Great work Tony!

 

Rob

Wouldn't the real world data based object collide with the objects that ship with the textures?

 

No, because I add the annotated objects using my W2XP library which does collision checks and lots of other tricks with roads and other data, so you wouldn't get houses or trees in lakes or roads, etc. Norway Pro is a mixture of real data and autogen, and it mostly works fine. The textures however are much more tricky, as you will still get the same problem you have in FSX and XP10 with roads going across. I'm hoping though that it won't have roads going through houses, since the houses are placed around the roads, but I haven't even got that far yet.

 

You are using XP's landclass data, alpilotx's/HDMesh, or is there even osm landclass data? Or is this question nonsense?

 

Neither. In this instance, I generated this tile using Ordnance Survey GB's for the height, coastline, water and forests. Because I generate GB Pro with the same data, you will get an almost perfect match. As AlpilotX pointed out, OSM data simply isn't detailed enough on its own.

 

 

Here's an image I just posted over at X-Plane.org on a topic which evolved from Norway Pro and is now talking about generating meshes:

 

 

The only difference between this and the default scenery is that the objects are placed to match exactly onto the textures and no blending is used between tiles so it runs faster, but it has the following disadvantages:

 

• You need to make lots of annotated textures to get rid of the tiling effect over large areas (It's quite evident in that shot). For farmland, you are going to need a lot (and ORBX have a large pile of them in their sceneries). You're going to need to be good in photoshop :-), but I've made a nice little tool to add the annotations, but that's the easy bit.
• You loose XP's nice effect it does on mountains and slopes. Basically, you inherit FSX/ORBX's problem of textures stretched up steep terrain or off the end of a cliff (unless I can find a solution)
• You still have the 1x1 tile limitation, so if somebody wanted to do the UK (let's say as a commercial scenery package), they'd have to do a small section of France, the Isle of Man and parts of Ireland. 

OK, I see. I would say that for an early stage of developement this looks already quite impressive.

I remember the ugliness of FSX's  streched mountain textures very well. XP is really doing a good job in mountain areas, and with HD meshes it looks phantastic IMHO. Hope you find a solution for that.

 

Best

Flo

Outstanding work indeed Tony, keep it up buddy.

You never cease to amaze Tony. I really hope that either someone snaps you up (Orbx) or you manage to follow their example and make a go of it yourself. You've already made such a massive contribution to the community and my personal enjoyment of the sim, I wish there were more like you.

Are your methods reliant on having pieces of photoscenery as your base texture or could a good texture artist produce textures that would be usable?

 

 

Are your methods reliant on having pieces of photoscenery as your base texture or could a good texture artist produce textures that would be usable?

 

No, you could hand draw stuff if you wanted to, the images and objects the tool can place are completely configurable. Mine are just examples from some tiles I had downloaded , cropped, made tileable and then annotated. You could add a picture of pink dots and annotate them with flying cows, it doesn't matter

 

Either way, yes I would need help from some good texture artist(s) . I'm not going to be able to do this on my own as I simply don't have the time or energy to do the amount of textures you'd see in an ORBX region. I also probably can't legally use aerial photography as textures unless I pay for them, and the ones I bought for my 3 airports were expensive (and that's just for a small region surrounding an airport), but at least it is possible.

I'm not normally the donating kind but I just made a small one on your site to serve as encouragement for you, you do fantastic work! :im Not Worthy:

Holy cow!!!

That´s simply amazing!!!

Thank you propsfan, much appreciated :-)

Great work Tony!  I'm amazed at your results - even with noticeable tiling due to a limited amount of textures, the results still look stunning.  The ability to have annotated textures (and thus have rural areas with proper farms!) would be fantastic beyond words.

 

I can't comment much on XP's method of doing things, for I don't know a lot in this area, but I have put a whole lot more time than I care to admit into FSX scenery creation - more precisely, dealing with translating the very extensive (and freely available) GIS data into FSX landclass, using both the normal landclass system of placing textures, as well as vector based approaches using QGIS.  I was ultimately successful in creating my own 'full fat' region using a mix of the two methods, but it can't be shared, since the textures used aren't my own.

 

Even with a very large assortment of annotated texture files to draw from, I found it very difficult in FSX to remove all visible tiling effects at higher altitudes. This is largely dependent on the textures themselves though. Stuff like irregular fields that stand out from the surrounding scenery show tiling much worse than solid colour based textures, as you can see from your side by side shot above.  I had much more success when generating vector based scenery using FSX annotated textures, very little repetition and looked great from high up, but of course the sharp edges / no blending in FSX vector scenery placement is a major drawback at lower altitudes.

 

One suggestion, since you're starting this from the ground up:  Might there be the possibility of randomly rotating the annotated textures you are using?  Depending on the area, such as areas with irregular fields, this might help give the illusion that many more textures are being used than actually are, and it would help to break up apparent tiling.  Even when simulating areas with regular fields, a random rotation of 90/180/270 degrees would help a lot.

 

Also, another suggestion - the one thing I absolutely loathe about FSX textures, and especially FTX textures, is the inclusion of roads in the textures themselves.  Nothing's worse than when you have very accurate road placement through OSM type data, and then the textures themselves show other fake roads.  Completely ruins VFR flight, in my opinion.  If you have the ability to start from scratch, I'd nix any roads from showing in the textures themselves.

 

Anyhow, I look forward to seeing where you'll take this!

Well, one more "drawback" I see with this annotation is (though, its not a major one I think) ... its not a "real annotation" like in FSX. Which means, the trees etc. do not get their final position during sim time (when it loads the scenery / textures), but instead w2xp (or which ever tool you might use) needs to pre place them at the right position DERIVED from the annotation information which you have given your textures (which are also placed at known / absolute positions, so they never "move"). So, you have the overhead of having every objects final location included in the scenery ... this means, that if you would do the rotation thing as Jimmy suggested ... then of course you have to do that all in advance (because the "generating tool" the knows how to also rotate the annotation coordinate system in sync with the scenery)!

 

X-Planes default scenery (and similarly HD / UHD Mesh) already use the tricks of compositing / tiling / randomly alternating textures ... all this was introduced exactly because of the repetition issue. And I think, that because most of this is done via shaders (at runtime), it would not be trivial to easily match annotated objects on the fly (I think this was one of the reasons why Laminar didn't include this tech ... but quite likely not the only reason). But I might be wrong.

 

And the texures having roads .... well, again I can only refer to the default texure set which does - for the exact reason you cite - no roads in the textures (maybe a few, faint hints of dirt tracks here and there). But even with that, the roads still can't look really natural as long as the larger "features" in the textures do not align with them (like big farms / fiels are usually somehow aligned with roads along their edges etc. etc.). In the long - very long - run this can only be solved if one can come up with some "big magick" shaders etc. which do more complex texture synthesizing (where the textures are maybe built up from much smaller basic elements on they fly ... but who knows how natural that would then look :-) ). And indeed Ben Supnik (the head behind the rendering engine in X-Plane) was contemplating such ideas ... though, I can't tell how far those ideas have matured (if at all).

I tried auto rotating and randomising, but I found it hard to get textures that would blend nicely, but the object matching was easy since everything is UV mapped by the same code that places the objects. If I could work out how to make textures that fit together when mirrorer/rotated, etc.. then it would be better.

 

One problem I have is exactly as you've described, if you have a distinctive feature in one of the tiles, e.g. a different coloured field, it's very obvious when tiling. 

 

Andras is right in that the rotation and annotations are burnt into the mesh and only the objects can be changed using the library system, unlike FSX where they are drawn/calculated as you fly along. 

This is great news, Tony! I wonder did you developed an easy way to specific a coordinate for a particular landclass tile?

 

When I create landclass for FSX, I launch Google Earth, draw a polygon, save the polygon as a .kml file. Load the .kml in a useful utility call 'fsxkml', tag the polygon with a correct landclass, click convert, immediately the utility generate the .bgl file which I can place in fsx library for proper landclass scenery. I hope there is a similar way to do this kind of landclass scenery in XP10 too.

Remember that FSX and X-Plane have quite different methods of dealing with the mesh. At the moment you can't simply draw a small piece of mesh and then have that mesh appear in XP, here are some differences

• XP works in 1x1˚ tiles. You can't, for example, make a small mesh to cover the area around the airport. You have to create and redistribute the entire 1x1˚ tile. This IMO is a big limitation which limits the creativity of many people when creating airports, and is likely why we don't see the same quality of airports as we do in FSX. It's also a limitation for people creating photoimagery as you have to distribute on the 1x1 borders, which makes many countries impossible to do without doing parts of the neighbouring country. AFAIK, FSX doesn't have this limitation as the mesh is calculated and drawn around the aircraft as you fly
• XP's mesh is hardcoded into the DSF and can't be changed easily. You can't add new rivers or change the coastlines or overlay new bits of mesh, so you're approach in Google Earth wouldn't work in XP. The level of detail (number of triangles) is static and doesn't change, FSX calculates mesh on the fly, which makes it slower than XP and more error prone (e.g. Flying houses and popping).
• FSX's landclass scenery is divided into 1.2km grids across the globe. XP has no concept of the landclass grid, instead each triangle is assigned a texture which says how it is painted, e.g. a forest. 
• Since FSX's landclass scenery is just a grid, annotated objects can be added easily. In XP it's very difficult because textures are tiled and have different effects on them in arbitary shapes. 
• FSX can have polygon land features, but AFAIK, they aren't blended. XP has blending features for its textures, which is why you don't see hard edges on forests in XP.

There are advantages/disadvantages to both approach, and what I'm trying to achieve is:

 

• Ability to replicate the landclass grid in X-Plane so people can create annotated textures. The actual objects are dynamic in that they can use the library system so there isn't object repetition (just like in FSX).
• Ability to give the generator a polygon and say "Here is a forest, Here is water" and it will overlay the forest on top of the landclass and also blend it. I'm trying various trickery here to try and reduce the number of triangles required, e.g. by using masks. 

Of course, you will still get the same problems as FSX such as stretched textures on mountains, and roads that don't fit, but you won't get object clashes (e.g. If you add real vector/object data, it won't clash with the annotated objects). My goal is to try and merge the above with XP's mesh, so that areas of farmland or boring flat terrain can be landclass based, and the mountainous areas can stay as they are (as XP does a great job here).

 

What this won't do:

• Get around the 1x1˚ tile limit.
• Magically produce ORBX regions from OSM data. Basically, if you give it garbage, you'll get garbage back out. You'll need good data (I think ORBX place each landclass tile by hand)
• Work well without a good range of textures.

Creating the annotated textures is easy. I've create a simple tool which opens your PNG file up, and you draw shapes on it and say what should go where (you can either give it a static object, a library path or an OSM tag).

They look really great Tony,  amazing work