This project brings support for photoscenery to FlightGear, the free and open-source flight simulator. The photoscenery is an overlay, which overrides the traditional scenery textures when there is a satellite orthophoto available for the current tile. It is fully compatible with Atmospheric Light Scattering (as well as the default pipeline), and works with your existing scenery.
Normally, FlightGear uses generic terrain textures. Photoscenery allows you to recognize the terrain, improving your experience when flying with visual flight rules (VFR).
This project has now been merged into upstream FlightGear, so you no longer need to apply patches or build from source! Visit the FlightGear nightly builds website to obtain the latest build for your platform of choice. If you're downloading the FlightGear Data package separately, please note that you should obtain this from Git, since this package is out of date on the nightly builds.
Make sure you have Git installed. In addition to FlightGear nightly with FGData from Git, you'll need Python 3, along with requests and Pillow. Also, clone this repo (git clone https://github.com/nathanielwarner/flightgear-photoscenery) to get the creator.py script.
Set aside a folder that you'll use to save photoscenery. In these instructions, I'll specify it as /home/yourname/photoscenery.
Photoscenery is created by providing satellite orthophotos for the scenery tiles you want. The creator.py script automates the download of these orthophotos from ArcGIS servers. To use it, provide either the index of the tile you want (--index), or a latitude and longitude (--lat and --lon).
For example, to make photoscenery for the tile containing the Eiffel Tower, you would first find its coordinates. (Latitude 48.858, Longitude 2.295) Then, you run the script, providing the coordinates and your download folder.
./creator.py --scenery_folder /home/yourname/photoscenery --lat 48.858 --lon 2.295
Note: If you have Windows, you'll need to run python creator.py instead of ./creator.py.
When you run FlightGear, you'll need to go to the "Add-ons" tab of the launcher, and add the folder where you saved it (/home/yourname/photoscenery in this example) as an "Additional scenery folder".
Once you're loaded in (after pressing "Fly" in the launcher), you can toggle Satellite Photoscenery on and off in the Rendering settings menu (View -> Rendering Options) in FlightGear.
The creator.py script has an option --provider which allows you to specify the orthophoto provider that you download from. By default, it selects the ArcGIS provider, which has global coverage. Your use of ArcGIS services is subject to the ESRI Terms of Use. By using this script, you take responsibility for following applicable terms of use.
Other providers are available under permissive licenses. For example, the United States is covered by the USGS provider. See the creator.py script for the complete list, which is being expanded over time.
You can automatically download a range of tiles, rather than one at a time, using the create_bbox.pl script. Perl is required. Specify the bounding box you want with the --latLL, --lonLL, --latUR, and --lonUR options, where "LL" means lower left and "UR" means upper right. After these options, add a -- then the options to pass through to creator.py.
For example, you could download the Innsbruck region:
./create_bbox.pl --latLL 47.1967 --lonLL 11.1984 --latUR 47.5321 --lonUR 11.7682 -- --cols 2 --scenery_folder /home/yourname/photoscenery
Note: If you have Windows, you'll need to run create_bbox.pl instead of ./create_bbox.pl.
Sometimes, when multiple versions of Python are installed on your computer, this will result in Python 3 being referred to as python3, however if you have just one version of Python, the keyword will be referred to as python. You may see this cause an error such as Python was not found; run without arguments to install from the Microsoft Store, or disable this shortcut from Settings > Manage App Execution Aliases.. This can be simply fixed by editing the create_bbox.pl script to rename all instances of python3 to python.
FlightGear now has support for DDS-format orthophotos as well as PNG, which reduces RAM and VRAM usage. The create_dds.sh script is provided to automatically convert all the PNG files in a directory to DDS using ImageMagick or Nvidia Texture Tools. (Bash is also required since it's a bash script.) You can run it like so:
./create_dds.sh /home/yourname/photoscenery
You'll need to have an Orthophotos/ subdirectory in one of your scenery folders, alongside Terrain/, Buildings/, etc. You could put it in existing custom scenery packages, or keep your orthophotos in a separate package (for example to use them with TerraSync).
The Orthophotos/ subdirectory is further split by geographic location to mirror other scenery subdirectories. The orthophotos themselves are normal PNG files (or DDS), named after their tile number. You can determine the tile number you need, as well as the base path in which to save it, by using the creator.py script, passing --info_only as an argument to show tile information only rather than automatically download the photo.
Attention: You no longer need to flip the orthophoto vertically.