If you are like me you have fantasized while using some of the popular online mapping services and have wondered why our flight simulator scenery could not look that good. Look again at the picture at the beginning of this article. No, it is not a photo of a real Beaver flying over "Going to the Sun Road" in Glacier National Park. That is FSX using Tileproxy to browse those satellite images we are all so familiar with the aircraft in FS9 or FSX. In effect that is exactly what Christian Buchner has done with Tileproxy. He has converted our planes to satellite image browsers and folks the effect is jaw droppingly amazing. Finally, you can fly over your town and pick out your house just as if you were flying the local flying club Cessna. It works and it works amazingly well.
Christian Buchner said, "The idea for Tileproxy came after I had purchased FSX and wasn't quite happy with the default terrain. My computer couldn't handle the high detail settings (despite it being a dual processor machine). So at first there was just this idea: Is it possible to get satellite terrain into the simulator? "
Christian is an electrical engineer who has had an interest in computers since the Commodore 64 days. After that he graduated to an Amiga but a lightning strike roasted it. That is when he switched to a PC. He has enjoyed Microsoft Flight Simulator in all of its versions. While also working on his masters thesis he came up with one pet project (in 6 weeks of time) that would record streaming videos off the Internet He got a job that involved applications that streamed media over the Internet. While working in that field Chris lived and worked in the United States and still has a fondness for San Diego.
He is now back in Germany working at a small mobile communications company that writes simulation software which emulates the internals of radio communications networks in real time. Chris says it is very challenging and he gets to work with some very nice people. Chris tells me that they speak English in the office most of the time and I had trouble with German after three years of studying it. He now lives in Karlsruhe, Germany near the French border.
Here is a screen shot taken while flying my Glasflugel Libelle over Mt. Whitney in California. The experience with Tileproxy is breath taking. You can see that Chris was successful in achieving his dream to load satellite imagery into the flight simulator. I had to fly a Libelle there since I actually owned an H-201 Libelle and Lone Pine, California is one of my favorite places. It was a delightful plane to fly and now that I have sold it and no longer fly using FSX with Tileproxy is almost as good.
So, how does Tileproxy work? After you set it up which simple involves running an installer, you setup a configuration file to tweak some of the settings. Ed Truthan has made it easy by publishing a Tileproxy User Guide site where you can download a configuration file that is already setup. This is the part that gives most users trouble so many thanks to Ed for his nicely done website and for making the files available.
Once you have the configuration file setup, all explained on Ed's site, you start Tileproxy and it connects to the chosen map service. You can choose any of the popular services by selecting them in the configuration file. Tileproxy makes the connection and then waits for you to start FS9 or FSX with a "Ready for takeoff." Start the sim and wait for the imagery to load. You will have to wait longer than usual while thousands of scenery tiles are loaded and converted into scenery but once that has finished be prepared for an amazing experience. Now we at Freeflow really think our scenery is a huge improvement over the default and it is but the experience with Tileproxy makes you think that this is what flight simulation should be like.
But before you try it yourself watch the demo video on YouTube
or this one flying over Santiago, Spain:
or view some of the screenshots over at the Avsim forum here . You'll see a lot of activity there and those of us that have used Tileproxy share an excitement that is refreshing in the flight simulator world. You can download Tileproxy at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tileproxy/
Here is Ed Truthan's tutorial for TileProxy. http://edtruthan.com/tileproxy/tutorial/
Don't think you need a super machine to run it because mine is only a single core AMD 2700 machine with one gig of RAM. You will need a fast broadband connection to handle the imagery downloads.
That's all for now.
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