I just started to look into the possibility of converting the Baikonur bases from 'Historical Spaceports" to 2016 format. So far, I've managed to script the tiles needed by the bases into the new format. Discovered the unfortunate side effect of the new tile system is that all tiles, even for the bases, are now lumped in the planet data set, and cannot be referenced from separate folders, isolating them from other "potentially competitive" addons: tile deployed by any addon will affect all other addons. In another side effect, tiles cannot be time-conditioned anymore: once deployed, tile will look the same in year 1910, 1961 or 2050. Are my assumptions correct, or did I possibly miss some customization logic somewhere?
After converting tiles, I am now trying to fix the terrain elevation, as default elevation has very rough accuracy (e.g. having a big hump at the location of the huge MIK building, and distorting the pieces of the building that go there from the base configuration file). I figured out how the tile structure and the tileedit app (too unresponsive and fragile to my test, but workable). But now I have the following resolution level problem.
- best elevation tiles available in Baikonur area are level 13.
- custom surface tiles that I am trying to deploy are level 19.
- editing level 13 elevations for level 19 images is too rough to be practical.
- maximum elevation level supported by 2016 is 17.
- minimum practical elevation level in a rather flat Baikonur area is probably no less than 15 (and only if 17 turns out to be too tedious, usually the more detail - the better).
- tileedit has a limitation: it can edit the elevation tile only if original tile OF THE SAME LEVEL exists.
This leads to a problem: if I want to edit level 17 elevation tile, I have to create it first. And I do not want to start from scratch with the empty tile: full-size level 17 tile is a much big area, than I need to modify. I don't care about most of its remaining surface, plus this surface contains relevant data in its upper levels of the quad tree (at level 13) that I want to preserve ant that I should somehow be able to propagate from level 13, rather than reinvent myself on a new virgin tile.
I did not find any reference on how I can take a corresponding piece of data from elevation tile 13 and generate a downstream approximation of subsequent layers (like 15 or 17) that will resemble the upstream data as close as possible, giving the good start to fine-tuning level 17 in elev_mod tree. So, my question is: does a step-by-step procedure or tool exist for such operation? Has anyone encountered any similar problems?