Hi Folks
Please take these comments with their light-hearted intent.
Maybe thats why its named
Treescapes.
Accurate tree coverage alone on this scale, is a major achievement in itself.
(They also look like the standard autogen ones,
The trees are optimized uk specific autogen models, (i.e. not default).
must admit, not that impressed with the looks of it.
It'll certainly substantially enhance the bald photo-scenery.
Think of it as a broadly-scoped area canvas for further commmunity enhancement.
In the same way as Horizon & Justflights photo-scenery is a base to draw airports on.
thats a lot of ... errm .... marketing hype .... as well,
the only way to place mass autogen is to open the texture wanted in the Annotator and you just draw your stuff on top ....
not even the textures are OS data .. seeing as how there photographs
Any map is always a compromise between detail and scale.
Photoscenery at 1m/px detail,
is always going to be of higher detail,
than any commercially viable map.
Matching tree coverage to the unique photo-tiles,
is a lot harder to do
than for the relatively few tiles used on any landclass based scenery.
IIRC, each tile is 1km x 1km,
so if using Annotator,
how long do you think it would take you manually
to inspect, then accurately tree-cover, over
151,174 km2 ?
Ok, granted the area isn't 100% covered by trees, (if it were, it would be a much easier task).
Plus do so, scaling/positioning coverage appropriately, for the various autogen slider levels, (if required).
AIUI,
the Treescapes UK coverage was programmatically generated,
using an in-house tool to read OS source data,
to then map that OS tree coverage data onto the unique photo-scenery tiles.
Hence why it supposedly covers plotted areas, (not unique isolated trees).
There possibly are other more accurate tree coverage source datasets, (e.g. NERC subsets),
which may not be available for
viable commercial distibution.
I'd of much rather had a package that actually provides some of the landmarks rather than default trees, I would have probably bought this!
Those are different matters.
The Treescapes packages are
Autogen,
whereas you're talking about landmarks, i.e.
Scenery Objects.
And yes, I'd be much more tempted if it also included semi-accurate buildings, with proper UK textures.
Brick houses and the like.
From comments posted, that may eventually be a possibility,
but would require creation of an extensive matching set of UK specific models and associated textures.
HTH
ATB
Paul
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