OHM Level 11 BMNG Earth Textures: January, Standard Quality

[OrbitHangar]

Author: felix24

NASA Blue Marble Next Generation textures for Earth.  Textures are Level 11 worldwide.  Features seasonal variations in vegetation color, snow cover, polar caps, sea ice, and fresh water lake ice.

Two texture qualities are available:
Standard quality, about 800MB per month unzipped, 9.5GB for 12 months
High quality, about 2.1GB per month unzipped, 26.5GB for 12 months

Standard quality is recommended for normal use, but some shorlines and islands may be blurry.  High quality is recommended if disk space is not an issue, and allows all shorelines, islands, and remote atolls to be visible in sharp detail.

Installation:
1) Unzip into the Orbiter root folder.  A folder named "BMNG Earth" will be created, containing a sub-folder with the month's textures.
2) Copy the files that begin with "earth" into the Textures2 folder.
3) Open the file Config\Earth.cfg.  Find the line "AtmFogParam = 5e-5 3e-5 4e3" and change it to "AtmFogParam = 5e-5 3e-5 1e4 ;4e3"

DOWNLOAD

 

[Ripley]

Downloading...

 

[Felix24]

Seeing as I have nearly 7GB of data to upload and only <1 megabit upload speed, this will take a while on my end too...

Here's me:

Here's my computer::download:

 

[meson800]

The BMNG site says that

Blue Marble uses a uniform blue color for deep ocean regions, and this value has not been completely blended with observations of shallow water in coastal areas. The lack of blending may, in some cases, make the transition between shallow coastal water and deep ocean appear unnatural.

Are these textures blended along the shoreline, or are they direct conversions from BMNG to Orbiter textures?

 

[Izack]

There appears to be some blending, but overall I think the oceans look far too dark:

 

[Felix24]

Are these textures blended along the shoreline, or are they direct conversions from BMNG to Orbiter textures?

I changed the color of the ocean to try to make it the shallow water blend better overall. So I guess it's not a direct conversion.

There appears to be some blending, but overall I think the oceans look far too dark

It looks like you haven't edited Earth.cfg yet. I have included instructions on how to do this: (from the Readme)

"3) Open the file Config\Earth.cfg. Find the line "AtmFogParam = 5e-5 3e-5 4e3" and change it to "AtmFogParam = 5e-5 3e-5 1e4 ;4e3" This is necessary because atmospheric haze has not been added to the textures. Adding atmospheric haze to the textures was done for old versions of Orbiter which did not have atmospheric haze to speak of.
Adding the "1e4 ;4e3" to the line makes it easy to see that the line has been edited, and to revert to the original value if necessary."

There is a bug in Orbiter where the atmospheric haze disappears at any altitude whenever the viewpoint crosses the terminator into the night side of the earth. Other than that, I think it works well. I wanted the ground textures to not look so washed-out when close to the ground.

If enough people disagree, I could bake the atmospheric haze into the textures instead, like the older earth textures. But I think at this point Orbiter can handle drawing the haze itself.

---------- Post added at 11:05 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:51 PM ----------

In the following screenshot, the left half of the earth is without the edited Earth.cfg, and the right half is with the edit.

 

[Izack]

D'oh, that was my fault, then, for not fully reading the instructions.

This is much better indeed. The same scene, with the correction:

Flying over my own home in Eastern Canada:

It's cool to see winter from orbit! An excellent addition, Felix. Many thanks.

(Mind you, this is the High Resolution version, not the Standard.)

 

[Yurik]

What archiver you use? I can not unpack

problem was solved

 

[orb]

What archiver you use? I can not unpack

Most of the files in the archive were compressed with LZMA compression algorithm. It was probably compressed with 7-zip, but other decompressors supporting LZMA should be good to extract it, too.

 

[Felix24]

What archiver you use? I can not unpack

I used 7-Zip (www.7-zip.org), using LZMA compression for most files, running on Windows 7 64-bit. I am am not able to unpack the archive using Windows without 7-Zip installed, so I assumed it would work for other people too. I would recommend using 7-Zip or similar program supporting LZMA to unpack it. Thanks, Orb!

Maybe the file got corrupted. In that case you need to re-download it.

If you want to make sure your files haven't been corrupted, here are the MD5 checksums of the archives so far. There are several programs that will let you check the MD5 of the file you downloaded, MD5Summer (http://www.md5summer.org/) and WinMD5Free (http://www.winmd5.com/) are two of them.

cfc5e4692d7ed8d686297bd53154b6ba *BMNG January Standard.zip
112bc96a85ab4fbab90b7abff07e6e99 *BMNG January High.zip
d15a1c5a5e2e6845d7f1cc1e46d09970 *BMNG February Standard.zip
c81358eae27d287c4bce95979b98f168 *BMNG February High.zip
8cc8fed8fd0c3de0f6129aa8472f659f *BMNG March Standard.zip
9ebb4af1894e505ea33698c66570c207 *BMNG March High.zip

 

[meson800]

This looks awesome, and is surely going to be one of my standard addons! (if the high resolution files ever finish downloading at my slow rate )

Thanks!

 

[Ripley]

Felix, do your [ame="http://orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=5856"]Earth High-Resolution Clouds[/ame] textures get along well with these new BIG textures?

 

[Felix24]

Felix, do your Earth High-Resolution Clouds textures get along well with these new BIG textures?

Yes, they do! I'd even say it's part of the same project.

 

[ZXS2000]

Quick question, will these textures work on stock standard Orbiter setup, I still haven't switched over to any of the graphic clients as yet.

Cheers

 

[Felix24]

Yes, they should work fine with the stock Orbiter release.

 

[Kendo]

It would be good if somehow, Orbiter could select the months via a scenario or by other means.

 

[garyw]

It would be good if somehow, Orbiter could select the months via a scenario or by other means.

Agreed. I wonder if it's possible to have a DLL dynamically update which textures it should use based on the in-sim date... :hmm:

 

[orb]

I wonder if it's possible to have a DLL dynamically update which textures it should use based on the in-sim date... :hmm:

Sure, a graphics client's DLL can do that.

 

[Cras]

This is a very impressive project. How does it look with the Hi-res KSC tiles Martin released a little while back?

 

[Ripley]

Sure, a graphics client's DLL can do that.

I was thinking about writing a little cmd to be run at pc startup to check the system date and copying the relative files...
But if there is a more elegant way I'll adopt it.