PsXP Posted December 16, 2017 Share Posted December 16, 2017 On a completely unrelated endeavor (I was trying to re-install O4XP, and have the attention span of your average squirrel) I stumbled across some files that made sense to a problem I'd about given up on. That question being, "How to you expand the coastlines / get those beautiful turquoise waters seen around tropical islands?" The answer is PhotoShop. In each folder created by O4XP (zOrtho4XP_+26-079, for example) there is a sub-folder named "textures". In this folder there are a bunch of handful of .png files, which are black and white masks, that define what is photo, and what is water. (Black is water) Opening one of the .png files with PhotoShop, and painting the edge of the white areas with a soft, white brush, will allow you to graphically expand the coastline. You can indeed change the size of your brushes for more or less opacity, feathering out to your heart's desire. At some point you'll run into funky orthophotos, and need to back it off a bit... THE COOLEST THING about this process is that you can have xPlane open on one screen, and check your work without shutting down!! It's as close to real-time editing as you can get. In xPlane, use the pull-downs "Developer" > "Reload the Scenery". Boom. Your recent (saved) .png manipulation will show. Crusty first pass below. ( I should also note that I changed the default water color to something deeper blue. Also very easy to do. X-Plane 11\Resources\bitmaps\world\water edit the "any.png" file in PhotoShop to whatever color you like.) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PsXP Posted December 16, 2017 Author Share Posted December 16, 2017 Bonus: Can anyone spot what's *WRONG* with these screenshots? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PsXP Posted December 16, 2017 Author Share Posted December 16, 2017 One from the air, with default clouds and about 16 miles visibility. I'm in heaven. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VFRflier Posted December 16, 2017 Share Posted December 16, 2017 Have you determined how much the Masks_width: option affects the results? I usually use a very wide mask to extend my shoreline but I think I like your results better, assuming the underlying ortho is appropriate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mindyourstep Posted December 16, 2017 Share Posted December 16, 2017 Wow, and with those frame-rates....more then 300% of mine, cpu/gpu almost 0,000 how come? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PsXP Posted December 16, 2017 Author Share Posted December 16, 2017 46 minutes ago, VFRflier said: Have you determined how much the Masks_width: option affects the results? I usually use a very wide mask to extend my shoreline but I think I like your results better, assuming the underlying ortho is appropriate. I set the Mask Widths as high as they'd go (kept defaulting back to 16, maybe?) and didn't get much of an improvement. This technique will allow you to reach out and grab lots of stuff that doesn't even show up on the default masks / scenery. (Middle upper portion of the After pic, for example.) After playing around with these for a while, there is such a thing as "too" far. You end up running into crummy ocean photos. But, it's easy enough to use a soft *black* paintbrush and work it back in. Also really easy to toggle back and forth between XP and O4XP to check progress. Edit Start with about a 50 or 100 pixel, soft brush and just trace the shoreline to start. The results should be pretty awesome and you can expand from there. Google maps as a reference helps understand where you might want to push the boundaries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PsXP Posted December 16, 2017 Author Share Posted December 16, 2017 27 minutes ago, Mindyourstep said: Wow, and with those frame-rates....more then 300% of mine, cpu/gpu almost 0,000 how come? Beats me?!? I have a 7700k at 4.5ghz, a 1080ti and 32mb ram. I will note that I was in such a hurry I didn't have my scenery in order, so it was suppressing OSM data and autogen. With all that in order and objects turned to max, I was still getting about 110 fps. Ocean / island areas aren't terribly resource heavy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WalSch Posted December 16, 2017 Share Posted December 16, 2017 3 hours ago, PsXP said: Bonus: Can anyone spot what's *WRONG* with these screenshots? Of course. XP's default West End Airport is completely mislocated. It should lie like this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
POM57 Posted December 16, 2017 Share Posted December 16, 2017 1 hour ago, WalSch said: Of course. XP's default West End Airport is completely mislocated. It should lie like this. Mislocated? There doesn't seem to be a single thing correct about it, I wonder how that happened, where did XP get data for that airport from? What's the ICAO? I might fix it if I find the time to do so and nobody else fixes it first. Edit: Doh, it's called West End Airport Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WalSch Posted December 16, 2017 Share Posted December 16, 2017 19 minutes ago, POM57 said: Mislocated? There doesn't seem to be a single thing correct about it, I wonder how that happened, where did XP get data for that airport from? What's the ICAO? I might fix it if I find the time to do so and nobody else fixes it first. Edit: Doh, it's called West End Airport The ICAO Code is MYGW. I'm working since yesterday on a fixed scenery. Should be finished in a few hours, I hope. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
POM57 Posted December 16, 2017 Share Posted December 16, 2017 21 minutes ago, WalSch said: The ICAO Code is MYGW. I'm working since yesterday on a fixed scenery. Should be finished in a few hours, I hope. Looks great! Is there some place (expect gateway bug reports) where people can report very inaccurate airports like this? If no a thread like that would be nice, flying into Niš and seeing how inaccurate the airport was is the reason why I learned WED Making local GA airports is fun, but I feel like I would be helping a lot more if I were fixing things like this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PsXP Posted December 16, 2017 Author Share Posted December 16, 2017 2 hours ago, WalSch said: The ICAO Code is MYGW. I'm working since yesterday on a fixed scenery. Should be finished in a few hours, I hope. Awesome! Looking forward to it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WalSch Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 21 hours ago, POM57 said: Looks great! Is there some place (expect gateway bug reports) where people can report very inaccurate airports like this? If no a thread like that would be nice, flying into Niš and seeing how inaccurate the airport was is the reason why I learned WED Making local GA airports is fun, but I feel like I would be helping a lot more if I were fixing things like this. I'm not sure if LR is interested in because the problem with misplaced airports on Bahamas (and elsewhere) has been around for years. I can not imagine that LR has never noticed this before. btw, my fixed MYGW scenery will come today. I have still to fix some issues. And I also had to sleep for a few hours. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VFRflier Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 In hopes of furthering this idea, I suspect that the file "water_transition.png", dated 7/21/2015 which is placed in every "textures" folder when the Masks are processed, could have the air-brush applied to it and allow a general, wide-spread affect on all the other masks in the folder and avoid editing each individual mask as a first pass; anomalies could then be back-tracked to a particular mask and adjusted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
POM57 Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 3 hours ago, WalSch said: I'm not sure if LR is interested in because the problem with misplaced airports on Bahamas (and elsewhere) has been around for years. I can not imagine that LR has never noticed this before. btw, my fixed MYWG scenery will come today. I have still to fix some issues. And I also had to sleep for a few hours. I was not thinking about something official or anything, just a place where people can report broken airports so other people can fix them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WalSch Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 2 hours ago, POM57 said: I was not thinking about something official or anything, just a place where people can report broken airports so other people can fix them. A good idea. I assume, it will be an almost never ending thread. btw, MYGW is online now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StevePHL Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 Upload fixed airports to the gateway. LR will include them, if approved, in a future release. They do it all the time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WalSch Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 6 minutes ago, StevePHL said: Upload fixed airports to the gateway. LR will include them, if approved, in a future release. They do it all the time. I would, but my version is not a simple fix of the apt.dat, it is a scenery with custom library objects. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
POM57 Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 16 minutes ago, WalSch said: A good idea. I assume, it will be an almost never ending thread. btw, MYGW is online now. Looks great. I might make a gateway version if you don't plan to make one. I might start the thread as well, I think that it could help to improve the consistency of default X-Plane a lot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WalSch Posted December 17, 2017 Share Posted December 17, 2017 4 hours ago, POM57 said: Looks great. I might make a gateway version if you don't plan to make one. I might start the thread as well, I think that it could help to improve the consistency of default X-Plane a lot. Thanks. Yes, feel free to make one. You can use my apt.dat if you want. But as I mentioned in my upload, I'm not sure or would claim that it is 100% correct. I adapted the runway to the orthos. Probably it's not absolute accurate in length and width etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Erard Posted December 27, 2017 Share Posted December 27, 2017 Hi PsXP. Super cool tip. Thank you! I am working on a couple of my old Caribbean sceneries and your Photoshop trick works wonders. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bobtildesley Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 great tip thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lorenzo.D Posted December 29, 2017 Share Posted December 29, 2017 Can someone do a video for this method with photoshop? Inviato dal mio ASUS_X008D utilizzando Tapatalk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Erard Posted January 12, 2018 Share Posted January 12, 2018 Hi PsXP I can't get enough of your tip: Before: After: Hats off to that! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PsXP Posted April 4, 2018 Author Share Posted April 4, 2018 ^^This is so cool. Happy to share with the community. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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