Hi Boris, though the price of 100 EUR/$ might be rather fair one should look for other limitations which are not obvious. I don't know the latest D-Sat version but in D-Sat 5 you have that export function for private use for MS-Flightsim (which I used to get the pics out, combined them and get the lat-lon-data for the corners). That sounds really good, but although it is limited for private use, there are a lot of hidden limitations - the area size for export with highest resolution is limited (you have to find your own way) - the given lat-lon coordinates of the corners are rather unprecise (you have to correct. This makes it impossible to adapt some of those BIG pictures automized (at least for me. I wasted a lot of hours searching bugs in my programm until I found out where the "bug" is. You have to do it manually, very time-consuming.) - the picture quality of the exported pics is limited (you notice if you export with highest resolution and compare with the screen-output of D-Sat5) - outside the big cities you have satellite-pics with limited resolution and rather bad colours (might be changed with Ver 6) - I am not sure they use WSG84 projection for output (bigger areas: if you match one runway at one corner you loose exact position of a runway at the other corner). - This is for D-Sat5, don't know D-Sat6 - For the prof version you should ask whether the size of the area/pics one can use "commercially" is limited by license.
After all, 1 1/2 year ago, when my work started, I was very enthusiastic about satellite textures. My opinion has changed. Until you get a very high resolution neatless for very big areas it is unsatisfying. The better alternatives could be using low-res satellite pics (as Landsat7) to derive information from it: a very precise "water-mask" (the way FLY! CAN display water areas independent from textures, if you make a mask), "land-use" (the way MSFS Flightsim IS ABLE to display CUSTOM(!!!) information about displaying irregular shaped landuse from big downto very small areas by using a lot of different high-res standard textures, if you look at AVSIM you'll find out that they use Landsat7 pics that way), part of the basic FlightGear dataset (streets, railways ..) and important obstacles and objects (USER created). This is just a fictional idea for FlightGear but the way how existing flight-sims do it (not bad). And it is NOT an argument against Manuel's work and suggestions - let's see how the result is, another grafic engine with SRTM is not bad. And I'm too go on working with Landsat as I cannot change the grafic engine of FLY!II which is rather obsolete und without further development - FlightGear has a better chance! Regards Georg "HeliFLYer" EDDW --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.756 / Virus Database: 506 - Release Date: 08.09.2004 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d