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Moving Autogen Trees with the wind!

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Guest lawyerpilot

We have windsocks that are aligned in a certain direction based on the wind direction fed into the weather engine by FSmeteo, ActiveSky, default etc. It seems as if it would be simple to write a small code so that other objects, which are all the same, such as trees, would reflect this weather too. I.e. instead of having "x" amount of tree textures, you have x times four, one for each wind direction roughly, North, South, East, and West. That way as you are flying along the terrain, you will see the trees bent a certain way slightly and can judge wind direction like in real life. Furethermore, it would add more texture, b/c like in real life, you would see the underside of the leaves on the side that the wind is coming from. It seems as if you write one simple code, it would cover all trees and really add a lot of texture to the landscape!!!!!Can anyone do this? If we can write a weather program we should be able to do this.Christopher P4 1.8768 ram 80 gig hardriveVisiontek Ti4 4600CH yoke/pedalsElite Multi quadrant19" inch monitor-Soundblaster PCI 512Win XPInstrument rated ASEL -224 hoursAOPALawyerPilots Bar Association"Men without dreams are never free, twas thus this way and thus will ever be."

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Guest

The fps overheads for one windsock might be OK, but for hundreds of trees? Sounds like a frame rate killer. ChasW

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Guest lawyerpilot

Two things: One, something like this might have to be GMAX which would be less of a framerate killer than a Bitmap and Two, my idea does not propose to make more trees, just make them so that they show a wind direction based on the weather engine. There should be no frame rate hit at all....and perhaps an increase if they have to be GMAX....Christopher

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The increase of the display from static to dynamic will have a frame rate hit - you cannot animate without using CPU cycles to create the animation. OK if you have a super fast computer, but the autogen is really there to give a sense of height/depth perception, not wind cues. Are you sure that pilots deduce wind direction based upon the swaying of the trees? Seems to me to be a very unreliable method, difficult to see unless you are at such a low altitude that you'd need to know the wind speed and direction before then anyhow, as you'd be on final aproach. And trees swing both ways, first with the breeze, then back upright again, and the rustling of leaves is not something any pilot is going to be concentrating on when he's at 1.3 Vs on short final coming down the g/s. Windsocks and `T`'s seem to be a better, simpler method, which is probably why they are used IRL.Finally, FS conveniently provides wind speed and direction whenever required, so why would designers reinvent the wheel. I can see the point if you want to dismount your aircraft after a good flight and look around at the scenery, but for actual use in the cockpit I wouldn't have thought this was desirable, unless and until we all have Cray equivalent computers on our desktops and such things have a negligible impact on the rest of the sim. If you want to put a microlight in someones back garden it might have a use, but you can just imagine the bleating of the jet brigade at having their precious frames sucked by trees when they could have double-jointed gear bogies, working jetways and dynamic shine on the inside of the cabin wing view, or whatever.ChasW

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Guest lawyerpilot

First of all, pilots will not be looking at the trees at "1.3x the Vs on a glideslope" because he liekly be in IFR conditions..if not he will fly it visually, and will not be looking at the trees anyway....my suggestion is just eye candy...I mean I think it's goofy that we spend so much time on the outer details of planes, are you sitting on the wing as you fly? No, your inside...so, it's just a suggestion for a little more immersion into the environment when flying VFR in the cockpit.... Second, as a real world pilot, three weeks from getting my commercial, I do not look at the trees to get my wind indication at the airport, I use a windsock.. Even further, I get a Duats Asos, or ATIS report before leaving the house or ramp, and when arriving to the airport enroute.. This gives me the wind direction that I rely on... However, in the real world, a familiar way of judging wind when flying a sightseeing or photographic mission, is to look at smokestacks, water, trees, etc. to get an idea of how to adjust when flying a circle around a point on the ground for example. i.e. turns around a point, eights on pylons, etc. Finally, I think you have my concept confused, although I tried to clear it up with the last post. No hard feelings. I am not proposing actual movement in the trees....while cool, this would be a nightmare for fps...I am however proposing the following. Trees are static objects. Currently, there are four textures, one for spring, summer, fall , winter.. I am proposing that we instead have 16 textures in the library....spring-East, West, North, South, Summer.....etc. That way a simple code tying the Auto-gen to the weather reporting, would cue the system to place a tree, when the wind is from the North, that looks like it is reacting to a wind from the North to be placed, instead of placing a simple summer tree, a winter tree, etc. You still get a static object, but it looks differently in its shape, or color on one side to reflect the underside of the leaves when blown from that direction... There is no framerate hit......The trees are loaded up at the beginning of the simulation based on the downloaded weather and wind direction.. Problem is, that if you are using dynamic weather, they will change over time, as wind direction can change over 90 degrees in vector during a front in a matter of minutes, or generally over a matter of hours from morning to afternoon, say on the coast. And, I don't know how the sim would do this, without going to the "loading screen" and pausing the sim. But, perhaps as we see the textures loading from blurry to more crisp as a general matter, the trees could load based on the most current wind...We don't see autogen out past 20 miles approx anyway....this would keep us in the sim....Anyone think this would be cool? Lago/Wilco have the sound and moving objects, this would just take thigns to a new level I think...make hillsides and mountains come alive instead of looking like a static blanket of green or brown sticks!!!!ChristopherP4 1.8768 ram 80 gig hardriveVisiontek Ti4 4600CH yoke/pedalsElite Multi quadrant19" inch monitor-Soundblaster PCI 512Win XPInstrument rated ASEL -224 hoursAOPALawyerPilots Bar Association"Men without dreams are never free, twas thus this way and thus will ever be."

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Guest Macs

It sounds possible,but not worthwhile. There just isnt any real demand,even if I'm flying a Visual approach at 80-90 knots, how the hell am I even gonna see the tree's move? If you arent gettting my point, these animated tree's are eating my frames and I cant even notice the animations happening...I'm a rookie programmer(C++) and the idea/concept,as I said, probably is possible. It would probably involve the use of Gmax and a very small portion of code,but hey,IMO whats the point?RegardsJohn Mc Avinuehttp://www.bavirtual.co.ukP 2.53 GHZ512 RAMWINXPGFORCE 4 128MB Ti4600http://vatsim.pilotmedia.fi/statusindicato...tor=OD1&a=a.jpg

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The technical challenge is to take the 2d object - the tree - and make if turn to face the wind, then bend. But to do so takes it out of the conventional line of sight of the object - toward the simmer, so in most cases the bending tree would be seen only as a wonky line, edge on, or else the bend could not be seen. Only in those rare cases where the wind is front three quarter toward the pilots FOV would any bendy tree even be seen, in exactly the same way as the 2d windsock disappears when its angled directly toward the simmer.A tough technical challenge, as the developer would need to redesign the way that autogen scenery rotates toward the observer, then animate or adjust it according to the wind direction on the ground, and achieve all this without a frame rate penalty. A tough one for sure.Ed Truthan went some way toward this with his FS2002 Conifers. He successfully increased the number and density of trees by removing the standard cruciform pattern, replacing each `tree` with simpler single plane `flat` trees located at 90 degree angles to each other, but with twice as many in each square. The result was more depth and quantity of trees per autogen setting, but no frame rate hit. Now, I wonder whether a similar manipulation of the autogen tile could be used with a minor offset or slight alteration in colour of the `leaves` so that the trees appear to shimmy and move, without actually doing so.Of course, to achieve the same effect, you could always turn mipmapping off. Then everything shimmies!ChasW

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Guest lawyerpilot

that like some people's fascination with the accuracy of the color of the pitot tube on a 747, my proposal has limited value aside from eye candy....In the RW, I can see the trees blowing from 3000 ft as I fly up through the hills and mountains in VT and Maine...They have a texture when the wind is blowing, just like the ocean, which one gentleman had taken the time to model with waves, etc. So, instead of flying next to the hills and through the valleys, with the same texture every time, you go through and sometimes see the wind "blowing" the trees giving you a view of the underside of the leaves, and increasing the realism....it's not all that useful per se, but neither is the accuracy of the markings on the outboard side of a 737 engine if you are truly concerned with flying the plane from the cockpit. As a quick side note on the "trees really having motion issue", how are the waves created in MS? They are moving and cover 3000+ miles of coastline on either side of the U.S. They don't really cause a frame hit....I assume the waves are not GMAX but rather a bitmap, and they do move in a repetitive motion in a certain direction... So, why could a tree not be programmed to do the same thing, back and forth with the wind? You can see it on final and you can see it from 3000 ft. On Sat, I flew from Bedford, MA to the Vineyard as I do couple of times a week, and the winds on the ground were 300 20-G30kts as low pressure area was blown out to the NE with much clearer conditions prevailing and a broken to scattered layer at 4500-5000. Trust me, you could see the trees on departure and final, even though it was only light to moderate between 3000-5000. Unless you are frozen with fear and tunnel vision when you are final, you should be able to look outside the cockpit to either side and enjoy the view.......ChristopherElite Multi quadrant19" inch monitor-Soundblaster PCI 512Win XPInstrument rated ASEL -224 hoursAOPALawyerPilots Bar Association"Men without dreams are never free, twas thus this way and thus will ever be."

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Guest lawyerpilot

"Now, I wonder whether a similar manipulation of the autogen tile could be used with a minor offset or slight alteration in colour of the `leaves` so that the trees appear to shimmy and move, without actually doing so."EXACTLY!!!! In terms of the artistic side, just change each bitmap to show a little difference in color for the underside of the leaves...for the programming side, just tie the autogen to the wind direction, and rotate accordingly....ACTUALLY WAIT!!!! Despite what I said originally, you do not need four different textures for each wind direction in each season. You just need one, and because the tree is uniform on all sides, and one side would have the "windstruck" texture, the program would simply need to align the autogen tree's side with the upwind direction in the weather. So, you only need one texture per season, with one "upwind" side, to be rotated by the program based on the weather input...So, we only need to get Ed or someone to create his 4 trees with a slight bend or an upwind texture...then someone could write a little code tying the wind direction to the autogen, just like a windsock or waves.... (although I don't think the waves align with the wind, but they do align with the shoreline....so obviously there is a code to tell the waves to do that...)Great thinking Chaz!That's why I love this forum....we can really develop some good ideas with everyone's input. It's like a big thinktank...Unfortunately, I am not an artist....just an idea man...CBP4 1.8768 ram 80 gig hardriveVisiontek Ti4 4600CH yoke/pedalsElite Multi quadrant19" inch monitor-Soundblaster PCI 512Win XPInstrument rated ASEL -224 hoursAOPALawyerPilots Bar Association"Men without dreams are never free, twas thus this way and thus will ever be."

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I would rather see chimney smoke that responds to wind more than trees because that is something you use in real flying. I can't notice the trees moving while I'm flying the pattern and certainly can't tell which direction the wind is coming from based on them. Georender 4 has great smoke effects! I just wish we could do it for all the chimneys!David

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Guest lawyerpilot

you can download it here or at the other site....try smoke effects or something like that in the search...P4 1.8768 ram 80 gig hardriveVisiontek Ti4 4600CH yoke/pedalsElite Multi quadrant19" inch monitor-Soundblaster PCI 512Win XPInstrument rated ASEL -224 hoursAOPALawyerPilots Bar Association"Men without dreams are never free, twas thus this way and thus will ever be."

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Guest lawyerpilot

they did smoke, but not reactionary smoke.

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Guest Tim13

If we're going to throw out ideas, then instead of swaying trees I'd rather have shadows from the dynamic clouds move across the landscape. Neither of these give any wind direction help to a pilot flying VFR even during the landing phase, but the immersion effect of the shadows I think would out weigh the swaying trees. Either way, I think that the frame hit might be more than people would be willing to accept(for either idea).Tim13

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That would be very cool Tim! I never thought about that.David

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