Chris Metzler wrote: > I saw your scenery email from a few weeks ago, but didn't respond > because I was ferociously busy, because most of your questions had > been answered many times in the mailing list archives, and because you > seemed at the time somewhat insulting of people that have put a lot of > hours into what we do have (absolutely it all has a very long way to > go; but everyone's trying when they have time, and you're very much > encouraged to jump in). But one other thing that I suspect you're > thinking is wrong, but isn't, is building locations. I remember you > commenting on the buildings in the East River, etc. The issue here > isn't the building locations; there are error bars on the locations in > the FAA DOF, but they're not big in places like Manhattan. When you > see buildings in the water, the problem is almost never that the > buildings are in the wrong place; the problem is that the *terrain* is > in the wrong place. Go to some of those buildings in the East River > with the UFO; hover on them, then open the property browser and get > your precise lat/lon; then put that lat/lon into Google Maps or > Mapquest's map-by-latlon. You'll find that you *should* be hovering > over land. Hover on one of the container-loading cranes "offshore" of > the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach, repeat this procedure, and > you'll find that you should be over the port according to the map. > > The issue is the dataset currently used for coastlines and river > courses, which can be off by significant amounts. To me, this is > something that needs fixing more than city building stuff does, > simply because it's more fundamental: no matter how nice folks make > the buildings of Rosslyn and the monuments of DC look, they're going > to look bizarre sitting in the Potomac. There are people working > right now on creating the infrastructure that allows people to > submit changes not just to coastlines and watercourses, but land > use information as well; search the flightgear-devel archives for > Ralf Gerlich and Martin Spott's posts on the landcover db, or just > head off to http://www.custom-scenery.org/?id=212 . They've > used this infrastructure to produce some very nice, reasonably > accurate scenery for part of southern Germany (and in answer to your > other post, at least people here are aware of GRASS -- it's used in > this project). > I too have noticed major issues with water placement for things like lakes and rivers. It looks aweful strange to see a major highway that I know drives around a lake go right through the middle of it (in FG the highway does have the right path) or a bridge that sticks halfway out across a river, then ends. I noticed one instance of a large lake actually missing, though I'm not surprised, as the lake is a man-made quarry-turned-park lake, and it's fairly recent.
>> URL to the FAAs data? >> > Despite being public domain data, the FAA has not at present chosen > to distribute it on the web; you have to buy it with bunch of other > datasets collectively called "Digital Aeronautical Info". I'm about > to buy another copy of it, provided no bureaucrat has made an > unfortunate decision about distribution like they did with the DAFIF; > if you want to look at it when I get it, or look at the old one I've > got, my understanding is that's fine. It's public domain, so would it be a problem to publish everything in those datasets for our perusal? I assume public domain is public domain, and that once you receive the CD of data, the FAA has absolutely no say over what you do with it, be it to sell it, distribute it, falsify it and call it my mother, etc. I wouldn't mind seeing it. JD ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-users
