Surface tile

Surface Tiles are a way to use high resolution ground textures for a small local region, usually around a base.

The earth is split into 2048 tiles in latitude and 4096 tiles in longitude.

The surface tiles in orbiter consist of two parts: The actual tile textures for the planet and the surface tile definition in the configuration file of a base.

The syntax for a surface tile list is

BEGIN_SURFTILELIST
<texturelevel> <tilenumberfrommeridian_positive_for_east> <tilenumberfromequator_positive_north> 1
END_SURFTILELIST

The filenames for the textures follow a similar scheme:

<planet name>_<texture level>_<E/W><tile number in latitude>_<N/S><tile number in longitude>.dds

The function for getting the tilenumber in latitude is:

$TN_{l}at={\frac {1024*latitude}{90}}>$

The function for getting the tilenumber in longitude is:

$TN_{l}ong={\frac {2048*longitude}{180}}$

Each surface tile is roughly 5 x 5 km large.