England VFR (Revisiting and playing with landclass scenery)

[alpilotx 505]

5 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Also with the autopen upgrades, will you be able / waiting to take advantage of the new height tags coming for XP11? I think that's going to make a big difference to the realism of the autogen.

Wait ... here you might interpret a bit too much in the "height tags". Thats not any kind of new feature in the rendering engine which Tony might / could use ... its something he can do immediately, as its just plain, good, "old tech" (and in a way, he has done it for a long time with his w2xp approach).

The difference in the future will be is, that in the default Scenery (and equally in future HD / UHD Mesh) we will use - much, much - more building height information than until now. Up to now, Ben only used good old FAA data in the US to spawn some additional high buildings in the base scenery (and with spawn, I mean simple. low tech objects or facade based buildings). Now what I did was to extract similar data from OSM on a global scale and inject it - the same way it happened before - into the scenery generator and let it spawn such buildings now globally. So the main change was / is, that we are now using a new data base (OSM) to do the "good ol trick" on  a much wider scale (--> globally). And indeed, it seems to work very nicely in many places ... but also has still more potential: its waiting for even more building height info in OSM (which is up to all of you and all OSM editors :) )

So, thats what is already in the pipeline. But indeed, Ben was thinking about introducing an even more "sophisticated" tech, that would make this "trick" happen trough the autogen layer (and not via simple object / facade buildings). Where the autogen would scale up and down based on real "height tags" supplied to this ... Of course, this didn't happen until now and it was clear that Ben won't have enough resources at the moment to implement this ... Thats why I hacked in the height data the old (but still quite effective) way into the system.

 

[tonywob 4,769]

6 hours ago, scotchegg said:

As someone who just can't get over the distractions of Orthos (baked in shadows, stationary cars etc.) the land class textures are a real attraction for me. I can totally understand that they take a lot of work but they are definitely part of your future development plans Tony? If so I might hold off on the GB upgrade until they're included, unless you're thinking of getting the autogen upgrades out the door first with the land class as a separate add-on?

Also with the autopen upgrades, will you be able / waiting to take advantage of the new height tags coming for XP11? I think that's going to make a big difference to the realism of the autogen.

Well in reality, all land class textures do is mimic/fake orthos. At least in ORBX scenery, the tiles are just photoshopped orthos made to tile, and they have a lot of them I'd imagine. Either way, it's definitely in my plans and I'm actively working on it, but the autogen is something I could release as something that ortho users could use. Bare in mind as well that to make the scenery appear authentic enough it would require not just a lot of time but also the purchase of some large areas of imagery to use as textures (and that isn't cheap). 

6 hours ago, scotchegg said:

Also with the autopen upgrades, will you be able / waiting to take advantage of the new height tags coming for XP11? I think that's going to make a big difference to the realism of the autogen.

Well the OSM height information is very disappointing in the UK (it's virtually non-existant). When there is a building with a height larger than 5 stories, I'll add that building straight in without using autogen. At the moment, all I can do is use the data I have to work out where the city/town centres are and adjust the heights accordingly (I think this is what X-Plane already does). The problem in the UK is the availability of data,  nothing is available cheaply so it's really difficult to get it super accurate, it just needs to be believable. I also think having a few handmade landmarks is important as well

[tonywob 4,769]

27 minutes ago, alpilotx said:

And indeed, it seems to work very nicely in many places ... but also has still more potential: its waiting for even more building height info in OSM (which is up to all of you and all OSM editors :) )

Indeed, it's so easy to go into OSM and add heights. So if anyone wants to help out with this and the default X-Plane scenery, go into your local area and add height or storey tags to tall buildings, e.g. Add building:levels=14 to a 14 storey block. I wouldn't bother tagging anything below 5 stories.

[alpilotx 505]

6 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Indeed, it's so easy to go into OSM and add heights. So if anyone wants to help out with this and the default X-Plane scenery, go into your local area and add height or storey tags to tall buildings, e.g. Add building:levels=14 to a 14 storey block. I wouldn't bother tagging anything below 5 stories.

Correct ... I think our filter for buildings we consider starts somewhere around 20 meters ... which is approximately 5 building levels.

So, I can - again - repeat my own and Tonys words. Who ever has time and wants to have some fun in OSM, go and add high buildings (or just add height / "buidling:levels" to existing buildings). It will help us to all in the long run

[Humpty 751]

43 minutes ago, alpilotx said:

Correct ... I think our filter for buildings we consider starts somewhere around 20 meters ... which is approximately 5 building levels.

So, I can - again - repeat my own and Tonys words. Who ever has time and wants to have some fun in OSM, go and add high buildings (or just add height / "buidling:levels" to existing buildings). It will help us to all in the long run

Who created Bombay with high rises ?

[alpilotx 505]

1 hour ago, HumptyDumpty said:

Who created Bombay with high rises ?

OSM vise or scenery vise? And where, default, add-on scenery? please be a tiny bit more precise in your questions  ...

[Humpty 751]

2 minutes ago, alpilotx said:

OSM vise or scenery vise? And where, default, add-on scenery? please be a tiny bit more precise in your questions  ...

OSM

[alpilotx 505]

11 minutes ago, HumptyDumpty said:

OSM

Then the answer is easy: OSM is a gigantic, free, open project like Wikipedia (not just for X-Plane ... effectively we are just a tiny group of end users for OSM). Thus, anybody could have done that .... But usually if you go into any OSM editor, there is always a user tag, which tells you who made the last edit.

[Humpty 751]

1 minute ago, alpilotx said:

Then the answer is easy: OSM is a gigantic, free, open project like Wikipedia (not just for X-Plane ... effectively we are just a tiny group of end users for OSM). Thus, anybody could have done that .... But usually if you go into any OSM editor, there is always a user tag, which tells you who made the last edit.

Yep I know but all tall buildings are by me but mostly are giving height to them. That reminds me more editing to be done.

It looks very nice with w2xp

[ca_metal 2,024]

On 28/02/2017 at 6:34 AM, tonywob said:

Indeed, it's so easy to go into OSM and add heights. So if anyone wants to help out with this and the default X-Plane scenery, go into your local area and add height or storey tags to tall buildings, e.g. Add building:levels=14 to a 14 storey block. I wouldn't bother tagging anything below 5 stories.

Tony, do you intend to put other textures on your sceneries, like golf courses, urban parks, plazas based on the osm data? Would it be possible?

What are the chances you producing autogen for asia or south america?

[tonywob 4,769]

If it adds something to the scenery and I can get data on their locations, then yes.

Asia and South America are huge regions, so the only thing likely to be seen are smaller regions (depending on availability of data)

[ca_metal 2,024]

9 hours ago, tonywob said:

If it adds something to the scenery and I can get data on their locations, then yes.

In my opinion would add a lot to the sceneries. I mean, when I look to the pictures on this thread, i fell amazed, but at the same time, something is missing to be more imersive. There are a lot of empty lots with just grass. Would be great to see plazas, parks, courts and things like that.

Quote

Asia and South America are huge regions, so the only thing likely to be seen are smaller regions (depending on availability of data)

I don´t know how autogen works on X-plane, but wouldn´t be possible to you make new autogen to some specified region? I mean would be great to have customized autogen to those regions, even without enough data to make those regions more real. Just changing to a more regionalized autogen would make a big difference.

[Humpty 751]

1 hour ago, ca_metal said:

In my opinion would add a lot to the sceneries. I mean, when I look to the pictures on this thread, i fell amazed, but at the same time, something is missing to be more imersive. There are a lot of empty lots with just grass. Would be great to see plazas, parks, courts and things like that.

I don´t know how autogen works on X-plane, but wouldn´t be possible to you make new autogen to some specified region? I mean would be great to have customized autogen to those regions, even without enough data to make those regions more real. Just changing to a more regionalized autogen would make a big difference.

That could be done provided the 3d models exists for parks , golf courses. There is a golf course right behind my house and a race course , for these i used WED adding things manually and the race course looks great.  

[tonywob 4,769]

Parks, football pitches and golf courses are ideal candidates for draped-annotated polygons and something I plan on doing (I've already done basic ones for parks). Other objects such as stadiums require more exact placement (maybe even a 3D model of the real thing). Placing them all by hand is not something I fancy doing and prefer the lazy approach of getting them from OpenStreetMap or some other source.

[Fi5kuS 57]

So is this compatible as an overlay to UK orthophotos, or?