Terrain! Terrain! Terrain!

[lordofwings]

Couldn't help it :-) I have been an avid user of Plan-G since I discovered it in its early phases. I recently upgraded to v3.0 and in particular liked the addition of several airfields in my region (country) as well as the aircraft profile feature.

However, I must say I liked the Google Maps better (but I think it was more prone to crashing Plan-G). My main issue at the moment is that there seems to be poor coverage of Open Street Maps in my country (Panama). As a result when I zoom in all I get is white for land and blue for water. All the important information about surrounding terrain (mountains which we have many) is lost. At least in this situation the Google maps was better suited for VFR planning that Open Street Maps when it concerns this region. I do use Plan-G also a lot for IFR planning, in fact I dumped the Aerosoft Flight Planner (an old looking, Java-based monster) in favour of this.

Any chance the program would support both Open Street Maps and Google Maps? just leave the choice to the user? For example SBuilderX lets you choose between 4 different map providers if I remember correctly.

Anyway, thumbs up for the excellent work! I am a software developer and have usually been appalled at the gross disregard for common practices in some freeware & payware from so called "programmers" but this my friend is the kind of craftmanship I like to see.

[tim arnot]

If you set the provider to Mapquest, there is terrain, but outside the US it stops at zoom level 9 (which is still okay for many flights). I presume they have a timetable for filling in the higher zoom levels, but I don't know what it is.

I have heard that some programmers leave "back doors" in their code, so that (say) more providers can be set via the cfg file than are available from the UI. Personally I wouldn't know... ;)

[lordofwings]

JUst noticed the other options for map providers, sadly Google isn't there which had better coverage for my area of interest :(

Also noticed that even though I have the DEM files in the DEM directory, when I loaded a plan that goes over high mountains it shows no profile at all. Any change there?

[tim arnot]

Did you unzip the dem files?

[lordofwings]

Yes, they worked fine in all the Plan-G versions I used (0.9 onwards as far as I can remember), including 2.05 which was my previous version. They are in unzipped format in the data folder just as I used them (successfully) in previous versions.

Now in 3.0 the elevation profile shows no profile.

[lordofwings]

Still no luck with the DEM files in 3.0, they work fine in 2.0

[tim arnot]

Did you put them in the right place? (Plan-G Files\DEM)

[lordofwings]

Yes, same place as always, I have been using Plan-G for a long time.

[tim arnot]

It's not the same place as v2...

[lordofwings]

Silly me! no wonder, they have been moved now to the %My Documents%/Plan-G Files/DEM folder! However, considering the size and use of these files I would deem them more suitable for the application installation directory (available for all) rather than a user directory.

Anyway now I can see the profile, cool! thanks!