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tonywob

Introducing World2XPlane...

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I got houses made in stekchup made I use for XPlane, but they built for Arizona or California. I can make objects in XPlane low poly items. I can create basic gas stations, apartments, rowhouses, houses, commercial facilities. Like this idea even if only 5% of buildings are used because it will further help plausibility and immersion.

 

Please do, we could use all the models we could get :-)

 

 

 


Forrest  'Fill Mode ' can be Area,Linear and POINTS.
Also you could cut holes , where _no_ trees should be.

 

The points could work well for the trees in residential areas, but I think we'd still need a random rule for other types of objects.

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I've managed to get some time today to work on the generator. Although, I think I might be addicted to creating 3D models, since when I was out shopping earlier with my girlfriend, I asked her to take some pictures of the supermarket with her phone so I could model it when I got home, and whilst driving, was tempted to stop and take pictures of some houses in the villages :D

 

Anyway, I've implemented some basic collision detection and also something I call area-tracking. With area tracking, you can tell the generator to track and record areas such as residential/industrial inside OSM, and then change your logic based on these. These are demostrated in the following rules: the first rule records residential areas and stores it as "residential", and the second places trees in residential areas using collision detection: 

<rule type="area-track">
   <filter type="key-value">
     landuse=residential
   </filter>
   <identifier>residential</identifier>
   <pass-through>true</pass-through>
</rule>

<rule type="random">
   <filter type="key-value">
      landuse=residential
   </filter>
   <density>2</density>
   <collision-test>true</collision-test>
   <pass-through>true</pass-through>
   <objects>
      <object>lib/g10/forests/autogen_tree_any.obj</object>
   </objects>
</rule>

The following rule places buildings which are tagged as generic "yes", which are inside the residential zones defined earlier, have an area up to 20m2, and simplifies the object, gives it a height bwteen 4 and 9 metres, and gives it a sloped-residential facade. This can also work for object placements, as well as all the other rules:

<rule type="building">
   <filter type="key-value">
     building=yes
     building=house
     buliding=residential
   </filter>
   <max-area>20</max-area>
   <min-height>4</min-height>
   <max-height>9</max-height>
   <simple>true</simple>
   <area-type>sloped-residential</area-type>
   <area-tracker>residential</area-tracker>
</rule>

This gives scenery designers a lot of power, since now it's possible to identify generically tagged buildings i.e. (building=yes), and give them facades and objects based on not only where they are, but whether they are in a residential, commercial or industrial zone

 

1.jpg

 

2.jpg

 

Generally, OSM is quite decent for landuse=* tags, so I'll begin updating all of my rules to include these, so there should no longer be houses appearing in the middle of an industrial state, etc.. Additionally, it could use additional sources for landuse, example the Corine data set, or Ordnance Survey OpenData for the UK via ESRI shapefiles.

 

 

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Some more screenshots of the collision detection in action. It doesn't effect performance too badly, and has done a pretty good job, especially with placing trees inside building courtyards.

 

1.jpg

 

2.jpg

 

3.jpg

 

4.jpg

 

5.jpg

 

Screenshots don't do it justice of course, it looks so much better when actually flying around. Also, slightly off-topic, the new update for SkyMaxx Pro is fantastic.

 

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tony i have a question about texture quality and house placement based on how close the houses are in approximation to the Big major airports. for example if your program could detect big airports like EDDF and increase the texture quality of the houses within the 15-30 mile radius so when one person is taking off/ landing in big airports it would increase the immersion while also saving fps and lots of work?

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Your meticulous attention to detail and your execution of your ideas continues to impress me. 

 

You are doing stirling work.

 

Bravo sir!

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ony i have a question about texture quality and house placement based on how close the houses are in approximation to the Big major airports. for example if your program could detect big airports like EDDF and increase the texture quality of the houses within the 15-30 mile radius so when one person is taking off/ landing in big airports it would increase the immersion while also saving fps and lots of work?

 

The generator can't control texture quality as this is beyond what is available for it control (as least as far as I know). However, you could create some high detail versions of houses and then tell the generator to use those when within a certain boundary (e.g. A square envelope around EDDF). The generator already supports rules based on latitude/longitude, so this is already possible, it just needs the models creating.

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A couple more regional buildings added, two for Germany, and one for the UK. 

 

1.jpg

 

2.jpg

 

3.jpg

 

There is still a LONG way to go, but the scenery is slowly diversifying. 

 

Also, the area filter is progressing well, as can be seen in the following screenshots, where it's correctly(mostly) placed/textured generically tagged buildings based on the landuse=* area they are part of, i.e. Generic buildings in industrial areas are industrial, etc..

 

4.jpg

 

5.jpg

 

6.jpg

 

7.jpg

 

 

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tony you can really start to see the advantage of your app in the latest shots. looks amazing man. im sure your app would be even more amazing when more objects are added and you refine your code.

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This is getting better and better day by day Tony!

Keep on working with and on Your tool - and:

All the strength, endurance, patience and dedication it takes to deal and come along with all the theoretical - and practical - shortcommings that certainly come across from time to time during all these various stages of the development process.

On that day Your already great and most promising looking tool might be released i am sure more people will join in and try their best to enhance the X-Plane world too.

But for now and once again Tony:

Amazing, impressive and absolutely fantastic work from Yours!

WOW!

Thank You very much!

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2 small updates for today:

 

1) The generator will now place lights on the top of tall buildings. A solid red light for those below 50m, and anything bigger will have a flashing beacon light:

 

Screen Shot 2014-02-11 at 22.09.47.png

 

It doesn't really stand out in this shot, because there are lots of lights around, but in the sim it flashes and is noticable.

 

2) Smart LODs for facades. The generator now uses different LODs for different types of buildings. Generally, small buildings have a small LOD, and large/tall buildings have higher. Really tall buildings will have a maximum LOD. I need to experiment with this more to get the right values. It does improve frame-rate a little bit, and makes distant landmarks visible, but it also looks much emptier and will require some tweaking. Also, considering the number of facades is going down (as they are being replaced by objects), I can't find a way of doing the same for objects.

 

As facades are replaced with objects, and things like trees are added into residential areas, performance is becoming a concern in the simulator. In Central Berlin, with HDR enabled, it was really jerky on my computer (which admittingly isn't too powerful), and I have to turn down the settings to get it decent. Although it looks fantastic outside of cities and performs well, this is now becoming a problem. The more eye-candy that is added,  the worse it becomes. If anyone has any suggestions, then please let me know. This is also why it is super important to create really efficient 3D models and textures, something which I'm not too good at.

 

I'm thinking if there is no solution to the jitters in large built-up areas, then I'll have to find a way of reducing object count in large areas. This will either involve telling the generator where the cities are, or using some sort of algorithm to detect how many buildings are within a given area and reducing eye candy around them, e.g. If there are over 1000 buildings in a defined area, then the tree placement and forest densities are reduced, etc.. I'm open to ideas if anyone has any :-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

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That was exactly my suggestion in X-aviation forum (Leporello nick there). Locate big cities and reduce number of trees and objects in that area. Don't get me wrong, cities are nice to see with detailed scenery, but I mostly fly over rural/mountains and usually airports are outside city boundary (let's forget Kay Tak and London City :lol: ).

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Locate big cities and reduce number of trees and objects in that area.

 

Of course, I remember you mentioning it on the other forum.

 

I'm trying to think up an automated way to guess if somewhere is a city. Storing a list of towns and cities seems a bit over-the-top, and also some towns might not be populated very well in OSM, and limiting such sparse areas would be a shame. 

 

I'm thinking something along the lines of counting how many buildings are in, let's say a 5km2 area, and if it goes over a certain threshold, all woodland and random placement is halfed. I just want to make sure it doesn't do this in areas where it isn't needed, so need to test a few ideas.

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I've tried a couple of experiments using various options to see if I can find the bottleneck. The results are interesting:

 

  1. Using OSM2XP with default settings and a LOD of 12000, I got between 17-19fps in the city centre. But there were far fewer buildings, and they weren't as high.
  2. Using my application, with default settings, which generates everything, including random trees, objects, etc. I got between 10-11fps in the same area. But the scenery had much much more buildings and objects and looked fuller and taller.
  3. Same as 2, but disabling random placed trees and objects, I got a ~1fps increase to around 12fps. Not what I expected  :wacko:
  4. Generated with settings the same as OSM2XP, i.e. Disabled all multipolygons, and used similar settings, I got between 14-15fps. 
  5. Full generation but disabling multi-polygons, I got between 13-14fps. 
  6. Base scenery without multipolygons and without any objects at all, no difference, between 13-14fps  :wacko:
  7. Completely disabling facades, and enabling everything else, i.e. Building Objects, Random Trees, etc. 30fps+. Not too surprised by this result, so I tried it one of the towns outside of Berlin which is filled mostly with object houses, and performance stayed stable at around 30fps.

I placed the plane in the exact same location at each test, with no clouds, etc. I was expecting that disabling the random generated trees would jump up performance, but it made no noticable difference to performance ~1fps. 

 

Enabling/Disabling the smart LODs made absolutely no difference to the framerate, but was visibily working. So the bottleneck at present, so it would seem, is facades. So, I will concentrate my effort for now on trying to optimise the facades, e.g. not rendering really small objects (I noticed someone had mapped every grave in a cemetry  :lol: ), and also removing unnecessary small edges and vertices. Hopefully this will improve things a little.

 

 

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