Introducing World2XPlane...

[tonywob 4,769]

 

 

Things I have to check with tony, maybe i did something wrong: they are all 3 storeys. In the lib I've put 3 to 6 stories buldings....

 

Great work. If no city tag is found then all buildings will be up to 3 stories high. Will grab Brussels and work it out :-)

[Humpty 751]

Hmm was watching "The Killing" Season 2 Episode 4 last night, and was that X plane.

[alpilotx 505]

Great work. If no city tag is found then all buildings will be up to 3 stories high. Will grab Brussels and work it out :-)

Here comes the point, where some 3rd party "density" information might come in quite handy (which we already discussed some time ago). I have that - more or less realistic (often just heuristic) - in my landclass data (which gives some input to the default autogen density). You might - in  a worst case - try to just create kind of a heat map of urbanization (highest density in the middle, and then going down the more outside the city center you go). This might not be perfect or realistic, but still much better than just making it all look identical :-)

[tonywob 4,769]

Hi Andras

 

At the moment it uses just information from OSM. What it does is use the place=city, town, suburb etc tags and makes "hot spots" around these with a configurable radius. You then tell it that random height buildings within these hotspots have a specific height range. So, all unknown height buildings within a 4km radius of Brussels centre will have a height between 9 and 18 metres, but in a village, 3-6 metres. The problem is that it just stops at particular radius, and a winding down is a good idea and would look more natural.

 

This is really showing the limit of what we can do with OSM data, and third-party data would help here. But, once we have to use third-part data, the program becomes even more complex than it is.

[alpilotx 505]

This is really showing the limit of what we can do with OSM data, and third-party data would help here. But, once we have to use third-part data, the program becomes even more complex than it is.

Yes Tony, I am fully aware of these implications(its the same with the Laminar "internal" scenery generator ... it uses a big pile of different data sources, where the hardest part is to manage them and make them fit together - to result in a nice, final, big picture). But maybe, you can - later at some point - make this an option. I mean, to add third party data for some special "use cases". Then normal user can just leave it out, while pro users can fiddle with the extra overhead, and get - maybe - better results ...

[Humpty 751]

when is 0.4.0 coming out ? 

[tonywob 4,769]

 

 

Then normal user can just leave it out, while pro users can fiddle with the extra overhead, and get - maybe - better results ...

 

Yes agreed. The only other data source than be used in addition to OSM at the moment are shapefiles, e.g. We use these to determine regions, but they could also be used in other cases. e.g. It could be used to determine city boundaries and the heights could be changed within the region. I fully respect the amount of work that must have gone into getting this working in the HD Mesh and X-Plane's default scenery.

 

It's worth knowing that I originally wrote World2XPlane to support plugins, and this is still valid. However, I doubt anyone at the moment will actually write plugins for it, but the ability is there to create your own rule types, parse your own data and use these in the scenery. Also, I'm working on a way in 0.4.0 to customise the CSV files used for building placement.

 

 

 

when is 0.4.0 coming out ? 

 

Not for a while. I still have lots of things to work out. Performance being the major concern.

 

Speaking of performance, it seems people are getting quite different results with the objects vs facades argument. I personally get better performance with objects, but others are getting better with facades. So, I'm guessing facades maybe more CPU bound, but maybe only Ben can answer this.

[Humpty 751]

Yes agreed. The only other data source than be used in addition to OSM at the moment are shapefiles, e.g. We use these to determine regions, but they could also be used in other cases. e.g. It could be used to determine city boundaries and the heights could be changed within the region. I fully respect the amount of work that must have gone into getting this working in the HD Mesh and X-Plane's default scenery.

 

It's worth knowing that I originally wrote World2XPlane to support plugins, and this is still valid. However, I doubt anyone at the moment will actually write plugins for it, but the ability is there to create your own rule types, parse your own data and use these in the scenery. Also, I'm working on a way in 0.4.0 to customise the CSV files used for building placement.

 

 

 

 

Not for a while. I still have lots of things to work out. Performance being the major concern.

 

Speaking of performance, it seems people are getting quite different results with the objects vs facades argument. I personally get better performance with objects, but others are getting better with facades. So, I'm guessing facades maybe more CPU bound, but maybe only Ben can answer this.

 

 

Hey Tony, 

 

 What the heck are objects and facades ? don't understand that .

 

BTW did you get NL compiled ?

 

Even right now its a third try with NL and i have assigned it 6 cores in your xml file. (as my Hack is a six core)

 

You want to see how X plane looks like in Seattle ? Saw it yesterday.

[tonywob 4,769]

Hey Tony, 

 

 What the heck are objects and facades ? don't understand that .

 

BTW did you get NL compiled ?

 

Even right now its a third try with NL and i have assigned it 6 cores in your xml file. (as my Hack is a six core)

 

You want to see how X plane looks like in Seattle ? Saw it yesterday.

 

Objects are real 3D objects from our building library, e.g. Blacky's buildings. Facades are a method X-Plane uses to create buildings on the fly using textures, and was used in OSM2XP. It takes a texture and basically wraps it around a flat 2D polygon and potrudes it into a 3D building. 

 

Regarding the Netherlands. Reduce your cores down, you are probably running out of memory. Try with just 2 and see if that works. I haven't managed to generate the NL yet, but I had the same problem in the UK and had to reduce the cores down to generate it.

 

Re: Seattle. Yep do share :-)

[Humpty 751]

Objects are real 3D objects from our building library, e.g. Blacky's buildings. Facades are a method X-Plane uses to create buildings on the fly using textures, and was used in OSM2XP. It takes a texture and basically wraps it around a flat 2D polygon and potrudes it into a 3D building. 

 

Regarding the Netherlands. Reduce your cores down, you are probably running out of memory. Try with just 2 and see if that works. I haven't managed to generate the NL yet, but I had the same problem in the UK and had to reduce the cores down to generate it.

 

Re: Seattle. Yep do share :-)

 

 

Hi Tony,

 

Oh ok. hmm so I reduce it to 2 cores. but why should that cause an issue ? is it because of OSM ? 

 

Share Seattle ? lol no i don't have any Seattle scenery.  I was watching "The Killing" last night which is based in Seattle and a couple of shots just confirmed that x plane 10 Seattle is the same. It looks almost what I saw in the Episode.

[tonywob 4,769]

Because you are using more memory. When using one core, you are processing one tile at a time, but if you are using 4 cores, you are processing 4 tiles at the same time, and each tile needs to store road locations, etc. So you are using more memory, and what happens is that one of the threads runs out of memory and just hangs (Bad programming on my part and I need to fix this).

 

 

 

Share Seattle ? lol no i don't have any Seattle scenery.  I was watching "The Killing" last night which is based in Seattle and a couple of shots just confirmed that x plane 10 Seattle is the same. It looks almost what I saw in the Episode.

 

Yep, I really like the default scenery for Seattle, and prefer it to Orbx's rendition. Not surprising they used it as the demo area :-). 

[Humpty 751]

Because you are using more memory. When using one core, you are processing one tile at a time, but if you are using 4 cores, you are processing 4 tiles at the same time, and each tile needs to store road locations, etc. So you are using more memory, and what happens is that one of the threads runs out of memory and just hangs (Bad programming on my part and I need to fix this).

 

 

 

 

Yep, I really like the default scenery for Seattle, and prefer it to Orbx's rendition. Not surprising they used it as the demo area :-). 

 

 

 

Hi,

 

 Hope it can be fixed.  Whatever videos of orbx I saw for PNW they looked great but i feel its so much better and with the HD Mesh its fantastic. 

[tonywob 4,769]

Here are some shots of the work-in-progress 0.4.0, using 2 new features:

 

- Buildings facing the street. World2XPlane will calculate which side of the building is facing the street and try and place a building so the door lines up with the street. It's not always possible, as there can be multiple streets around a building, but it gives a bit of order to the somewhat random placement seen in 0.3.1.

 

- Taller buildings in cities

 

 

 

Blacky is still working on his tall European city buildings, so this will improve over time. But initial results are very promising

[Humpty 751]

Tony how about the gardens and stuff ? is that possible ? 

[tonywob 4,769]

 

 

Tony how about the gardens and stuff ? is that possible ? 

 

If the garden is tagged in OSM then it already works, but nobody has gone into that much detail AFAIK. Also, remember this a flight simulator and not city simulator . We're already really pushing it with the amount of stuff we render, and the default config generates scenery which is great for helicopter pilots, but is way over the top for other uses. This is why there is talk of providing HD and non-HD scenery ;-)