Adding back Autogen Trees and Buildings & ADE Airport Registration

[whitav8]

Hi all, I think Sim Savvy and MegaEarth Scenery and the other photoreal vendors that have no or limited Autogen have recommended that somehow we all could start to contribute our add-Autogen-back efforts to a common file repository so that those of us who like some 3D objects could get them for free. Another area of similar interest would be airports that are reworked with ADE or similar tools to be registered to the photoreal imagery. Another issue for me is that I add static aircraft to the airports because I don't want the performance reduction of AI. I have been doing this type of effort recently with Annotator.exe (trees - by hand - ugh), InstantScenery2 (properly registered buildings, aircraft, and a few specific trees - easy but LOTS to do - need more house models), and ADE for the airports. It takes me about 5 hours to do a city and an airport so the time is not inconsequential. I fly in helicopters so the photoreal and 3D objects are much more important than they are for high flyers but still... Just wondered if we could all think about a place to keep these efforts - along with any source material for them so that all could do further improvement. I'm not versed in file repository efforts or in really indexing and publishing about these efforts but I would be glad to share some of my work. Any ideas out there? whitav8

[samd]

Hello whitave8, I can't respond to most of the issues you raise, but I'm pleased to have learned that there is someone other than myself who sees the value of static aircraft rather than dynamic. For the 2 of us, at least, the presence of aircraft at the airport is more important than them moving around on the airfield. The idea for me is to get rid of the ghost town feeling while still having lots of aircraft visible, I would love for someone to produce a static aircraft population program for FSX airports. Who needs the performance hit, even on a powerful system, when the gain in all the other eye candy performing so much better is worth the missing dynamic aircraft? Also, I have gone into the aircraft configuration files of all AI and disabled the gate docking feature which makse for consistently high frame rates and smoothness even at the busiest airports with more AI than with the jetways enabled. I leave docking only enabled for the aircraft I fly, which is never the default FSX aircraft. Just my thoughts in response to your post, and maybe there are others who would like to profoundly improve performance at no cost. Those moving jetways really are performance hogs. It's a matter of personal preference that others might want to consider...or not. Blue Skies! Samd

[whitav8]

samd, Thanks for your response! I use either SbuilderX or InstantScenery2 (much easier since your can see it in 3D FSX immediately!) to place the aircraft quickly. I found a nice set of GA aircraft in a library format and then I just use the generic aircraft (no specific liveries) in the FSX product itself - still need some commuter propjets like Dash-8. I would actually like to have these libraries have a shadow in the model so that they would look really "glued down" to the tarmac.BTW, how do disable the docking? Another question: Why does this forum show up ONLY if you register (login?) Still looking for others that want some Autogen trees (or specific non-autogen trees) and non-Autogen, mostly registered (correct orientation and size) buildings added to the photoreal. When you are landing, you really need these 3D objects and FSX default will not provide very many. Also, the runways need an hour of work to reregister them to the photoreal - and then add a few more buildings as you have time. Anyone????

[greggerm]

whitav8, (et al) I've been working with these concepts for some time - at least since I received my original hard drive with SimSavvy on it. Runway Alignments:Using ADE, I spent some time realigning the FSX airports to match their photoreal counterparts in my areas of interest. I fly with "FSEconomy", so I am flying in and out of several dozen smaller airports in my region all the time. Smaller airports tend to be less well documented with the government, and that leads to the errors found in the FSX database. On larger airfields, I'll generally skip moving the taxiway signs and I'll just delete them along with the myriad of parking spots that might come with a default airfield and just try to get the runways, taxiways, and aprons in place. I've found that it's best for me to use SBuilderX to create a photo underlay, which I can then import into ADE to "trace" the airport back to its proper location. It takes time, and is detailed work especially with multi-runway complex airports, but the end results are quite apparent in the simulator itself. Pros: The crisp runway matches the photoreal texture underneath!Cons: None, except for the time it takes to do. Doing a midsize-to-major airport is a real time sink! Airport/Regional Objects:Like you, I use Instant Scenery to add objects (buildings, static airplanes, perhaps some vegetation) to the immediate area of an airport. (And of course, my house!). It adds so much to the experience to have some three dimensional objects around when taking off and landing. After adding these items, performance is essentially not hit whatsoever. The objects are too few in number to have any measurable impact on frames or smoothness. I don't add much to cities and towns unless they are immediately adjacent to an airport. In my personal view, the airport terminal area (1-5 mile radius from the field) is the most important. If there are some MAJOR landmarks in the area outside that radius that are missing, I may add it in... case in point - a local coal/oil power plant just erected two MASSIVE cooling towers (hyperbolid), which makes it look like a new nuclear plant. These cooling towers are not in the sim as they just went up over the past year... I added them in and I've got a more realistic flight condition in the area. Pros: Done correctly, it adds much needed atmosphere to an airport area when you're on the ground.Cons: If you put in too few objects near an airport, the ones that are there tend to stand out, jarring your suspension of disbelief. Autogen Trees:I've been using the FSX autogen annotater to scribble in some trees and forests in my local area for the past several weeks, primarily near airports. Again, having 3D objects when on takeoff and approach adds a ton to the experience... but autogen is not an ideal partner for photoreal textures, as I am seeing. Unfortunately, with the new 50cm/1m upgrade installed for SimSavvy, the source material that Larry has had to use in my region is a little bit milky in color... it must have been either a hazy day when they did the imaging, or their photographer couldn't operate a point-and-shoot camera. The lighter shades on the ground provide stark contrast to the darker autogen objects, and this has a negative impact on the overall look and feel. In some regions where the photoreal textures are darker and more lifelike, autogen additions make 110% improvements to landing pattern work. In others, where ground textures are lighter or otherwise off-color, it can be a distraction. As far as performance goes, once again, there's little to no impact with this added autogen. By using only trees and not the houses, I've eliminated a lot of polygons from having to be drawn, and autogen really never hit my system with any problems anyway! Pros: Immense improvement to spacial recognition and feeling of motion.Cons: Texture and autogen colors don't always match up. Distribution Issues:I've been doing all my work primarily for myself, with no real intention on distributing. I have briefly talked with Larry, suggesting just what you have whitav8 regarding some sort of customer portal where we could upload and otherwise share our creations with the rest of the SimSavvy community. If I had extra cash, I'd consider setting up some sort of hosting arrangement and doing it myself, but that's not really a possibility right now. One can always upload files to AVSIM, flightsim.com, and other related websites, but searching through and finding items in these massive repositories is simply horrifying. On the plus side, these scenery files we are working with are absolutely TINY when compared to the actual photoreal, and the same could be said for the Instant Scenery and airport BGL files which are created. Perhaps someday Larry can create or install some sort of content management system on the SimSavvy website which would allow registered customers access to these collective works. The bandwidth used to serve out these tasty morsels of custom work would be a mere fraction of a percentage point of the bandwidth needed to serve the sample photoreal scenery areas, so I don't think that would be an issue. :)

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ Whitav8 - what region of the country are you working on? I'm finding that even working in my home state of Rhode Island, the smallest tiny little state, it is a daunting task to even think about having border-to-border autogen coverage... -Greg

[1mikel151]

Interesting posts and some good food for thought. I like the idea of a community effort in adding autogen and aligning stock airport layouts to match the photoreal. There is actually a guy that does just that for the megascenery earth photoreal packs, which from what I have seen and heard are far lesser quality than what Simsavvy is producing.. My thinking is that his work should line up rather well with any photoreal scenery, look in the AVSIM library for Drew Sikora. back to the community effort, if enough people are interested, maybe a photo record in the forums as to what autogen objects work best, especially buildings for what areas to help save those doing it from looking thru the list, which can add to the tedium. I have been finishing up a photoreal airport scenery in NH and had to actually look up what types of trees are actually in the photos/indigenous to NH so I could place the right autogen As for the static vs AI discussion, well there are not enough quality static aircraft around that I have seen and to be fair, polygons are polygons, so any performance hit you are getting will be from the programming of the AI and any animations, not so much from the actual model.

[1mikel151]

After my last post I thought more about an option I had on my mind that goes along and further with what was discussed a bit here. that is small high res areas for just airports, which is basically what I like to do anyway with the default, but have always wanted the rest of the world to be photoreal, but at the resolution I prefer, the d/ls would be really HUGE. as I have yet to make up my mind about purchasing simsavvy, I did d/l a sample of the new HR scenery, namely Florida, Miami area. Immediately I was put off my the color, way to much blue which bummed me out. I then wondered if that was the case with all of Florida based on other sat imagery. So i picked a small airport within the simsavvy sample area and did my own photoreal area to see if the data was close and also to see about the possibility of small HR airport addons on top of simsavvy. Needless to say, without at least color correction with simsavvy I doubt it will be feasible, at least in this area as you can see from the comparison.

[samd]

Hello whitav8, If you want to disable the jetways from automatically docking to any aircraft, whether AI, add-on, or default you need to edit the aircraft's configuration file as follows. 1. Find the aircraft in the simobject folder and open to view the folder's contents.2. Find the file named "aircraft" and open it with "notepad"3. Scroll down until you find [exits]4. Under [exits] you will find, for example number_of_exits=25. To disable the jetway from automatically docking or docking with the control + J keystroke, place a left square bracket before the entry. In the case of this example the edit will look like [number_of_exits = 2 You will have to do this for every aircraft you do not want the jetway to automatically dock with or manually dock with. I did this with all My Traffic X AI aircraft and default AI aircraft and the performance boost at busy airports was profound. With the jetways disabled for automatically deploying to AI aircraft you can increase the percentage of AI even more and enjoy really smooth approaches, taxiing, etc at the Heathrow, JFK etc. It takes a bit of work to reach all the models, but it's worth it. If you think as I do, I don't need to see the jetways attached to AI aircraft, but do want to maintain high FPS (35 +) at heathrow with 75% AI, then consider this as a means. There you go! samd

[greggerm]

Samd, Might I recommend using the more traditional, authorized method for commenting out a line... Instead of adding in an open-ended bracket " [ ", use two slashes instead... " // " Because brackets usually contain "section" information in a config file, using an open-ended bracket might cause problems down the road or with some addons. The slashes are the standard FS2004/FSX comment marker, which forces the system to ignore what is on the line. The more appropriate entry for your suggestion above would be... // number_of_exits = 2 Just in case,-Greg

[samd]

Very interesting Greg. Hither to now I've always thought that the "//" entries are the conventional way to designate the entry which follows as merely text, and not part of the instructional set that the program reads. Now I know that they actually prevent the entry that follows from being seen by the program for "processing". While I have your attention, do you know of any sources where I can learn the contents of the default FSX .bgl files so I might learn just exactly the scenery elements that they are rendering. The files are all numbers with the .bgl extension which does not tell me much. Thanks for increasing my knowledge base. Blue Skies, samd

[greggerm]

Now I know that they actually prevent the entry that follows from being seen by the program for "processing".

Bingo... they prevent anything on the line that follows from processing or being read - be it a basic text comment, or a line of coding you don't wish to use.

While I have your attention, do you know of any sources where I can learn the contents of the default FSX .bgl files so I might learn just exactly the scenery elements that they are rendering. The files are all numbers with the .bgl extension which does not tell me much.

I don't think that info is available... if it is, it's well above my knowledgebase too! While the SDK does go over how some of the scenery elements layer and work, I don't think it gets into how a BGL file is actually constructed. There are no tools (to my knowledge) that exist which will decompile a BGL into its resultant sources, either. I won't be of much assistance on that one, I'm afraid! -Greg

[whitav8]

Just to get back on track, I am wondering if SimSaavy,MegaSceneryEarth, and other VFRXXX users see the need for more trees and buildings and optionally static aircraft at airports. As one user above indicated, while we could post our scenery adds to avsim and other such websites, it would become difficult to find it piece by piece. Maybe we could use for the time being, just a pinned topic here and continue to edit the last message with a list of available areas and then just upload to avsim as we make it. I also made a short tutorial on the tools I use and techniques (simple as they are). Hey, how do you include an image in your post? If I hit the Image button on the post editor, it wants a URL instead of giving me a browser to my jpegs.

[1mikel151]

Hey, how do you include an image in your post? If I hit the Image button on the post editor, it wants a URL instead of giving me a browser to my jpegs.

You have to have the image uploaded to another site such as your domain or an image sharing service. I use imageshack. Make sure it is still in the allowed format for posting images at AVSIM, 1024 width and under 200K I believe.