Elev tiles in lower nodes

Marg

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I created succesfully some area with higher re tiles (level 14 and 15). Level 13 was highest res until that moment in that area.
but I cannot make a smooth surface. So question is - do corresponding (level 14, 15) elev tiles have to exist?

Because I edited level 13 elev tile (which is leaf node tile), and somehow no changes appear.
 

Face

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I created succesfully some area with higher re tiles (level 14 and 15). Level 13 was highest res until that moment in that area.
but I cannot make a smooth surface. So question is - do corresponding (level 14, 15) elev tiles have to exist?

Because I edited level 13 elev tile (which is leaf node tile), and somehow no changes appear.

Did you set your Orbiter instance to using the "cache" as well? It's in the extra tab, Visualisation parameters/Planet rendering options, middle of the dialog "Tile sources", should be "Try cache first, then archive".

If it is set to "Compressed archive only", files in the file-system tiles tree will have no effect.
 

Marg

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Yes, cache is definitely set. My new SURF textures work flawlessly. But - I only edit tiles with tileedit in my another Orbiter 2016 BETA installation (because that has also extracted textures which can be opened by tileedit), and then I copy edited ELEV tile in my base installation.

When I open again - level 13 ELEV tile shows new smoothed data. At least in that Orbiter BETA installation. Is 000***.dds the only file, where elevation data are stored?

---------- Post added at 11:22 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:52 AM ----------

Wait - I edited mountains not far away, creating a "hole". I saw it in Orbiter.
but when I approached with a camera, it disappeared, mountains were OK.
Strange, because I think I do not have any ELEV files below level 13.
And runways have hilly terrain which could correspond to higher resolution than (because "hills" have diameter of ~ 50-170m?)... maybe those higher res ELEV are hidden in tree format?
 

GLS

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You need to "propagate" the changes in the higher resolution elv tiles up the tree, to the lower resolution tiles, otherwise wierd things will happen.
Also, the tiles must "fit side-to-side", as there is some overlap between them.
If you use tileedit, all of the above should happen when you move to another tile. :shrug:
 

Marg

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I see now - there ARE elevation tiles with higher res than level 13!
I worked with Orbiter BETA, and tileedit did not show anything better than level 13, but I had an old "Archive" folder with much smaller "tree" files and replaced my current "Archive" folder, and surface is smooth.

Current archive folder has much larger "elev_tree" file ~16.8 GB vs ~263MB.
 

Face

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Is 000***.dds the only file, where elevation data are stored?

Elevation tiles do not have *.dds, but *.elv extension. E.g. Textures\Earth\Elev\15\000628\000675.elv . DDS files are typically in the Surf layer, like e.g. Textures\Earth\Surf\05\000000\000002.DDS . In essence, both layers are defined independently. The resulting texture from the Surf layer is applied to the appropriate triangle network mesh built up by the tesselation based on the Elev layer.
 

Marg

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Yes, I know now that "elv" is the right extension.
But now if I understand correctly, it is necessary no extract (with OT3 tool) some elevation data from huge Elev.tree to get those level14,15 elevation data in cache format, I just cannot figure out exact command in treeman.bat file...
This frustrating I even tried basic Orbiter's tool texpack.exe - I cannot find usage description. I know -e attribute, but what are exact command line parameters? Where tree file should be placed?

I looked and entered in bat file the line: texpack d:\Games\Orbiter2016\Earth Elev_mod -e
but error happens and program closes...
 
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Face

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I just cannot figure out exact command in treeman.bat file...

There is no treeman.bat in the OT3 distribution, just a treeman.exe . It follows the same logic as texpack in terms of command line interface.

To e.g. extract all elevation tiles of Earth Elev layer 4, you use it like this:
Code:
treeman s:\Development\Orbiter2016\Textures\Earth Elev -e -I /04/.*
Note the spaces and the use of regular expression to limit the file set.
 

Marg

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Using treeman, I see, that lowest level of elevation is 15 (globally). Higher resolutions are used only locally somewhere. So not 13 but 15.
 

jacquesmomo

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I am always interested in topics with elevation tiles for Orbiter 2016.

In the current version of Orbiter 2016, the highest resolution for the surface tiles is level 19, and for elevation tiles (elv) is 13, according to Martin's doc. Right ?

For kourou I managed to make elevation tiles up to 17, but with a "ground" vehicle (car for exemple) there are problems : the vehicle is not always on the ground relief...
But overall it works ...

But I find that the management of tiles elv (and therefore elv_mod) is quite difficult.
 

jangofett287

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I've been considering writing a tool to reprocess the 259x259 overlapped grid into a 256x256 shared edge grid, going from .elev files to .r16 or maybe a GeoTIFF. Then we could pull the files into WorldMachine or some kind of GIS program and do the editing there.
 
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