Update: I was hoping to get v0.3.0 released this weekend, however some more issues have cropped up with roads and facades which will delay the public release. However, whilst being testing by some users, I've also added some new "safe" options which can enrich the scenery:

 

Object Height Rewrite. If you have an object, such as a flag or antenna, and it's not in a library. World2XPlane can be told to copy/rewrite the object and change its elevation. This is used to place flags on top of buildings or antennas. I'm sure some people can get creative with this, and also in future versions, I can also add an option to resize the object.

N.B. The flags will also animate and match the wind if you have the sandybarbour flag plugin installed.

 

Polygon Buffering. This option allows you to enlarge or shrink an OSM polygon, or turn a line into a polygon, and then use the buffered polygon for rules. I've already create a few examples, such as placing small trees around a pond and along a stream.

 

Multithreaded Generation. The application can now be told to generate several tiles at the same time. You can see big improvements in the generation speed, especially when used with an SSD or RAM Disk. This option hasn't been fully tested yet, so will be disabled in the release, but you can enable it if you wish to try it out.

the multithread, for info.... Rendering Belgium takes around an hour... the multithread (8 cores for me) and a RamDisk (used 30Gb), made me rendering Belgium within 9 minutes!!!

better performance on 3D houses to come... after  reading, testing, etc all together with Tony, we found a new way to get generated 3D houses, more performing...

 

To understand this in great lines: lets say a rectangle wall of a house, is build with 2 triangles. If you put something onto that wall (or roof), the 2 triangles will split in much more to accept the new form within the wall (or roof).

 

Now the trick was, NOT to get the chimney touch the roof, so it's floating.... but only a few mm over the roof, you won't see anything. Now the roof are untouched and remain 2 triangles per side...

 

But, enough bla bla... Here a house I made with the new process, with the old it took around 84 triangles, now only 24... :-) Ok, only one house, now imagine the number of triangles saved on 100 of houses!! More to come, soon...

 

better performance on 3D houses to come... after  reading, testing, etc all together with Tony, we found a new way to get generated 3D houses, more performing...

 

To understand this in great lines: lets say a rectangle wall of a house, is build with 2 triangles. If you put something onto that wall (or roof), the 2 triangles will split in much more to accept the new form within the wall (or roof).

 

Now the trick was, NOT to get the chimney touch the roof, so it's floating.... but only a few mm over the roof, you won't see anything. Now the roof are untouched and remain 2 triangles per side...

 

But, enough bla bla... Here a house I made with the new process, with the old it took around 84 triangles, now only 24... :-) Ok, only one house, now imagine the number of triangles saved on 100 of houses!! More to come, soon...

 

 

 

You guys are amazing!

This is fantastic news and clearly shows again how talented and innovative Tony's and Yours work is!

If such continuous progress can be kept alive, the world in X-Plane will finally be what was promised at first, almost ages ago by now:

It will be a plausible world, replicating reality within the sim in a truly convincing way!

Fantastic!

Thank You very much again for all Your efforts!

Hi Christoph, good to see you still on the forums :-)

 

In 0.4.0, I'm working heavily on trying to optimise the scenery. So as well as the on-going effort to reduce the poly count on our models, 0.4.0 will also do the following:

 

• All facades, forests and roads will be optimised. i.e. Unnecessary points will be removed and the complexity reduced. e.g. If a forest or building has a tiny protruding edge which is less than a specified size, it will be removed. This almost halves the size of the DSF file.
• The default settings have been lowered and street lighting spaced out more to reduce the number of objects needed. 

House library growing! Added around +130 (residential) houses. Tony added a few new too! well done :-)

here some shots of Brussels (BE)... my houses starts to infiltrate the scenery ^^

 

 

 

House library growing! Added around +130 (residential) houses. Tony added a few new too! well done :-)

Wow, you work quick! Building variety has been an area sorely lacking in XP10 for years now. And to see soo many buildings churned out so quickly is impressive. It's honestly amazing to see the work you guys are doing.

thnks Carrotroot...

 

It goes fast cause just of 'variety' :-) Why? Here's how I work:

 

I have 2 texture images. One with 4 different black/dark roof colors, the other one with red roofs. Each of both textures contain 14 different wall typos.

Here the black roofed ones... the other (not shown) contains the same structure, but instead of black, it has only red roofs (again, 4 different reds)

.

 

Here it comes bout diversity: I really model, for each specific base measure, 4 different houses. Put different wall textures on it, each one a different black roof to get all 4 different blacks covered, moving and creating around attic windows and chimneys in a click, and done.

Those 4 houses now, will be applied also with the red roof texture (a copy/paste of files and renaming to point to the right texture). So it goes from simple to double in a click (or slightly more).

 

New if a region wants to get other walls as the 14 available in the textures, nothing easier than that: the already +500 available houses could faslty become 1000, if I create a new texture with different walls on it. The model of course remains the same, but would look different on texture side :-)

 

But it's still a hell of a work :)

 

I might cover all residential houses from 6x6 up to 20x20 within the next coming 3-4 weeks...

 

Thnks all for your messages and following

@blacky75

 

Were you or are you working in a construction company ?

 

 

 make more please.

Tony,Blacky, thank you very much for this amazing project ! This is taking  x-plane scenery to another level.

by the way: is there any place to download a demo area with latest features ?

Thank you again!

Hi Marty

 

Simheaven provides some sceneries using the latest 0.3.1 beta, you can find some here:

 

http://simheaven.com/experimental/

Hi Tony,

 

great work so far!!

 

Thanks!!

 

By the way.. i am momentary using the defaul "..us/industrial/power..." Winturbines (not in the videos above). They are visible with every setting and are always looking into the wind direction. The R2 Windturbines have the visibility-problem (only visible if you change the "objekt drawing distance" in the rendering options) and are looking into the wrong direction. So if you like to use the R2 winturbines, you have to set the objects looking to 180° direction.

Thanks again!!

 

Philip

Hi Philip

 

Thank you. I never noticed they were facing the wrong way, and they also must have a bug in the LOD values used.

 

I'll switch over to the default scenery ones in v0.4.0, even though the R2 ones look nicer. I'm not allowed to edit them, or include them in our own library, so this is the only option for now. I'm also having lots of problems with objects in the R2 library, such as misaligned buildings (i.e. Buildings whose origin is not in the centre of the object), as well as missing textures on some of the hangars. I'm slowly working on adding equivelant aligned objects to our own library, so we have control over this, but it's a slow process

 

Also, nice video. The Bell 206 is incredibly difficult to fly (I got it a few weeks ago and still haven't got the hang of it). Landings are always *fun* :-)

Also, nice video. The Bell 206 is incredibly difficult to fly (I got it a few weeks ago and still haven't got the hang of it). Landings are always *fun* :-)

 

I purchased the Jet Ranger because of Philip's video just today - the sound, the sound ... (it remembers me of my first and only - real - helo flight last year durcing vacation around the Cape of Good Hope in a Jet Ranger).

 

And indeed, taking off is so so :rolleyes: , but landings are a kind of .... :Praying: :Whew: