Bringing FSX/ORBX landclass to X-Plane

[nikaslan 9]

No problem, I'm not in a hurry.  :smile:

[GamerNurd 7]

Any news?

[bsupnik 23]

Hi Y'all,

 

When I first did the design work for DSF (about fifteen years ago!!!!) there were two major goals:

1. Move as much computation out of X-Plane and into the scenery creation process as possible.  We had single core machines, so any on-the-fly computation was directly stealing our precious frame-rate.

2. Make the scenery file format and rendering engine agnostic of the actual techniques used to make scenery.

 

I ended up going with a (cough cough) highly vector-centric approach to the default scenery (sometimes for better sometimes for worse), but because pretty much all of that vector work was precomputed, the DSF file format itself ends up being able to do land classes, orthophotos, and other techniques.

 

So it's cool to see real land class tiles in X-Plane. :-)  

 

The X-Plane mobile autogen is actually precomputed annotated land class tiles too.  For xp10 mobile we couldn't use the v10 urban autogen (too high system requirements) and we didn't like the v8/9 urban autogen. So the v10 mobile scenery is v8/9 vector-based land classes for natural terrain with annotated tiles cut into the base mesh (with the annotations coming through as OBJs).

 

One difference between this and how FSX (and X-Plane 6/7) work: since the mobile autogen is totally precomputed, the "grid" of autogen can be arbitrarily placed on 1x1 tile at any offset and angle.  As of now, it is placed by hand by an art guy (and thus can be "fit" to the land a bit).

 

Mroe: AG points would make a reasonably efficient way to put annotations down, but for best performance, HIDE_TILES should be used so that the overlay AG isn't putting down a second layer of texture - orthophotos and land classes in the base mesh are -much much much- faster.

 

(For mobile we use AG points to prototype the autogen on desktop, but then the final result is fully 'baked').

 

Tony: my understanding is that the FS X land class system will sometimes composite several tiles with masks to make terrain transitions, and this is done on the CPU while flying.  X-Plane won't do this but it -will- overlay several tiles on the GPU, and we have enough GPU power that the results should be very flyable.

 

If you need to do this and haven't figured out for yourself the particular combination of .ter and DSF mesh options to make this happen, please shoot me an email and I can point you in the right direction.

 

cheers

Ben

[propsfan 52]

Maybe I'm being overly optimistic but this might be the beginning of something exciting. I hope it is.

[MantasTheK 0]

Very nice, indeed. But what I don't like about ORBX is - roads going on top of the "photo-real" buildings. Almost in random places. I think it's not that nice.