large texture sizes and Surveyor instability

[martinvk]

I've been giving my long term project another go over the holidays. The problem now is that Surveyor in TRS2004 seems to be either crashing to the desktop or freezing rather often. Never had this happen before

In order to locate and place objects, I've been using images captured in Google Earth to create guides. The guides are planes from 1 to 4 km covered with a texture. In order to see the details, the textures need to have enough pixels which result in rather large files sizes: 49 MB is not uncommon. (4096x4096) Could this be causing the problems? Would several smaller guides covering the same area cause fewer problems.

Intel Core2 Duo @ 2.66GHz
2048MB ram
Nvidia GeForce 8800GT with 512MB displaying 1280x1024

 

[geophil]

TransDEM creates 2048 x 2048 px textures for this purpose (after enabling this feature). Often, several dozen of those "UTM tiles" (1000 x 1000 m each) will be in use concurrently. Users have not reported problems until now.

 

[martinvk]

That leads me to believe it's a size issue. Had once tried a 8192x4096 texture but that seemed to cause an instant crash. Since you say that multiple 2048x2048 textures work, it would appear that it's not the total size that counts but the size of each one. Sounds like I'll have to make more but smaller guides.

 

[RPearson]

TRS2006 CCG lists 1024 pixels as largest dimension for texture files. Larger than that is probably asking for problems.

Bob Pearson

 

[martinvk]

By reducing the size of the guides, I was able to use 2048x2048 textures and still have a good level of detail to guide me in placing objects.

Pretty amazing that we can blithefully toss around 12MB textures with the expectation that everything will work.

OOPS, just got an access violation in the Render3DCore.dll. Oh well, back to the designing board. I think I may have left one of the larger guides in there.

 

[tommylommykins]

I don't know how you're extracting images from Google Earth, but using screengrabs, I've always created one scenery object per screenshot and done the alignment in TRS. Taking that approach may well eliminate your need so enormous textures.