Messages

1

Feature Requests / WMS maps

« on: August 15, 2009, 10:05:27 PM »

Hi Scott,

I am back in Europe for a month and I again stuck with the Landsat as the only map server that Topofusion supports. I managed to get one local WMS server to work - though it only loads the aerials, not topo maps. I found trying to put the custom WMS server in quite cumbersome - not your fault though - it's more a documentation issue on the WMS servers side. With that, I have a few ideas  for you to entertain.

1. Finding the layers and other features on the WMS servers is a pain if it's not documented (and the ones that I found are not documented). It'd be good if Topofusion's Custom WMS Servers dialog could query the server's GetCapabilities (e.g. by allowing user to paste in the link from http://www.ogc-services.net/) and interpret them in some sensible way (e.g. list available layers).

2. OpenStreetMap WMS additon would be great. There seems to be a group in Germany that runs one server, http://www.osm-wms.de/, though, with my limited knowledge of WMS I could not get it to work. I am sure many people outside US/Can/Aus would appreciate that.

3. Finally, we discussed this last year but I am back at it again - it'd be nice to be able to select any tile set for Photofusion. I know there's problem with different extent of the tiles in diferent tilesets, perhaps in that case you could have user to choose just single tile set (e.g. color aerials) instead of the two (topo, b/w aerials) as now?

Guess that's it for now, take care
MC

2

Beta Testing / v3.56 - Color aerials for most of the USA

« on: November 11, 2008, 10:57:47 PM »

Scott,

those color aerials are awesome. Makes planning for the next camp spot much easier ;-)

One request. How hard would it to be to add an option to photofusion to use the color aerials instead of the old b/w ones?

Thanks,
MC

3

Beta Testing / New Feature - Log Book

« on: March 30, 2004, 05:00:20 PM »

Scott,

cycling through the day files through clicking sounds good to me. More in direct e-mail.
MC

4

Beta Testing / New Feature - Log Book

« on: March 29, 2004, 01:20:07 PM »

Hey Scott,

the logbook is great. Have one comment, though. On some days, I do more than one ride in a day, which I save into multiple gpx files. Can you modify the logbook to show info on all the entries for that particular day? E.g. just to have one gpx file name per row in the calendar day display, clicking on each line will display details in the lower info window.

Thanks,
MC

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5

Beta Testing / Bugs in beta 1.61

« on: February 13, 2004, 08:16:45 PM »

Quote (Alan @ Feb. 13 2004,1:09)

[/quote] Quote [ 2. it is not working in 3d anymore, either, instead, switches to 2d Right.  Almost anything that would change the texture boots you back to 2d.  I intend to have it redraw and recreate the texture in the future (since the model doesn't need to remade this should be quick).

Can't you do the 2d bump behind the scenes? The first beta actually did something like that, if I pushed 'a' in 3d, and then 'r', it would redraw the switched (e.g. topo->aerial) texture.

Quote

Quote (mcuma @ Feb. 12 2004,9:58) It may be worth it to consider generating the 3d image a bit further, outside the 2d map view, in the direction of view - when you look at the 3d scene from smaller angle than say 70 deg, the horizon looks cut too quickly. I don't know.  The idea was to view in 3d exactly what's being viewed in 2d (it takes exactly what's on the screen as the texture).

Sounds good to me, I was more thinking of greater 3d viewing pleasure ;-)

Quote

Quote (mcuma @ Feb. 12 2004,9:58) Any thoughts on dynamically redrawing the scene as you drag (with right mouse)? Do you mean basically automatically pushing 'r' for you, or something far more smooth?  The former is obviously easy to do, but the latter requires a completely different 3d engine.

I think automatically pushing 'r' would do, that's what I am doing now manually and it's works OK for me.

Quote

Quote (mcuma @ Feb. 12 2004,9:58) Another thought for more enjoyable playing with Topofusion - how about drawing a small scale bar in the lower left corner, both in 2d and 3d. In 3d the perspective skewes the scale, but, it should not be that hard to change it with the view angle as well. No kidding, it's been on the todo list for a long time.  I don't understand what you mean on the 3d view.  Seems the only way to do it would be to put the scale bar actually in the scene, next to the model or something, then it would scale accordingly.  Not sure it'd be all that useful, but we should probably try it.

Yes, I was meaning 3d scale floating in the scene - in fact, you can probably just keep the scale from 2d and just. Probably not that useful, but, fun to see...

6

Beta Testing / Bugs in beta 1.61

« on: February 12, 2004, 09:58:39 PM »

Hey guys,

overall, a great improvement. Mainly, no more memory leaks, at least after a quick run. Also, looks like you have DEM caching on, right?

A few things that I noticed right away:

1. "a" button still does not switch aerial-combo-topo  in 2d.
2. it is not working in 3d anymore, either, instead, switches to 2d
3. why buttons o and p in 3d do not work anymore? It's easier to use them than the 3d dialog box.

A few other suggestions:

It may be worth it to consider generating the 3d image a bit further, outside the 2d map view, in the direction of view - when you look at the 3d scene from smaller angle than say 70 deg, the horizon looks cut too quickly.

Any thoughts on dynamically redrawing the scene as you drag (with right mouse)?

Another thought for more enjoyable playing with Topofusion - how about drawing a small scale bar in the lower left corner, both in 2d and 3d. In 3d the perspective skewes the scale, but, it should not be that hard to change it with the view angle as well.

Anyway, just a couple of evening thoughts.

Later,
MC

7

Beta Testing / Memory leak?

« on: February 09, 2004, 10:38:02 PM »

One more test, trying to pin this down a bit more.

I keep the 3D on, move by 1/2 screen (right mouse drag) push r to rerender, and do this several times. The memory goes from 181 MB to 197 MB to 202 MB to 209 MB.

Same thing's happening when keep pushing a and then r (switch to aerial/combo and rerender).

Memory stays the same when change elevation exaggeration (o,p). So, guess there must be something with the scene bookeeping (I am pretty ignorant in 3d graphics apart from some basic ideas and generalization to problems I know about ;-)).

MC

8

Beta Testing / Memory leak?

« on: February 09, 2004, 10:25:49 PM »

I've noticed that when I would screw around with the 3D for a while, I'd start paging memory a lot. So, I did a little test...

I load Topofusion with about 60 MBs of DEMs, and display a pretty large chunk at 16M topo resolution (say 1.5x2 quads).

When started, Topofusion takes 190 MB (as per Windows task manager).
Then I switch to 3D - 216 MB, switch back to topo - 207 MB.
So, we gain 26 MB going to 3D and clean only 9 MB going back to 2D.

I keep switching to 3D and back to 2D,
232 MB - 223 MB
238 MB - 229 MB
244 MB - 236 MB
So, we grow by about 15 MB for each 3D on, again clean just 9 MB, leaving 6 MB behind.

then I move the map to see a different set of quads at each 3d switch
3d on - 3d off
254 MB - 245 MB
265 MB - 256 MB

We gain 18 MB, clean 9 MB leaving 9 MB behind.

When I did the same thing with a pretty zoomed up map (4M topo about 4x5 miles), the memory pattern was pretty much the same, so I have feeling it's somewhere in the 3d.

Anybody else notices this?

Just thought of making you aware of this, guess not a big deal for the beta now as things are being still polished. Memory bugs can be pretty hard to track.

Thanks,

MC

9

Beta Testing / "Shadow" GPS trail in 3d

« on: February 09, 2004, 10:01:48 PM »

Alan,

sorry for making this sound more confusing that it is.

I have no problem with having the track display selection apply to all tracks.

All I want is to be able to see either the floating or flat track. Having the two together to see the difference is interesting, but, can be distracting in a view in which you really care just about seeing which way you went up the hill ;-)

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10

Beta Testing / "Shadow" GPS trail in 3d

« on: February 08, 2004, 05:28:49 PM »

Quote (Alan @ Feb. 08 2004,8:59)

Quote The little problem I see is that the GPS track sometimes shows shadowing, probably it's plotted twice, once on the flat map and second time on the 3d? An example is at: http://www.chpc.utah.edu/~mcuma/images/topo/shore.jpg Yes, it's not clear to me how these options should be available to the user.  There are 4 options for viewing your track in 3d (painted on the texture, floating as given by the elevation in the track, neither, or both)  You can control this currently by turning on/off the tracks in 2d view, switching to 3d, then turning on/off the tracks in 3d.  We're open to suggestions for a good way to present these options to the user.  We don't really want to add a bunch of toolbar modes.

I feel that default should be floating, and let user select if he wants flat, or both. But then, playing with turning the track on and off, both flat and floating are pretty close. I suppose the main thing that bothered me was the dual display, which sometimes showed two tracks instead of one.

Selecting this through right clicking on the track is a good idea. I would not think of enabling/disabling track display with the track selection also in 3D.

11

Beta Testing / Other SDTS Sources

« on: February 08, 2004, 01:07:37 AM »

This site, http://130.166.124.2/dems.html, has most of California in DEMs, with clickable map, nice and quick to load. The other states are in SDTS just with quad names, which is more demanding. I worked on some parts of Utah by getting quad names from http://nrwrt1.nr.state.ut.us/cgi-bin/quadview.exe and then downloading one by one from the above SDTS site.

I'd like to suggest some kind of sharing scheme between the people here, since getting the DEMs is painful (although a bit less with Alan's program).

I have most of Wasatch Front and SW Utah (St. George, Gooseberry) now, which I can compress and put on my website, if there's interest. I'll probably end up doing most of Utah, at least the places where I've been. Don't want to advertise this too much, as it's an university site, but, a few dozens downloads would be OK.

Pls, let me know if others feel like joining in.

MC

12

Beta Testing / "Shadow" GPS trail in 3d

« on: February 08, 2004, 12:58:21 AM »

Hello guys,

first of all, the 3D is amazing, especially the aerials. Spent good time of the afternoon and evening screwing around with it (in between of shoveling snow).

I saw most of the problems that I noticed in bug reports already, so, just wanna mention, that most pressing is some kind of caching of the DEMs. I have about 250 MB of them now, and, things are starting to get a bit sluggish, plus, Windows starts to complain about low virtual memory, which I've not seen before (I have 512 MB RAM).
The way I am solving this now is to have multiple directories with DEMs from Utah, California,...

The little problem I see is that the GPS track sometimes shows shadowing, probably it's plotted twice, once on the flat map and second time on the 3d? An example is at:
http://www.chpc.utah.edu/~mcuma/images/topo/shore.jpg

One more little thing, the screen capture does not work in 3D, but, that's not really a big deal.

Take care,
MC