When will East Gippsland Victoria be updated

[Ianh]

Order Number: FSS0004103

I was wondering when East Gippsland will be updated, I note in the FTX AU BLUE User Guide that it is not one of the areas which has been done. any time lines

I like the hot fixes particularly towers etc but would like to be able to fly home.

[Martin Lott]

G'day and welcome Ian. I'm currently doing a sweep of the Melbourne Tile for missing towns. When that's complete, which won't be long, I'll put in a request to update the Mt Beauty Tile if it hasn't already been done by then. What's your home town? If it has good satellite coverage we'll be able to give it extra attention.

[Ianh]

FSS0004103

Let me preface these comments with FTX is great package, with great support, and probably too cheap for the amount of work you have done, the more I look, the more I love it. It has really greatly improved FSX in Australia.

I am from a place called Bonang but there's nothing there of significance, What I would really like is reasonably accurate landclasses the length of the Snowy River from Orbost to the NSW border and to the east for 100 km, the river is an intersting fly even in a helicopter. But the current river itself is increadibly patchy in FTX, and while the coastal systems seem accurate, the landscape from the coast to the Monaro (NSW) is all over the shop. My problem is I already know how it looks from the air, so seeing clear country where it is deep forest is disconcerting. The widths of tracks are too wide often due the the high level of treecover and there is a lot more diversity in the tree cover than shows up FTX for that area.

I actually live in Bendigo so any work you can do around that part of Victoria would be nice.

What imagery do you use, I am work in the GIS field and may be able to assist with some data. The event of Google Earth makes any product like FTX a challenge, they have the capital to buy any data they can, I'm sure you haven't at these prices.

[Martin Lott]

Hi Ian, thanks for your kind comments. I'm only doing missing towns atm and some improvements to existing larger towns, such as Bendigo, which you'll be glad to know now has the CBD depicted. John mentioned that there's plans to do a sweep of AU Blue with some of the textures from AU Gold so when that happens you'll no doubt see improvements to your area of interest. I can't answer what John uses for Orbx's imagery. For doing the landclass work we mainly use GE as well as Yahoo Satellite, Virtual Earth etc, etc.

[Barry Meiklejohn]

G'day Ian,

As you can imagine FSX uses a defined number of texture sets to represent the entire globe. We have been able to modify this system and expand upon it for our usage. Unfortunately we are extremely limited when it comes to depiction of heavy forest. If we were to expand the amount of heavy forest textures it would be at the expense of other imagery - a tradeoff which would significantly effect other areas such as crops or towns etc. The whole process is a delicate balancing act.

Also the depiction of rivers and streams is a challenge. It took two people approximately 6 months solid work to define the coastline for AU_Blue. It is not created from a geographic database, it has been hand drawn. In many instances they have to determine a coastline through swamp or marsh areas as there is no equivalent in FSX. As you are aware we also run up against limitations of non-perennial systems as we proceed inland, what can be shown in data as a river/creek/lake is often a dried out depression or series of small waterholes. My understanding is that we have used some GEO data to model some rivers and lakes however the results are sporadic.

When AU_Blue was released the focus became accurate east coast shorelines and adjacent systems. At this stage our focus is on creating accurate coastlines for AU_Green - a mammoth undertaking.

[Ianh]

Thank you Martin & Barry from FTX team for you replys. I have spent some time reading most of the posts which has explained some of the issues I had particulaly in relation to tracks.  It looks like if I want to improve my area of interst I will need to get into the Community Scenery Design Workshop forum. When I get over flying with FTX I will look at that approach.

cheer Ianh