Earthview: Difference between revisions

Finally, while it is possible to use Earthview in rendering schemes other then ALS, this is neither supported nor endorsed. While they work perfectly well for the normal operations envelope of a flightsim, at high altitude the default renderer as well as [[Project Rembrandt]] do not render a realistic horizon line, plausible atmosphere visuals or the hard shadows of outer space and Earthview can not compensate for these issues.

== Customization ==

To get full advantage of Earthview, and your graphic card, you may install and use your own high resolution tiles as well as normal maps having a alpha channel to trigger parallax mapping.

==== Texture generation ====

The solution is to add margins that encompass a bit of the neighbouring tiles. This is what [https://github.com/chris-blues/Nasa2FGearthview Nasa2FGearthview] is doing (as well as the texture set provided). These bordered tiles don't use '''earth_unitscale_rawuv.ac''' but instead '''earth_unitscale_hires.ac''', which is the default (see [https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=15754&start=135#p207629 this forum post] for the original discussion). In other words, if you use [https://github.com/chris-blues/Nasa2FGearthview Nasa2FGearthview] to generate your own textures, you do not need to change '''earth.xml''' nor '''earth_unitscale_rawuv.ac''', but you should still edit '''earth_unitscale_hires.ac''' if you want to use dds tiles.

==== Open tips ====

* Since there is no limit to customization, and if you can afford 50GB of disk space, you can create a whole set of directories containing Earth textures for each month of the year, as for instance:

And you'll be flying Earth with textures matching the current month!