This is near Taipei. I downloaded the OSM vector road and converted all vector road autogen lights to the new 3D lighting. Running in DX10, I can apply Light Bloom to those lights and still get ok performance. The low fps (around 20) could because of my 6 years old system. Until Steve fix the DX10 transparency bugs, those 3D lights could look even better!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I downloaded the OSM vector road

 

Wow, lots of lights...!!! How and where did you download the OSM vector road...? OpenVFR? Or is that some freeware...?

That looks amazing!

Wow, lots of lights...!!! How and where did you download the OSM vector road...? OpenVFR? Or is that some freeware...?

I downloaded from this site:

 

http://nazo.secret.jp/fsx/index.html

Ditto! Very good, I'm interested too, in how the osm data is used to create the scenery.

Wow very nice, do you think you can show us how or provide us with a tutorial on how to do this? Would be great to share with the community if we can all pitch in and work on different parts of the world by improving on little details like this. Great work!

I love FTXG but it still has a long way to go before looking good at night like some other modern sims.  I hope they improve the "floating orbs" nght lighting.

That actually looks decent.... similar to how XP10 looks.... very impressive.

That is impressive.  Add me to the list of people who'd like to know about how to add the OSM roads. Can this be done in any region?  They look better than the UTX roads, and I'd be happy to consider switching if it's feasible.

 

EDIT: Although I don't have any Asian languages, it looks from the linked site like this data is available only for certain Asian regions.  Correct?

EDIT: Although I don't have any Asian languages, it looks from the linked site like this data is available only for certain Asian regions. Correct?

 

Yeah, seems like it. My Japanese isn't what it used to be :rolleyes: but I also had that idea, after which I closed the site again without downloading something... I will wait for Orbx's solution for this.

I am stil hanging out on the fence!!! Will wait till things kind of settle down, and some of the bugs are fixed, want to make life easy, not complicated.

The site I mentioned above is not mine. You can download some Asian scenery from that site. The OSM data are already in BGL format and ready to be used in FSX. Once you layer the scenery in Scenery Library, and if you have FTXG installed, then you will see those 3D lights along the vector roads. Since OSM is a global project, the vector roads at some areas are quite complete and so you will see a lot of lights in FSX.

However, the 3D lights used in UTX and FTXG vector roads are .fx effect lights. Those lights are actually 2D sprite textures that always rotate at every frame in order to face you perpendicularly (like the 2D clouds), hence they are not fps friendly. The 3D lights introduced by ORBX are actually normal 3D objects composed of some simple polygons with light texture. They do not rotate at every frame and thus fps friendly. Even with my old Q6600, I can display thousands of those lights and still maintain around 20fps, like in the screenshots.

To achieve the XP10 night lighting like in FSX, we basically need 2 things: massive road network in vector format and lots of 3D lights along the vector roads. Unfortunately I can't find a way to apply the 3D lights to the UTX vector roads. We have no problem displaying huge amount of 3D lights in FSX now, the tricky part however is the vector road data. There are some good vector road network in some areas in default FSX world. For those areas which lack good vector data, We will either convert the OSM road to BGL format, or if you want to spend a little bit of time, trace those road network in Google Earth and save it in KML format.

Converting OSM road to FSX BGL format is a bit tricky, this is how:
1) Download an OSM editor (I use JOSM - http://josm.openstreetmap.de/ );
2) Locate the area you want to work with, save the area in OSM format;
3) Now come the trickiest part: to convert the OSM file to Google Earth KML format. You can see the info here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_in_Google_Earth
4) Open the converted KML file in Google Earth, check the road network, do some cleaning, resave the KML.
5) Use "FSXKML" (a very useful freeware), open the KML file, tag the roads with a road tag (Asphalt? Concrete? 2 Lanes? 4 Lanes?....) Then click "Build", within seconds, a BGL is ready to be used in FSX.

Once you load the BGL in your scenery library, you will see the vector roads together with 3D lights along.

Here I compare default FSX vector roads with new lighting and UTX lighting, note the fps:
 

FSX default road with new lighting:

 

 

UTX and its lighting:

 

Very impressive! But OSM data are availale for all parts of the world?

 

If I'm not wrong this is what ORBX will do when releas its OpenLC packages, correct?

The UTX lights look better to me.

We are releasing a V1.1 patch for FTX Global that improves the lights further:

 

- Now 140% brighter

- Better FPS again

- Now vector roads don't use .fx for much better FPS on vectors

- Denser vector lighting

- Added intersection congestion traffic brake lights

 

Here is an example at Boston: