Tofft River near Queenstown (YQNS)

[RobdeVries]

Hi there,

Today I flew from  Queenstown (YQNS) to do a little sightseeing. Flew southeast towards Tofft River and noticed that it was missing except for some rectangular inlet. Checked it with GMAP (based on google maps) and it definitely didn't look that way in GM/GE

Moreover King River (same area) is missing completely.

On a site note. Same situation at Lake Pedder (rectangular inlet). There's already a post mentioning this issue but without response from the developers.

Screenshot situation Queenstown (YQNS)/Tofft River

LAT: S42 9.95'

LON  E145 37.53'

EDIT: continued my flight around Lake Burbury and noticed that coastlines where blocky and crude anyhow. Several streams/rivers missing. Is this intended? Am I spoiled by UT?

Thanks in advance,

Rob

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi Rob,

what you're looking at are the default water features. We don't have access to highly detailed topographic data (they are prohibitively expensive; also one of the reasons Allen isn't doing an UT product for Australia) so we have a couple of people who are manually tracing shorelines and rivers using Google Earth and other source material. You can imagine that this is quite the task for an entire continent.

At some point we hope to be able to include all shorelines, rivers, and major lakes but that will take a while. Until then, some areas will be more detailed and complete then others. Sorry about the contrast.

Cheers, Holger

[RobdeVries]

Hi Holger,

Thanks for this answer. It gives an insight into the development process that I didn't know of and it makes sense of course. All the more kudos to the people who manually correct shorelines!

On the other hand I'm keen to know how the developers prioritize their efforts. Take Lake Pedder. I would suggest that if you have a nearby customized scenery (whether airstrip or otherwise) that you also take the surroundings into account and make them more accurate as to add to the overall experience.

Thanks again,

Rob

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi Rob,

that's a good point about focusing on the vicinity of landmarks and airfields. Then again, given the density of airfields provided with the GA packages... 

The issue with Lake Pedder and the surrounding lakes is that they have very complex shorelines. Imagine digitizing those by hand! I'm currently looking into options for autoextracting the lakes from Landsat satellite imagery; we'll see how that goes.

Rivers are probably too narrow for autoextraction so they'll need to be traced manually.

Cheers, Holger