w2xp SimHeaven pre-generated Canada_OSM_AG files...are amazing!

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

 

 

Also, have you installed Andras's treelines and farms?, this is another nice addon which will add some variety to the scenery

 

Yes...they are both installed..and you should be seeing their output, along those great roads!

 

Havin' a blast....great hobby!  <_<

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Mitch, your enthusiasm for whatever you happen to be flying is truly joyful and contagious.  Whenever you post, I always end up considering installing what you're flying. ^_^

 

Those screenshots are really, really nice.

 

My only nitpick, and this is valid for absolutely every scenery depiction of farmland, across every sim, is those circular fields that result from pivot based irrigation.  They always bug me.  In reality, they are only ever found in certain regions (I especially hate seeing them in areas where there is no irrigation at all), and they are almost always found in real life as full circles.  The high cost associated with pivot irrigation means that generally farmers want to cover a full 360 degrees with them.  Occasionally you'll see less than 360, but not as a matter of course.  And of course, you'll never see trees and roads cutting across them...  However, in sims, you'll see them as part of the landscape, cut up into chunks, and often where really not appropriate.

 

It's a small thing, but since I grew up on an irrigation dependent farm, it bugs the hell outta me!!  I'd rather have pure rectangular / square / irregular shaped fields than cut off pivot circles!!

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

Mitch, your enthusiasm for whatever you happen to be flying is truly joyful and contagious.  Whenever you post, I always end up considering installing what you're flying.

 

Hi Jimmy!

 

 

Yes...those very same dry-climes irrigations crop circles bug me too.  As you also state..they can get quartered in the scenery. I just cringe...roll my eyes...and fly on.  You're right though...I think they are too well defined as a pattern, to be in any sim....for if you don't get four-border tile placement, and a full circle (of which you do in XPX more than not...) it can look ugly.  Yep...you're right!

 

Cheers!

 

Mitch

[alpilotx 505]

My only nitpick, and this is valid for absolutely every scenery depiction of farmland, across every sim, is those circular fields that result from pivot based irrigation.  They always bug me.  In reality, they are only ever found in certain regions (I especially hate seeing them in areas where there is no irrigation at all), and they are almost always found in real life as full circles.  The high cost associated with pivot irrigation means that generally farmers want to cover a full 360 degrees with them.  Occasionally you'll see less than 360, but not as a matter of course.  And of course, you'll never see trees and roads cutting across them...  However, in sims, you'll see them as part of the landscape, cut up into chunks, and often where really not appropriate.

There are good reasons for all of this (well, they are not necessarily good for the user ... but "good" in a technical sense).

 

Two major problems are associated with agriculture:

• for persons who know a region well, its always "obvious" where / what type of land should be (where the irrigation is, where a forest is, where the city border is etc.) .... but for the scenery, this information needs to come from somewhere as clearly defined data. And that data is never perfect, nor does it has unlimited accuracy. Thus, the change of some land classification might not occur where you would expect it, might not occur in the correct pattern/shape, or might not even have the right land type. Especially with agriculture ... its often not trivial - which might seem to some users - to get good data at all .... Like information about where irrigated and where non irrigate areas might be (and even if one gets that data ... its not necessarily accurate down to 100m-s !! ... which might seem a lot for local observers .... but not much in terms of land cover geo data).
• second .... at the moment there is absolutely no technique in X-Plane (especially not in  the scenery generator), which does sync natural landscape (all the landclass based terrain) with the road grid (the only place where this happens are cities with the "urban zoning"). Thus, the underlying landscape texturing is just depending on the mesh ... but does not know much (at all) about the road grid (and the trees which get plant along the for example by my "tree lines and farms" scenery). So, thats why you get those "strange" roads cutting trough those fields ... And no, neither is this a trivial algorithmic task, to sync - especially when you automatically generate scenery - two quite well defined "geometric" systems (the road network is well defined ... but your agricultural fields would like to have their well defined shapes too ... otherwise they look "goofy"). To my knowledge,  Ben Supnik has some ideas on his long term agenda to improve this agriculture misery ... but I wouldn't expect to see results from these ideas anytime soon.

[alpilotx 505]

Tony...you and Andras say there is no LandClass data in OSM files.  Or that is what I think you are saying, right?

Well ... I think there might be some great "misconception" about the different data types and how they can affect the scenery.

 

First, not everything you see is something would be called landclass data. Or if we want to be correct, landclass data is not even a term which is usually used by scientists ... its a term mostly defined by flightsims (especially by MSFS). Still, there are two scientific terms, which would add up to our "landclass" idea. Those:

• land cover - usually meaning all types of natural features on the ground
• land use - usually used for the more human induced use of the land (agriculture, industry, urbanization ... you name it)

But all of these have in common, that this type of data sets (land cover, land use ... or the mix ... lanclass) are usually datasets which just "plain" describe, what generalized(!!!) class a given surface area has. And that surface area can either be described via some vector polygons (which you might usually find in OSM .... or other scientific data sets ... and those polygons can either be very detailed or extremely inaccurate) ) .... or via raster data (pixels ... where each pixel can be understood as an area of n-by-n meter / kilometers or what ever ... depending on the resolution of the dataset!).

 

So ... our - now lets stay with this term - landclass is "only" responsible to describe what type of land / terrain we would find in a given, smaller patch of land (and a good dataset usually gives us this information across a large entity of land ... states/ countries or even global). Like .... in this area we have a city, there we have a forest, and again, in that other place some agriculture. And usually we try to have all of this a bit more detailed (but still in discrete classes) .... Like for example I try to have forest info at least in 6 different classes:

• coniferous dense
• coniferous sparse
• deciduous dense
• deciduous sparse
• mixed dens
• mixed sparse

And the same holds true for agriculture (irrigate, non-irrigated, orchards etc.) .... or cities (four density levels and info about industry)  ... etc. etc. (like: rocks, ice, snow, sand, wetlands, morains, mining, shrubs, sparse vegetation, grass, meadows ....)

(but still, depending on the landclass source, I almost never get all of these details, and often need to derive them by mixing in other data sources, which can give me the right hints about those "extra" infos I need).

 

OK, but what happens with landclass data? Landclass data is usually - at least for default Mesh, HD Mesh Scenery v3 or UHD Mesh Scenery v1 - "only" responsible to specify how the terrain gets textured in the end. The scenery generator "makes up" a gigantic triangle mesh depending on elevation data in the first place, and then cuts it up in myriads of tiny triangle patches depending on the additional landclass data (which I always mix in in its raster form) .... and assigns some "terrain type" (and terrain type is the abstract name which later gets a real texture assigned to the mesh in X-Plane ... the colors you see on ground!) to each of those triangle patches. ... Thats the main use of landclass. Then in the default mesh (and HD Mesh Scenery v3 or UHD Mesh Scenery v1) ... you also get 3D forests assigned ... and all of them are created (they are all defined by polygons which specify the shape of the forest) by deriving the shape from the mesh patterns ... thus the forests usually exactly match the ground texturing (so, where you have forest textures on the mesh, you usually also get 3D forests on top) . Of course, their shape is dictated by triangle structures in the mesh, so they are not necessarily 100% accurate (when compared to the original source landclass data) ... but the higher the mesh resolution, the more accurate the forests get too (thats why in HD Mesh Scenery v3 ... and even more so in UHD Mesh Scenery v1 ... they should be quite good ... at least as far as the landclass accuracy goes).

 

AND this is really ALL which Landclass is responsible for. But landclass is NOT responsible for the placement of road networks / railroads / power lines .... nor is it responsible for all water features (rivers / lakes / coastline). Both of these are defined by vector data, which in most cases is - definitely in default Mesh, HD Mesh Scenery v3 or UHD Mesh Scenery v1 - sourced from OSM (only exception: the CanVec water data for Canada in HD Mesh Scenery v3!).

 

Now ... the "interesting" thing for you is, that OSM does of course have some landclass information too ... Yes, indeed it has in forms of polygons (you can for example easily and nicely see those polygon defined forests in OSM etc.). Some very detailed ... and sometimes absolutely non existing. And this latter is the reason, why I - for large area scenery which I do - never rely on OSM based landclass info (even if in some areas its so great), because in some areas its non-existent or not detailed enough for my needs (often it really jsut says forest or non-forest ,,,, but as you see above, I usually try to work with 6 different forest types ---> and yes, even map them to differences / versatility in the X-Plane landscape).

 

BUT, yes Tony can (and does) fetch those forests - as an example - where they exist, and can - because of the nature of well defined polygons - drape(!!!) nice / detailed forests on the landscape (where the good data in OSM exists).

 

So, most of the time it all boils down to a mixture of both (or even more sceneries!) .... B) ... But if you have good base data (landclass!), then usually HD Mesh Scenery v3 can already look quite detailed / good on its own (and then w2xp can add a really nice icing on the cake .... if it has good OSM data for a given region :-) ),

 

@Sesquashtoo: maybe one question .... as you say, that without w2xp things look quite "bland" in some Canadian areas ... are you 100% sure, that your HD Mesh Scenery v3 installation is correct and working? You wouldn't be the first one implying that he uses HD Mesh Scenery v3 while XP10 does not even load it because of a tiny installation error :wink: ! You might (should!) try this, to make sure everything is working as intended: http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-10-hd-mesh-scenery-v3/#How-to-know-if-the-installation-was-correct

 

PS: and by the way, I had a very detailed description about how landclass and mesh work together (and how landclass data influences the mesh) on simflight.de some time ago .... Yes, ts in german ... but also has some nice illustrations to give you an idea (or you might try google translate ... hehe): http://www.simflight.de/2014/08/15/mesh-und-landclass-der-x-plane-welt/

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

 

 

@Sesquashtoo: maybe one question .... as you say, that without w2xp things look quite "bland" in some Canadian areas ... are you 100% sure, that your HD Mesh Scenery v3 installation is correct and working? You wouldn't be the first one implying that he uses HD Mesh Scenery v3 while XP10 does not even load it because of a tiny installation error ! You might (should!) try this, to make sure everything is working as intended: http://www.alpilotx....ion-was-correct

---------------------------------

 

Thank you Andras...GREAT post!    Yes..here is the log file HD Mesh v3 entry, from my LOG:

 

+45-078.dsf (0 tris)

0:00:00.000 I/SCN: DSF load time: 12500274 for file Custom Scenery/zzz_hd_global_scenery_v3/Earth nav data/+40-080/+45-078.dsf (1506711 tris)

0

[tonywob 4,768]

It's also worth noting that the landcover data inside OSM (Particularly forests, buildings or farmland) is often too generic. Most times I don't know what type of forest it is, or farmland so it's generally randomized (or changed based on region or some other factor). But, as far as forests are concerned, I don't think anyone notices unless you're seeing forests of English oak trees in the arctic. For the GB scenery I did, I had more information to play with, e.g. Types of woodland, bog etc so I could make the scenery more accurate. Generally, when using W2XP with third-party data, it becomes difficult to setup for average users (requiring a database, or scripts to interpret the data), which is why I keep that bit disabled.

 

Regarding the repeating farmland, well I had an idea some time ago to try and get round this, and it was to use something akin to an annotated terrain file (A texture). Basically, you'd create a large, let's say 2x2km texture containing some fields, and then annotate it with objects, such as hedgerows, small wooded areas or ponds in the middle. If the objects matched the TER file below then it would look more realistic, and with a set of these 2x2 tiles to add variety, it would look quite nice and I think this is exactly what ORBX do. 

 

The problem is that X-Plane doesn't support this (not that I could find anyway), so I had to place the .TER files with SV coordinates, and then place the objects over the TER files hardcoded into the DSF. It worked, but I couldn't place TER files without having an entire mesh (i.e. I couldn't create an overlay scenery with them, POLs could also work but are dreadfully slow), and secondly without the data available, I didn't know what should go where and it never got out of me experimenting with a few fields on an untextured mesh :-)

[Poppet 703]

Mitch, your enthusiasm for whatever you happen to be flying is truly joyful and contagious.  Whenever you post, I always end up considering installing what you're flying.

 

Lol, I was only thinking the same thing, it's adorable really.

[tonywob 4,768]

 

 

Lol, I was only thinking the same thing, it's adorable really.

 

Shhhhhh, don't scare him away back to P3D. We need more of his kind in the X-Plane forum ;-)

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

Shhhhhh, don't scare him away back to P3D. We need more of his kind in the X-Plane forum ;-)

(smile...)  "it's adorable really."

 

Wha?

 

 

Ses