A bit more makeup

Supporters of the project pointed me towards the general appearance and quality of the renders. While, in general, it was agreed upon that the imagery is usable, it lacks a bit of kick, or drive. So I was suggested some adjustments I can make to make the imagery more lively and better-looking in the X-Plane simulator.

In the end, it boiled down to three post-processing steps:

Apply hint of exposure to the render

Shift color matrix into a more warmer region (7000K) in the image

Apply a bit of sharpening to the render

And indeed, this does have a noticable effect. Lets have a look at an example of a rural area:




On the left we can see the original render, and on the right we can see the adjustments applied. We can observer a more lively effect with the changes applied.




City and urban areas also profit greatly from this change, as you can see.




Above you can see the initial screenshot I published for the EDDM airport, and below is the color-adjusted version in the simulator. Indeed, the area looks more lively, more colorful.




The same positive difference is visible at the EDDB (Berlin-Brandenburg) airport, and of course, in the surroundings.

Tile Patching

I have been made aware of an issue at which a certain part in the German North Sea Coast looks a bit off. While I am working on a fix to remedy these situations, I also needed to come up with ideas to be able to better offer these kinds of small adjustments or improvements.

After looking at some options and weighing them against each other, I believe the best option is that I will add small zip files to an existing tile.

This zip would then be called zOrthographic_+51+007_Patches.zip for example. It would contain only the amended files for the tile. In most cases that will probably one or more single DDS files in the textures folder, it might also contain a new DSF.

The General Instructions for Installation page would be updated accordingly to provide steps to install these patches.

In the long run, this is more effective instead of having to reupload the entire tile - if I only changed a single DDS in the textures folder.

Streaming options

On the Reddit post that introduced Orthographic, I was asked if there would be the option to stream the imagery, instead of having to download every tile individally. Akin to AutoOrtho or MapEnhancement.

At this time I am entertaining this idea, and I am doing some tests with that. At this time, the best way to implement this would be as follows:

- I upload the tiles to my server
- Users get a login to my server
- On Windows and Linux, a connection to the server is created as a drive on Windows and a folder on Linux
- The yOrthographic and zOrthographic folders are symlinked into Custom Scenery of X-Plane

What this does, is that you now have drive or folder which contains correct entries concerning their location and size. For Windows and Linux, this is handled as a normal file system, and requests to it will be handled accordingly.

When you then start a flight in one of the Orthographic tiles, the imagery will be streamed from my server instead of your hard drive.

This might take a bit longer than an SSD - but if you do not want to use up space on your hard drive, I believe this could be an option.

The huge advantage of this approach would be for you, as a customer, you would not need to re-download every tile.

As soon as I have something tangible on that, I will post more details.

That's all for today!