USGS Urban Area Ortho Issue

Greetings,

My apologies if this issue has been brought up previously and I missed the post - I searched as well as I could and was unable to find anything referring to the specific issue I am experiencing in World Wind 1.3. Basically, although everything else seems to be working perfectly, whenever I attempt to view parts of the U.S. using the Urban Area Ortho layer, as soon as I zoom in below around 325 km (which I assume is where it tries to start loading the Urban maps), all of the newly loaded blocks come up as these blank white tiles which completely cover the entire area and show no detail whatsoever all the way down to the lowest level of zoom. I copied the information of one of these blocks out of the download window and it was as follows:

Start time: 3/3/2005 9:15:47 PM
Url: http://nww.terraserver-usa.com/nwwtile.ash...L=2&X=527&Y=649
Target file: C:\Program Files\NASA\World Wind 1.3\Cache\Earth\High Resolution Imagery\USGS Urban Area Ortho\2\0649\0649_0527.jpg.tmp
Progress: 7700/7700 bytes
Status: OK
Proxy: http://nww.terraserver-usa.com/nwwtile.ash...L=2&X=527&Y=649

Response headers:
========================================
Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2005 02:15:47 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 7700


Obviously, browsing manually to this location shows you exactly what is popping up all over the different urban areas in my World Wind client when I try to view them. Zooming further and further in prompts more tiles to be downloaded, but all of these are white as well. I've restarted the client a number of times, as well as tried at different times, but the only thing that seems to restore the area to a normal appearance is zooming up over 325 kilometers or switching off the Urban Area Ortho layer. I have no clue whether this is an issue on my end, where it is somehow requesting some kind of out of bounds data, or if there is something wrong with the data on the Terraserver end.

I'd most definitely appreciate any help on this matter. Thanks.

- Tarcel

[Beansprout]

Interesting. Were you browsing areas which are covered by the .25m Urban area imagery? There's an add-on to show it, I'md pretty sure it's been converted to work with 1.3 - check in the add-ons section.

I have seen some of the tiles you mention, and they just appear to be in areas where there's no coverage.


Edit: Can I also say....in the last 48hrs us mods have had an amazing amount of work to do on the forums. Thankyou for being in the top percentile who restore my faith in humanity through your manners!

Originally posted by TheBeansprout@Mar 3 2005, 06:33 PM
Interesting. Were you browsing areas which are covered by the .25m Urban area imagery? There's an add-on to show it, I'md pretty sure it's been converted to work with 1.3 - check in the add-ons section.

I have seen some of the tiles you mention, and they just appear to be in areas where there's no coverage.
Edit: Can I also say....in the last 48hrs us mods have had an amazing amount of work to do on the forums. Thankyou for being in the top percentile who restore my faith in humanity through your manners!

Quoted post

Thank you very much for the quick reply.. I checked out that add-on that you mentioned and you were right - it appears I just wasn't looking in the right places. I guess what really threw me off is that instead of just leaving the map images that were previously there, the USGS Urban Area Ortho layer replaces everything that doesn't have a high resolution urban area with those blank tiles. So what you basically wind up with is a map completely covered in white, with no reference points (though the yellow name-markers stay, though they are almost impossible to see through the white), and the urban areas that are available as these little islands of high resolution land

Perhaps there would be a better way to integrate the different layers more seamlessly? For example, it'd be nice if as you zoomed in closer and closer to the Earth, it would continuously update with textures following some kind of precedence scale of detail or something. So you could start zoomed all the way out, then as you get closer, each image that is retrieved would be the highest resolution one available, all the way down as far as possible. That way, if a place just didn't HAVE a high resolution map such as the Urban Area one, it would simply jump back a few levels to the NEXT highest resolution, and so on. I can understand the benefit of having the layers as being separate and/or combineable, but sometimes I find myself just jumping from one layer to another, searching for whatever has the highest resolution view of whatever area I happen to be looking at.

In any case, just my own ideas on the issue.. I've been incredibly impressed with World Wind thus far and I am most definitely looking forward to future releases, higher resolution imagery, and so on. It'll be great to follow things as they get better and better. Thanks again!

- Tarcel

[Beansprout]

Ok, it appears that the .25m USGS now loads greenish tiles instead of white ones when there's no data.

It used to load white tiles, and that's what Patrick thinks it does...so who knows what's going on!

Nonetheless the fact remains that there's no data. I know there's data for Los Angeles, try zooming in over there to see if World Wind is receiving data.

You can press Ctrl+H to bring up a download log showing World Wind's activity.

[Tarcel]

Originally posted by TheBeansprout@Mar 3 2005, 09:51 PM
Ok, it appears that the .25m USGS now loads greenish tiles instead of white ones when there's no data.

It used to load white tiles, and that's what Patrick thinks it does...so who knows what's going on!

Nonetheless the fact remains that there's no data. I know there's data for Los Angeles, try zooming in over there to see if World Wind is receiving data.

You can press Ctrl+H to bring up a download log showing World Wind's activity.

Quoted post

Yep, it's working fine now.. Found a bunch of high resolution areas in Florida that I'm currently perusing. It doesn't look like that add-on has been upgraded for 1.3 though, as the directory structure within the zip isn't consistent with the one in the World Wind directory - even if it still works within World Wind, I wouldn't be sure where to place the files.

[Beansprout]

Originally posted by Guest@Mar 4 2005, 02:51 AM
Thank you very much for the quick reply.. I checked out that add-on that you mentioned and you were right - it appears I just wasn't looking in the right places. I guess what really threw me off is that instead of just leaving the map images that were previously there, the USGS Urban Area Ortho layer replaces everything that doesn't have a high resolution urban area with those blank tiles. So what you basically wind up with is a map completely covered in white, with no reference points (though the yellow name-markers stay, though they are almost impossible to see through the white), and the urban areas that are available as these little islands of high resolution land

Perhaps there would be a better way to integrate the different layers more seamlessly? For example, it'd be nice if as you zoomed in closer and closer to the Earth, it would continuously update with textures following some kind of precedence scale of detail or something. So you could start zoomed all the way out, then as you get closer, each image that is retrieved would be the highest resolution one available, all the way down as far as possible. That way, if a place just didn't HAVE a high resolution map such as the Urban Area one, it would simply jump back a few levels to the NEXT highest resolution, and so on. I can understand the benefit of having the layers as being separate and/or combineable, but sometimes I find myself just jumping from one layer to another, searching for whatever has the highest resolution view of whatever area I happen to be looking at.

In any case, just my own ideas on the issue.. I've been incredibly impressed with World Wind thus far and I am most definitely looking forward to future releases, higher resolution imagery, and so on. It'll be great to follow things as they get better and better. Thanks again!

- Tarcel

Quoted post

We've been nagging the devs for transparency (ie, just showing the layer below like you describe, instead of white) for ages...and each time they come closer to shooting us

They're working overtime, and rest assured it shall be fixed

[5of0]

Originally posted by TheBeansprout@Mar 3 2005, 06:33 PM
Interesting. Were you browsing areas which are covered by the .25m Urban area imagery? There's an add-on to show it, I'md pretty sure it's been converted to work with 1.3 - check in the add-ons section.

I have seen some of the tiles you mention, and they just appear to be in areas where there's no coverage.
Edit: Can I also say....in the last 48hrs us mods have had an amazing amount of work to do on the forums. Thankyou for being in the top percentile who restore my faith in humanity through your manners!

Quoted post

I've been checking in throughout the day, and am amazed at the volume of posts you guys dealt with today with the release (and testing) of 1.3! I'd just like to be one to say thanks for your hard work!

As for the white tiles, I thought someone had done something (sorry for the lack of specifics) about downloading USGS tiles only if some tiles with data were in your view screen (i.e., it would only download white tiles if you were getting some real tiles with it.) Has this changed in 1.3, or am I delusional? No hurry - I know yall are busy!

[TomServo]

Originally posted by 5of0@Mar 4 2005, 12:11 AM
I've been checking in throughout the day, and am amazed at the volume of posts you guys dealt with today with the release (and testing) of 1.3! I'd just like to be one to say thanks for your hard work!

Quoted post

Thanks.. I'll be putting a PayPall button up so people can donate to the medical care I will need from all this typing