Had a wow moment in X-Plane

[lsteere 0]

Been spending time with XP9 since the Caranado Bonanza breathed some life into the sim. I recently installed the free forests update for the U.S. from http://www.alpilotx.net/ then flew around my home turf. Wow...all the 3D forests and clumps of trees sized, shaped and placed exactly where they are in the real world! Who'd have thought it was possible?The only flaw is that the default ground textures clash pretty badly with the 3d trees which undermines the effect to a large degree. What's needed now is a set of treeless ground textures.

[Phantom88 3,287]

Fantastic.I'm having a lot of WOW Moments in the XP-10 Demo,Very excited to get my hands on my full copy from Aerosoft.

[alpilotx 505]

LOL :( . I was quite surprised to read this ... as now the transition to XP10 has started, and most reports are about that. But I am glad to hear, that even now there are a few out there who are thrilled by my "old" scenery packs.The good new is, that with XP10 you don't even need extra forest packs anymore, as I used the same landclass data in XP10 (as with the old forests). Even better, not only the forests but the ground texturing (well, the ground scenery) too comes from the same high quality data. And as a result, we now have far less "texture-forest clashes" than before.

[lsteere 0]

The good new is, that with XP10 you don't even need extra forest packs anymore, as I used the same landclass data in XP10 (as with the old forests). Even better, not only the forests but the ground texturing (well, the ground scenery) too comes from the same high quality data. And as a result, we now have far less "texture-forest clashes" than before.

Sounds great! I was wondering about that.Last night I was reading through the document you wrote that shows step by step how you generated the data. I'm really amazed that you were able to find and then figure out how to use the tools needed to get the job done! I downloaded gdal and grass (because I have a sick fascination for this kind of stuff) and they are definitely NOT intuitive nor even well documented. I can't imagine how you figured out how to make them do what you wanted. You must be really tenacious!! LR was wise to hire you.

[alpilotx 505]

I'm really amazed that you were able to find and then figure out how to use the tools needed to get the job done! I downloaded gdal and grass (because I have a sick fascination for this kind of stuff) and they are definitely NOT intuitive nor even well documented. I can't imagine how you figured out how to make them do what you wanted

Do you think so? Yes, of course, they are nothing like the usual, shiny, high-profile GUI tools. Even though GRASS has a GUI ... well, for sure its not trivial or simple to use (especially if you didn't first learned the basic concepts of GRASS ... which makes the difference here). BUT where GRASS (and GDAL of course) shines is the scripting. Well, its more or less a purely script based system and the GUI is just put over that as an "abstraction" layer. Without this scripting system I wouldn't even have considered it for my forest projects ... because I needed to write a quite extensive script to process the amount of data one gets with entire continents :(.And yes, I used GRASS for XP10 too ... mostly for the processing of all the landuse and climate data (took me many weeks to get everything in a form I liked). Did you read this interview (there are some more details)?http://xplane10.word...n-mr-x-terrain/

[lsteere 0]

for sure its not trivial or simple to use (especially if you didn't first learned the basic concepts of GRASS ... which makes the difference here).

I downloaded grass and gdal so I could follow the instructions you provided, so I really didn't understand the basic concepts before I started using them. :(

Did you read this interview (there are some more details)?http://xplane10.word...n-mr-x-terrain/

Very interesting article! Thanks for the link.