NZFF

toprob wrote:

QUOTE (toprob @ Oct 10 2008, 10:41 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Microsoft and Google couldn't give away or sell most of their imagery even if they wanted to -- they don't buy the images, they just license them for use on the web. They need to deal with thousands of sources, most of which wouldn't dream of giving anything away or selling it cheaply. I suspect that neither Microsoft nor Google pay for most of what they display on the web (I'm talking about Microsoft's Virtual Earth here, which is a competing product to Google Earth.)

Because MS and Google have competing products, and because they don't get on, they will never co-operate on anything. That's why Microsoft got into web mapping in the first place, so that they don't have to deal with Google.

But since Microsoft has it's own mapping product, there's no reason why they couldn't combine that with FS somehow.

The problem is that what is available is patchy, variable quality, and not colour-matched. What I do involves using the largest area of colour-matched imagery I can find, but two different areas will have completely different colouring, so it is almost impossible to join them up.

One day we'll have a colour-matched NZ image, but it won't come from Microsoft or Google:) It will probably be a Govt project, and I can't see it happening for at least 10 years.

In the meantime, anyone with FSX (or FS2004, for that matter) can easily incorporate Google or Virtual Earth imagery into FS using Tileproxy. These days TP will even do a very nice water mask automatically. Sure, it will still be patchy, but it is going to be patchy no matter how any large area is put together.



Issues with 'Real NZ' Auckland City are not mipmap issues, but due to the quality of the source image. This is partly what I've said above -- images tend to be made from bits and pieces patched together, and sometimes there is just not a good image of a particular area. I think when the folk who put the map together have trouble with a particular area (due to clouds or damaged photography) they use something of lower resolution, or 'paint' over the faults. That's why some parts of Auckland are crisp and others are murky. By the way, the FSX scenery is based on exactly the same image (although higher resolution) so it will suffer from the same issues.

I would love to get hold of a very high resolution image of a large area, but it is unlikely that this will happen. As far as I'm aware, only Timmo has managed this, sourcing the Rotorua area photography from his former employer. Other developers have released high resolution scenery using unlicensed images, and have got away with it because the areas are small and the distribution is limited, but this is not possible for large areas, and especially not possible (or moral) for a payware business.

If I thought for a minute that Kelvin's scenery would ever be released, I would probably put Real NZ Auckland on hold until I saw the final product. Because of the time I'll put into Auckland, it's financial success is tricky -- it needs to give me a year's income, otherwise it doesn't pay for itself. This means that I'd have to sell twice as many Auckland scenery as I sold Wellington, just to pay for the time it took to develop. This may or may not happen, but if there was a competing 'product', it would almost certainly make it uneconomical to complete Auckland.

This doesn't mean I don't want the competition -- I would love to see a lot more NZ scenery being released -- but I need to survive as a business, so I need to make business decisions.

Good job, Kelvin -- the screenshots are stunning.

EDIT: oops, one thing I forgot to say -- although Google don't own these images, somebody certainly does, which makes it a lot easier to source a particular area. You just need to find out who owns the image you want, and get it from them. If you are lucky, you might get it for nothing.