Day 13 – Eureka! A SeeYou map for Caesar Creek

For the last couple of days I have been making some real progress on my Caesar Creek Scenery.  In ‘Day 12’, I got through one more piece of the Condor Scenery Toolkit (CST) , and while looking through the steps for Task 6 Part B “Getting trees into the right place”, I was momentarily stumped by the first two steps, i.e.

Step 1:
Create a second copy of the \Condor\Landscapes\Your Scenery\.bmp by copying this bitmap image to Condor\Landscapes\yourlandscape\Working\ForestMaps\ then rename the bitmap image to Map.bmp

Step 2:
Open Photoshop and resize the image (in pixels) the map bmp to the same size of both ConiferousMap and DeciduousMap bitmap images as created in Part A.
Rename the layer containing the map.bmp image to “Map” save the file as map.psd outside the Condor folder structure, the desktop is best location

When I looked in my scenery folder, I saw I did indeed have a CaesarCreek.bmp file, and it appeared to be the one I see in the Task Planner when I first fire up Condor, and on the PDA moving map screen when I’m flying.  This image is the extremely basic one that was produced as part of the initial scenery creation, and I have been trying for months now to figure out how to replace it with a representative screenshot from SeeYou or Google Earth.  Now that I have (gag, wheeze, puke) PhotoShop, maybe I could simply replace it with an appropriately sized SeeYou image and I’d be home free?

Well, it wasn’t quite that simple, but it wasn’t too bad either, and now I have a ‘real’ map for the Task Planner page, and that same map shows up on the moving map screen on the PDA – cool!  Here is what I had to do to get it all working.

Step 1: Copy the current CaesarCreek.bmp to a safe place by right-dragging it into the same folder, and accepting WinXP’s default ‘Copy of CaesarCreek.bmp

Step 2: Copy my previously made screenshot of my SeeYou screen, arranged to cover the same geographic coordinates as my scenery into my landscape folder, and rename it to CaesarCreek.bmp.  This crashed Condor immediately when I tried to select the Caesar Creek scenery.

Step3: Copy the original CaesarCreek.bmp back, and confirm that Condor will now open the Caesar Creek scenery correctly.

Step 4: Open my SeeYou image In PhotoShop, and resize it to have the same pixel dimensions (2816 x 2560) as CaesarCreek.bmp.  Save it, and then repeat steps 1-2.  This time the Task Planner dialog came up correctly when I opened the Caesar Creek scenery, but Condor crashed with a memory exception error when I tried to start the flight.  Repeat Step 3 to confirm everything still works.

Step 5: Try to figure out what the difference is between the SeeYou image and the original CaesarCreek.bmp image…….  think, think, think.  Oh, then I noticed the file sizes were quite different – hmm.  Opened them both in PhotoShop and then noticed that the CaesarCreek.bmp file was an RGB-code file with 8 bits/pixel and a file size of approximately 20 MByte, whereas the SeeYou file was an ‘Indexed Color’ image with a size of about 7 MByte.

Step 6: In PhotoShop, change the ‘Mode’ of the SeeYou image from ‘Indexed Color’ to RGB Color, 8 bits/pixel, and save as CaesarCreek.bmp (making sure I still had the original CaesarCreek.bmp file hidden away safely).  Now the SeeYou map appears in the Task Planner dialog, *and* on the PDA moving map in flight – YAY!!

130127_SeeYouInPhotoShop

SeeYou image in PhotoShop, showing change from ‘Indexed Color…’ to RGB Color modes

130127_SeeYouInTaskPlanner

SeeYou image on Condor Task Planner Tab. This part worked even with the ‘Indexed Color..’ mode – go figure

SeeYou map on Condor PDA in flight.

SeeYou map on Condor PDA in flight.

 

I know this is a really small step in scenery design, but this part has been bugging me ever since I started.  Having a ‘real’ map on the Task Planner and PDA means a *lot*.  Not only that, but as a bonus I automatically got multiple map choices on the Task Planner page, as shown in the following figures.  Turns out *any* BMP file in the  top-level scenery folder will be presented as a possible map choice – who knew?.  Of course, in this particular selection only the ‘Copy of CaesarCreek.bmp’ and ‘CaesarCreek.bmp’ (the SeeYou version) will work – all the others will crash Condor – but this is easily fixed.  The last figure shows just two maps, labelled CaesarCreek.bmp (the SeeYou version) and ‘CaesarCreekTerrain.bmp’ (the original CaesarCreek.bmp).

130127_TaskPlannerMapChoices1

Map choices, but only ‘Copy of CaesarCreek’ and ‘CaesarCreek’ choices are actually viable

Map choices after removing non-viable images and renaming 'Copy of CaesarCreek' to 'CaesarCreekTerrain'

Map choices after removing non-viable images and renaming ‘Copy of CaesarCreek’ to ‘CaesarCreekTerrain’

Next up – the continuation of Task 6 Part B – Getting trees into the right place.

Frank (TA)

 

 

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