Photoscenary

Programs to generate and manipulate photoscenaries for FGFS.

The program is written entirely in JULIA and therefore requires JULIA to be installed on your system. It is a command line program and currently has no GUI.

A list of changes / history can be found in Versions.md.

Quick guide

Elaborate instructions in a complete manual can be found at the FlightGear Wiki.

The process of getting photoscenery is simple:

1. Install the toolchain
2. Use the tool to download photoscenery tiles in the correct format
3. Tell FlightGear to use those downloaded tiles

Installation

If you use Linux, chances are good your distribution already provides packages. Otherwise, install manually:

• Install julia (version <=1.6 needed): https://julialang.org/downloads/
• Install ImageMagick: https://imagemagick.org/script/download.php
• Install photoscenary.jl (clone this repo, or download the zipfile)

Usage

• julia photoscenary.jl -h (or --help) will print version and usage information.
• julia photoscenary.jl --version will print version and perform checks on needed programs.

Basic call

Running julia photoscenary.jl without arguments will run the program with the last commands.
They are read from the args.txt file in the base directory.

Simple example using coordinates

The program, for basic example, you can run it with this command:

julia -t 4 photoscenary.jl -p /home/user/photoscenery/Orthophotos --lat 45.66 --lon 9.7 -r 15 -s 3

where:

-p      the path of photoscenery
--lat   the latitude of the central location of the area
--lon   the longitude of the central location of the area
-r      the radius of the area to be covered with the photoscenary
-s      Max size of image in pixels 0->512 1->1024 2->2048 3->4096 4->8192 5->16384 6->32768

Simple example using Airport ID

You may also download around a airport using its ICAO code (-i <ICAO>): julia -t 4 photoscenary.jl -p /home/user/photoscenery/Orthophotos -i LIMJ -r 15 -s 3

Use SkyVector route

You can use a GPX route made by skyvector to download scenery along that path (--route <file.gpx>): julia -t 4 photoscenary.jl -p /home/user/photoscenery/Orthophotos --route https://wiki.flightgear.org/mySkyVectorRoute.gpx -r 15 -s 3

Using the tiles in FlightGear

To make FlightGear load the downloaded tiles, you need to tell it to:

• In the FGFS launcher, add the photoscenery folder as you would with "normal" addon scenery. Just add the folder that you specified with the -p option as Addon-scenery (hint: it contains a sufolder named Orthophotos).
• When FlightGear started, activate the option: Menu > View > Rendering Options > Satellite Photoscenery