LR have posted some shots of their new autogen for Europe on their Facebook page:





https://web.facebook.com/XPlaneOfficial/photos/pcb.10153900495206283/10153900494986283/?type=3&theater

 

Looks very impressive and a great start, although having Germany all over Europe might upset a few people.

LOL, are they not already?

This is really an improvement. That would give a more realistic touch in France and Italy as well, at least north Italy.

Now if only LR could get rid of those crossed billboards trees in the foreground ...I know...I know...one thing at a time

Looks great ...

I think the trees aren't too bad. The fact that it has to render thousands of them seems the best balance between performance and appearance. That being said, if there was a way for them to be higher detailed closer up and degrade to billboards in the distance would be great.
 

At least having red roofs in Europe will be an improvement.

 

 

LOL, are they not already?

 

There was a popular joke in Europe just after the first Greek crisis that went something like the following.

 

Angela Merkel, when passing through Athens International was briefly questioned at immigration:

 

Immigration Officer: "Name?"

Ms. Merkel: "Angela Merkel."

Immigration Officer: "Occupation?"

Ms. Merkel: "Not this time."

LR made a joke during the presentation in Cosford that Brits wouldn't like the German theme because of some recent important vote :-)

@Tony

Should we wait for a France PRO  :wink:  Would be cool. Are those screenshots photoreal? The overlay layer of vegetation looks so great, an improved Orbx I'd say.

 

Regarding trees of course in the long distance they are good but at medium/short range the average autogen trees  break immersion especially at certain time where shadows make them ugly. In this case I think the best solution would be to have rotating one side BB, the result in FS world is definitely better when flying low or at airport.

 

 

Should we wait for a France PRO    Would be cool. Are those screenshots photoreal? The overlay layer of vegetation looks so great, an improved Orbx I'd say.

 

I removed the shots and I'll start another topic (I moderated myself for going off-topic  )

 

 

In this case I think the best solution would be to have rotating one side BB, the result in FS world is definitely better when flying low or at airport.

 

Is that how this works in FSX/P3D. I can't remember, but I do know the trees seemed to look better there.

Wow! These models will work great here in Norway! Let´s face it: They look a lot more european than the US autogen   Hope that they will work fine in conjunction with the World2Xplane World Models @Tonywob? 

Either way - great news! Cant wait for 11! 

 

 

Hope that they will work fine in conjunction with the World2Xplane World Models @Tonywob? 

 

There's no reason why it shouldn't. Although, the world-models buildings look bad compared to these. What I'm curious about is how it looks outside of cities. If all the houses look like this (even in small villages), it will look quite odd. 

There's no reason why it shouldn't. Although, the world-models buildings look bad compared to these. What I'm curious about is how it looks outside of cities. If all the houses look like this (even in small villages), it will look quite odd. 

I can see in the upper left corner of the first image an area with low residential houses, I hope that outside town these will be used though I don't know how they can detect and define the city (better city centre)  boundary.

The most interesting thing about the new XP11 autogen is (imho) that 3pd's can create autogen for whatever region they want. Out of the box, so I understood, Europe will look German all over but when people start working on this you can get Dutch autogen, Italian, Norwegian, French, whatever.

 

I have to add I am also curious what the autogen outside of cities like this one look. And what about suburbs or modern city centers.

 

 

The most interesting thing about the new XP11 autogen is (imho) that 3pd's can create autogen for whatever region they want. Out of the box, so I understood, Europe will look German all over but when people start working on this you can get Dutch autogen, Italian, Norwegian, French, whatever.

 

Well you can do this already in XP10, it really is no different. I did exactly this for my Czech/Slovakia building sets. 

 

 

I can see in the upper left corner of the first image an area with low residential house

 

It looks like the default trailer park homes again, but hard to be sure from the screenshot :/

I hope that outside town these will be used though I don't know how they can detect and define the city (better city centre)  boundary.

This (knowing where what kind of urban density we have) is indeed a very complex topic and usually most users don't or can't imagine how hard it can be. But indeed, ever since Global Scenery was introduced (late in the XP8 run), Laminar (and since XP10 me) tried to somehow solve this issu (otherwise you wouldn't have this differentiation in XP10 ... but you can clearly see, that there is some degree of density modeling).

 

Simply put: there is no unified, reliable, hight resolution, easily available urban density data which we can use out of the box (one of the simple reasons is, that this science is extremely subjective and can be interpreted - depending on scientific needs - very differently).

 

At least - in the meantime - most land class source data I use, gives at least a simple differentiation between urbanized / non urbanizes (so, we have a more or less usable information about where cities / toewns / villages are located). But then begins the problem of the density interpretation. For example the US NLCD land class data has a quite usefule additional "heat map" layer, which allows for a quite reasonable approximation of urban densities. In Europe, the CORINE land class data has some similar info ... but is less like a heat map and needs some tuning. Many other regions of the planet do not have such info at all ... there we need to either generate our own "heat map" (outside lower, inside higher density) or try to mix in some other population density data sources (there is a quite interesting one for Africa / Asia / South America). usually my approach is to try to figure out the best way for evely landclass source when generating urban densities (and as I told, this already happened for XP10 .... and now is further improved for XP11 ... depending on available data etc.)

 

But even if we have now this density information, it still has quite some variance over the different regions of the planet and thus, when generating autgen info from it, it can still result in different end results.

 

Add to this, that even though we have this density info, it is still too imprecise to generate skylines (or high buildings) from it. For that we need some additional information ... which is even less trivial to get. With XP10 Laminar used some obstacle dtabases (mostly only available in the US) to get some "high building" heights .... Wich XP11 we try to move to building height information coming from openStreetmap which already has usable building height information in some regions. But tstill, we are fully dependent on the data quality / availability coming from OSM (and still, its by far the best we - or you the users - can get at the moment, even if its inconsistent).