The New Faster, Leaner Next Generation Flight Simulator SIM-Posium is Now Available for Your Input

[fs4fun 366]

Can "procedural" be used to depict the real world? Maybe if constrained by and then blended with RW vector GIS data (such as roads, land use data, building footprints, water polys etc). That might be a lot better than FSX's landclass where RW roads get slapped over landclass textures and you end up with roads running over buildings or a highway running through the middle of a residential neighborhood.

 

I think most simmers expect to see the real world, or at least something that's close enough to match up to nav charts. There also needs to be support for accurate placement of landmarks used for visual references.

[dtmicro 1]

Can "procedural" be used to depict the real world? Maybe if constrained by and then blended with RW vector GIS data (such as roads, land use data, building footprints, water polys etc). That might be a lot better than FSX's landclass where RW roads get slapped over landclass textures and you end up with roads running over buildings or a highway running through the middle of a residential neighborhood.

 

I think most simmers expect to see the real world, or at least something that's close enough to match up to nav charts. There also needs to be support for accurate placement of landmarks used for visual references.

 

You can use vector data for the roads.

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I already came up with an algorithm to do snow over PR textures, here is snow over a 1.2m NAIP image.

Note that this snow is NOT painted on, it is instantly procedurally generated over the texture. The original image had NO SNOW in it at all. Anyhow there are plenty of ways to make snow over a PR texture, only problem is it takes up twice the hard-drive space to create winter/summer textures in PR vs just one season (even worse if you do 3 seasons).

 

And it works in FSX as raster for my seasonal variations of the scenery I was working on, and it looks heck-of-a lot better than FSX seasons or just making everything pure white for snow. Unfortunately is again that dreaded 1.2m quality from NAIP we always get

 

It's not perfect since it's low res aerial, but it's not too bad, and would only get better using higher res (terragen or otherwise).

 

[HiFlyer 9,390]

Can "procedural" be used to depict the real world? Maybe if constrained by and then blended with RW vector GIS data (such as roads, land use data, building footprints, water polys etc). That might be a lot better than FSX's landclass where RW roads get slapped over landclass textures and you end up with roads running over buildings or a highway running through the middle of a residential neighborhood.

 

I think most simmers expect to see the real world, or at least something that's close enough to match up to nav charts. There also needs to be support for accurate placement of landmarks used for visual references.

 

I've always thought of something like X-planes Osm to fill in roads, but something that was also easily modified by ordinary users without requiring a degree. So if osm made your city generic, users, maybe even collaboratively! could go in and correct things. Cities: Skylines illustrates what's possible. Something like that would be very, very ambitious, though.

 

On the other hand, yes, Outerra does seem to be heading that way and some user tools are already available. Collaborative building has been mentioned speculatively. Not so sure what the tools are for Unigine. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=84&v=6DzxJ_JekYw

[dtmicro 1]

Getting the roads into a game engine isn't difficult until you have floating point rounding or coordinate conversion issues between the different Coordinate systems, especially with certain game engines the precision of the coords might not be there and might require hand correcting coordinates. Though using a detection algorithm you could make a program that self corrects coordinate rounding issues after the fact with image detection.

[fs4fun 366]

Sorry, I have another question.  :rolleyes:

 

Apparently there is some evaluation of game engines going on. Has anyone made a list of requirements, ie what capabilities does a game engine need to have to make it suitable for a nextgen flight sim?

 

For example, does the engine support 100's of flying aircraft (for AI, multiplayer)? Can it depict all the needed weather effects: precipitation, visibility, fog, lightning, thunder, heat shimmer/ripple? Can the FDE make a near zero-latency query about the aircraft's AGL to simulate ground effects? Since different sim modules (weather engine, FDE, ATC, AI, terrain etc) need to inter-communicate, is there a common database with pubsub support? Is there realtime scheduling, or it's all native multi threading? Are there latency guarantees?

 

Do all game engines do this stuff already and they are great flight sim foundations right out of the box?

 

I have no experience with game programming (just my hobby as a frustrated FSX scenery dev) or designing flight sims. I would think we'd need someone who's actually worked on a flight sim such as FlightGear to help make a requirements list.

[dtmicro 1]

I wouldn't ask flight gear as they are more concerned about the SIM than the graphics. At first we are more concerned with the graphics, the sim stuff can always be added.

 

Your only going to get what you are going to get with this stuff, so the most important thing to me is the ability to handle textures quickly in a large open world, and for it to have a decent API. Everything else is secondary and can be added to any decent game engine. I have a good idea what Unity's API was like as I used it some, and I got a good idea what needs to exist for requirements.

 

Game engines have a lot of add-on developers and do different things, effects are often rendered as animations in outside programs than imported with various techniques, some game engines do provide some effects like basic explosions, shooting, etc... Most of the time I find them insufficient and need to be replaced anyhow, so I think you're not going to have it easy there regardless.
 

The flight models I've seen are fairly basic, but there is no way for me to judge the physics in all of the different flight sim plugins. Unity as one example has a ready-to-go flight sim plugin with very basic physics, but I doubt it would be sufficient for anyone to put into production.

 

Edit:

Some stuff such as intra-module add-on communication would be exposed with encapsulated hash tables or custom data structures directly to a DLL that any add-on developer can script it with. What scripting would it support, well that's a whole different issue, but you could easily use any interface that can read a real-time .NET DLL (which is almost anything really once you wrap the DLL). There are so many other methods of communication, but this is the least of our worries. This is the simple part.

[fs4fun 366]

 

 

You can use vector data for the roads.

 

Yes I know that much.  . I was wondering about vector data as a constraint input for procedural scenery generation, so that procedural scenery still matches reasonably with RW.

 

 

 

I already came up with an algorithm to do snow over PR textures, here is snow over a 1.2m NAIP image.

 

That looks really good! What tools did you use?

 

 

 

I've always thought of something like X-planes Osm to fill in roads, but something that was also easily modified by ordinary users without requiring a degree. So if osm made your city generic, users, maybe even collaboratively! could go in and correct things.

 

Yes that's a great concept, to rough-in the scenery using automation and available GIS data, then hand-tuning selected areas. I think FSX scenery was built up this way too.

BTW, there's some decent higher-res imagery in NationalMap, much of it from county or other local sources (and mostly public domain). Below shows the coverage:

 

[HiFlyer 9,390]

 

 

Yes that's a great concept, to rough-in the scenery using automation and available GIS data, then hand-tuning selected areas. I think FSX scenery was built up this way too.

 

Only, FSX had those generic tiles stitched into a patchwork.... with roads running right over the top of them. That was great for back then, and nobody had better, but it's time they went away. (pretty please?)

[dtmicro 1]

 

Yah, the image above is exactly what I meant earlier when I said MOSTLY the east coast is covered in 30cm, as the brown I believe represents 30cm or greater (or at least 60cm or greater), but I think 30cm or greater.

 

You can create snow over a PR image with various tone curve settings by isolating a particular gamma or exposure range and ONLY turning that level to white. I would look up a tutorial from google, as I doubt I can explain it here much more than that. Any paint program like Gimp or Adobe can do it.

 

NOTE:

I however used my own front-end FSX compiler extension to do it, basically it uses Image Magick in the background so I could run all the images through at once to generate a new season as I am compiling them. So I just check a box on my FSX compiler helper app I wrote, the box is called "Add Winter Textures"...

 

The software is not available to the public and likely never will be as no plans for releasing it.

[fs4fun 366]

Thanks for the snow tips I'll check it out. More things to look into (ImageMagick). 

 

 

 

Only, FSX had those generic tiles stitched into a patchwork.... with roads running right over the top of them. That was great for back then, and nobody had better, but it's time they went away. (pretty please?)

 

Indeed, that's one of the ugliest features of an otherwise pretty good terrain engine for its day.

[HiFlyer 9,390]

By the way, when I say procedural I'm not just talking about Outerra. Remember that Outerras template, Proland is out there, and completely open source.......

 

http://proland.imag.fr/

 

http://proland.imag.fr/documentation.html

 

http://proland.imag.fr/publications.html

 

It started essentially as a research project into the making of procedural worlds, and an awful lot of things that followed took crib notes from this.....

 

Recently, Proland was even partially (at this time) transported into Unity. http://scrawkblog.com/2014/05/19/proland-to-unity-terrain/

 

A lot of very talented individuals, out there.......

[dtmicro 1]

Yah, if we do end up going the Terragen route, we will need something to do procedural generation to fill in the gaps between the custom designed areas. I have an idea how to do this, but am going to keep this idea private for now. I've actually already done some procedural generation. However, If I give away all my secrets here that I learned over 20+ years of coding, and this project does get going, then you guys will not even need me anymore and I will be out of a job before I can even get a job

 

Honestly, I'd love to build a flight sim over the type of programming I have been doing, it's about bored me to tears lately, I need a change. I did the same basic type of work for the last 15 years (databases, statistics, modeling, basic derivatives w/ pixel geometry, some light server admin duties, web design, etc..). My background is mainly back-end math and query stuff, but I also know front-end ok.

 

That said, I prefer to be more of a project architect or consultant at this point, instead of having to be a math banger.

[srborick 0]

This is most definitely a step in the right direction... it took quite awhile to read through the comments posted since I hit the hay last night. And the majority of the conversations were positive.

 

dtmicro... I sent you a PM, please get back to me when you can. And thank you for your most generous offer.

 

HiFlyer... in answer to your question regarding cities... maybe this will help... HERE scroll down to Urban Planning

 

I also received an email from UNIGINE Sim regarding their road map for 2015. What is most exciting is that they would like our input regarding flight simulation and the requirements that we would like to see. That's good stuff... we as a community could actually have influence on the direction of a major 3D Engine!

 

I'll create a new topic announcing the road map as well as ask for volunteers to evaluate the engine... with the only requirements being that they are willing to work together as a team and report back their findings either here on AVSIM or on the SIM-Posium.

 

Here's the email.

 

Hi Stephen,

 

Our meeting has been pushed back until tomorrow, so I will follow up tomorrow mid-morning regarding the Helicopter Demo.

 

Below is our roadmap for 2015.  Again it would be interesting to gather requirements from a Flight Sim perspective from your Evaluators.  Do you know when this data will be compiled?

 

Thanks!

Beth

 

 

2015 UNIGINE 2 ROADMAP

 

Q2

• PBR Materials in DirectX 11 mode
• The full C++ API (same level of access as for UnigineScript)
•  

 

Q3

• Increased Z-buffer precision
• Improved AA
• Asset Browser System
• Improved Editor UI
• Improved data streaming

 

Q3/Q4

• Improved performance with the new rendering pipeline
• DirectX 12 / Vulkan support
• Improved clouds
• Improved water rendering
• Revamped terrain tools
  • Improved usability
  • Support for Geo Coordinates
  • Support for Vector Data
• Improved multi-channel synchronization

 

Q4

• Forest Tools
• Round Earth Model
  • Geoid model for the planet
  • Geo coordinates for the terrain
  • Modified light scattering model
• Integration with LVC Game or similar library

[HiFlyer 9,390]

Looking at engines..........

 

I think in the end one thing I don't think many people want to compromise is on frame rate, or at least smoothness. The weight of all the framerate threads over the years is probably sufficient to have sunk the titanic all on its own, and while something close to photoreal is cool and all, I don't think many would be happy if smoothness is in doubt. But what is an acceptable base frame rate below which a new sim should not allow itself to go?

[HiFlyer 9,390]

 

 

HiFlyer... in answer to your question regarding cities... maybe this will help... HERE scroll down to Urban Planning

 

Thanks. I had seen that and was aware it had capabilities; my real question was how the tools worked and how user friendly were they? The small bit of information I found regarding that, looked more like working in blender rather than the intuitive process in cities; skylines, but the info I saw was old and things may have changed.