from this page. These are very easy to use with the XGrinder interface. Simply run XGrinder and it will open a GUI window. Drag and drop your .dsf file in there, and it will output a .txt file. Here I could update the coordinates of my polygon with those I calculated in my spreadsheet to an accuracy of 8 decimals (I think OE only does 6). Saved the text file, dragged it into XGrinder again that converted the .txt file back to .dsf format.

Fired up X-Plane, and my overlay texture was sitting exactly where it was supposed to. Now I'll try to get 4 overlay polygons together around an airport to see how it goes.

Thanks for all the handy pointers!

[Simmo W]

thanks for sharing Warm! I have plenty of g2xpl files, can xgrinder let yo locate which files relate to a coordinate, to assist editing?

[Warmbrak]

XGrinder will only convert X-Plane related files. I have no idea what the g2xpl files look like, but might give it a go sometime. I am making progress with the ortho's, and here is some of my first runs: