NZFF

Right...most of these questions are because im doing most of the GIS work for the scenery areas at work and i dont have access to the FSX SDK documentation in front of me....its on my home PC grrr

What i want to do is to be able to define the RGB values for the water areas and the areas of NoData in the .inf file used by the resampler....this will make it heaps easier for me as i have accurate water polygons for this area.

From memory black (0,0,0 RGB) pixels are treated as no data and white (255,255,255) pixels are treated as water...I was wondering if it is possible to define these RGB values to something else? This is because white and black pixels are valid in an aerial photo and in nature (i.e. dark shadow or the roof of a house) meaning that some strange results are encountered using White and Black for water and NoData.

If i can specify some other value (ie. a bright horrible green that doesnt appear in nature 85,255,0) then i can be sure that no pixels will be treated as water or nodata by accident.....

Any help on this?

Can someone also remind me of the maximum resolution of terrain grids in FSX

Can someone also tell me if it is possible to place the default roads over a custom aerial photo tile? (Ive tried moving scenery in the priorties list but??) This would be a big help as it would mean i wouldnt have to re create the roads (the default roads are very detailed....look to be based on the TOPO data)

Im also having some trouble getting the SDK object placer thing to work but ill need to look into this when i get home....

Heaps of questions there but hopefully someone can help.

From my own memory (aging fast), I think that you can define NullValue within the INF to whatever value you wish. This is designed mainly to clip the rotated edges of a reprojected image.
However the transparency (for merge) and water masking are defined within a separate 8-bit channel or image.

The maximum resolution of photo textures is 7cm.

I don't think it is possible to place roads over photos -- however they should be part of the photo? Road traffic continues to use the hidden data under the photo, so traffic appears over the photo.

Sweet...im at home now and have the SDK documents. I had specified the null value to the colour of my water as a work around (had set the polygon colour as a horrid green before exporting to geotiff) but then i couldnt set the actual 'nodata' areas.....so i ended up with big blue areas (the colour i used as 'nodata' when i exported them from GIS)

Yeah ive noticed that the 'freeway' traffic still shows/animates cars on the roads but of course the road textures are only going to have resolution equalling the aerial photo (i.e. poor...1m max) I thought it may be nicer looking to have criser textures based on the vector roads....then again that may lead to alignment problems ( I think the topo roads are only specified to about 1:10 000 or so..?)

I also found its possible to use another image to define water and no data....i think i might do this as it will allow me to blend in the aerial photo better. The only reason i had to use the no data was because i was using some other aerial photos which only covered Rotorua district....ill use our Region wide photos instead (colour is better and coverage is better)....