Technology - Tile Proxy for DCS?

[Thisdale]

Doing some research on this forum, there’s barely any mention of the thing, so I figured I’d throw it out here.

 

For anyone wondering, Tile Proxy is an amazing piece of tech, which is open-source to boot, which allows live (or not) streaming of Satelite-quality earth image captures. In-game, this translates to life-like/looking (to the best resolution accessible) ground textures. The way it works is, as you enter a specific “zone” or “tile, the program streams or loads the necessary texture from cache or directly from the net, onto the ground on your immediate area in-game.

 

I’m been flying for a couple of years in FS2004/X and it is magnificent.

 

The reason I mention this is quite simple; BlackShark and Warthog both use a real location for their theater of operations; the black sea area. Not really knowing if the terrain is actually accurate or to what level, i still wonder and propose here, if the DCS team has ever considered its use?

 

Having contacted Christian Buchner(maker of TileProxy) himself, he told me the architecture of the games are different than FSX (of course), so he couldn’t just port it. His Software is designed for FSX. However, it would be doable (and possibly quite easy) for the DCS dev team to implement TP for their series of game.

 

Overall, the software is somewhat free (open-source), works incredibly well even over moderate machines and adds so much realism and immersion to FSX, I figured it’d be amazing to be able to use it in the DCS games.

 

Any thoughts on that?

Dev team? Wags?

 

Thanks for reading!

 

 

 

 

Interesting links to ponder;

 

TileProxy tutorial by Ed Thruthan

http://edtruthan.com/tileproxy/tutorial/

 

Original Support for TileProxy, forum from ASVSims

http://forums1.avsim.net/forum/284-the-tileproxy-project-forum/

 

Very nice examples of TileProxy in action, from the RedFlag’s group leader/creator: Pennyfour (recommend subscribe)

 

and other videos can be found on youtube, of course.

[DarkFire]

Those videos look amazing! However, some observations:

 

1. Tileproxy looks INCREDIBLE at medium - high altitude. Not sure though if it has the resolution to look sufficiently good at low altitude, which would be very important for the DCS games.

 

2. Implementing it would necessitate an internet connection. My gaming rig doesn't have one, as I suspect is the case for a number of other people. One of the joys for me of the DCS series is that activation is possible via email, i.e. using a smartphone.

 

If the Tileproxy data could be downloaded or unzipped from a DVD that would be awesome. I know very little about coding a game engine, but it would be great if the DCS engine could use the Tileproxy data for flight above a certain altitude, or under certain conditions, then use some sort of detail texture for low altitude flight. That would be seriously good!

[AggiAggi]

Considering a commercial combat simulation such as DCS you have to consider the following:

 

1. Legal aspects. What Tile Proxy does is not really legal. Eagle Dynamics cannot just use the content of some other company and put it in there sim. Buying those digital contents is also quite expensive.

 

2. Quality. Eagle Dynamics would not be able to control the quality of the environment. I have used TP myself and it gives varying results. For example, I decided to purchase VFR Germany from Aerosoft just because I was not satisfied with the patchwotk scenery TP delivers. I personally prefer a confined region with properly designed textures and 3D objects over a global coverage with poor quality. At least for a combat sim, for FSX its different because you do not interact with the environment so much.

 

3. Limitations. What TP gives you is just the textures. What you need for an integrated combat simulation is multiple layers of information. On top of the textures you need cultural data such as roads, woods, citys, power lines, etc. Then you need information for sensor simulation such as radar and IR sensors. What the human eye sees is not what the sensor sees.

 

My opinion is, although the idea is neat, it would not really benefit the DCS series. I think the better approach is to release the documentation of the database format and let the community and 3rd party suppliers do well modelled scenery with a good quality control. Optimally, some open standardised format such as CDB (Common Database, http://www.presagis.com/products_services/standards/cdb/) would be used. But I guess this is not realistic for DCS at the moment.