I have been playing around with ortho4xp for a few weeks.  I recently created orthos of the entire Alaska range and have been flying bush planes in and around the valleys.

I have been pretty disappointed in the quality of the tiles I created; some are faded out and some look crisp.  I am using Bing and I went online the check the quality of the satellite imagery on that website.  At some levels of zoom, the photos look good and at other levels they are very mismatched.

How can I tell which zoom level I'm on when I'm looking at the website?  Should I just zoom in maximally and zoom out by increments?  I want to chose the zoom level that produces the most consistent photoimagery.

 

 

1 hour ago, ckelly14 said:

I have been playing around with ortho4xp for a few weeks.  I recently created orthos of the entire Alaska range and have been flying bush planes in and around the valleys.

I have been pretty disappointed in the quality of the tiles I created; some are faded out and some look crisp.  I am using Bing and I went online the check the quality of the satellite imagery on that website.  At some levels of zoom, the photos look good and at other levels they are very mismatched.

How can I tell which zoom level I'm on when I'm looking at the website?  Should I just zoom in maximally and zoom out by increments?  I want to chose the zoom level that produces the most consistent photoimagery.

 

 

The most consistent I have found, has been zl17.  When I played around with zl16...colors changed from tile to tile, it seemed. Not so drastically, with zl17.

On Google maps you can see the ZL in the address bar url if you zoom with the map zoom control rather than the mousewheel.  Since I rarely have luck with google for orthophotos (many partially blue or all blue tiles) this isn't much help, but I have opened google and bing or arcgis at the same time and used google to display the area at the zoom level I am interested in evaluatiing, then, in an adjacent window, zooming the bing or arcgis map to the same level. Pretty tedious, so not great for checking large areas. I agree with Mitch that zl17 proves the most consistent results.

Since you are doing Alaska have you tried using ASK_1 or ASK_2 as the source in ortho4xp.  They are specifically for Alaska and are available in the dropdown.  I have not tried them personally, so don't know if they will be any better than bing. If you do try them, I'd love to know how they turn out.

 

My suggestion is when you generate a tile, tick the "Skip Conversions" option. This way, it will simply download all the jpegs first before generating the textures. You can then go into the Orthophotos folder in Ortho4XP and look at the images whilst it is downloading them. If you see many bad looking tiles, then just cancel it and try another source.

If you are happy, generate the tile, but this time untick Skip Conversions. It will then convert the already downloaded jpegs for X-Plane.

This is generally my workflow unless I know the source I am using is good. But really for Alaska, I think you are out of luck.

 

Thank you for the replies.  I'll try the alaska orthos and report back.

The ASK_1 and ASK_2 data has been transferred to a commercial company that requires a subscription.  If you download the orthos via ortho4xp, you get a white tile. 

Thanks for the info on that. I wonder how the imagery was.  

So far, all of the scenery I have downloaded has been in North America, but not Alaska yet.  Getting consistent colours is very difficult, more so in some areas that others. Good consistent coverage in Canada is very spotty, so I have only done select areas. For some areas I have downloaded from 2 sources and renamed some of the files from one source to replace poor photos from the other. I've even edited the colour on some individual tiles.  This is very time consuming though, so I only do it in areas that are most important to me.

I gave up on Alaska and I created tiles for most of the Pacific northwest.  ZL17 with W2XP and ortho overlay looks fantastic.  Have a great screenshot flying past Mt Rainier that I'll try to post later.

I hear that Europe is pretty solid- anyone do "bush" flying around the Alps?

2 hours ago, ckelly14 said:

I gave up on Alaska and I created tiles for most of the Pacific northwest.  ZL17 with W2XP and ortho overlay looks fantastic.  Have a great screenshot flying past Mt Rainier that I'll try to post later.

I hear that Europe is pretty solid- anyone do "bush" flying around the Alps?

Yep....

Did you use ortho4xp?   Which map service did you use?