Curtis L. Olson writes: > > Norman Vine writes: > > Here is some *excellent* global data for a start on this > > http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarble/ > > > > WARNING THE COMPLETE SET OF DATA FILES IS HUGE > > and will require an additional download of approx 70 MB > > for the minimal installation and approx 300 meg for the > > full data set, which uncompresses to ~2.0 GB > > > > Note this data is the same resolution as the gtopo30 DEM, 1 km pixels > > at 'best' LOD, and as distributed has 5 levels of texture LOD which is > > texture mapped onto an unperturbed sphere, this is suitable for distances > > of >50 miles or so > > > That does look cool. So 1km resolution of the earth is about 2.0 GB > uncompressed, which means if we wanted 1m resolution of the earth we'd > be looking at about 2000 TB, or 2 of whatever the next unit up is.
Yes the data requirments are staggering and prohibitive with todays machines but ... I think we could get away with substantially less then 1 meter data for the *vast* majority of the earth. for starters over 50% of the earth is water so we could easily substitute a couple of textures and are data requirements are cut in half Then we really only need 1 meter data where you are allowed to be close enough to the ground to see 1 meter i.e. the immediate airport vicinity so lets cut the data requirement in half again. This is still a staggering amount of data though > And you still wouldn't have nearly the resolution you'd need to do > runway markings and taxiway lines and that sort of thing. Runways and such could be inserts > Our planet still seems pretty big sometimes. :-) FWIW It has always seemed pretty big to me and I definately am not ready to implement 'photo texture' for the planet, except for selected inserts which btw I am doing with the above data set as a base :-) < this is not publically available yet however > Cheers Norman _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel