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tonywob

England VFR (Revisiting and playing with landclass scenery)

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Tony, how do you see this comparing to gbpro? I'm using your v2 with orthodox and it is fantastic with max objects in xp11. Have you stopped development of gbpro now? Is this going to be a suitable replacement or is this landclass only?

i love how landclass can look and acknowledge ortho deficiencies but for vfr practice I need the ortho side of things. 

 

Chris

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I think this might be a much better version of GBpro.


Ryzen 5 1600x - 16GB DDR4 - RTX 3050 8GB - MSI Gaming Plus

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1 hour ago, Fi5kuS said:

 

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

 

Yes see screenshots on page 3 :-)

Just to clarify a few things. Yes I decided to abandon GB Pro v3 because it offered little improvement over v2. The biggest issue with GB Pro v2 and my work-in-progress v3 was that the buildings just looked random and if you removed the orthos it looked like someone had just chucked random buildings all over the scenery with no thought and the vast majority of users don't have orthos (I cringe when I see pictures without orthos). My old approach was to find any building (within reason) that matched a particular footprint, so you'd get widely different types of houses along a single road with some facing sideways, and it looked ugly and unrealistic. The only time this type of scenery looks good is when it has a good photo-imagery layer below it and you are flying at least 2-3000ft. The other issue is that it required hundreds of different buildings creating, and the more variety of buildings the worse the performance. So, apart from Poland Pro (which I haven't released yet http://www.avsim.com/topic/503575-touring-poland-xp11/) which is only meant to be used with orthos, I don't think simply adding some more building types is going to help with GB Pro v3, especially because the data I have to work with really isn't that good (It's far too generalised)

So here is where I am going with this approach:

1. Instead of following building footprints exactly, I use them simply as a guide to place autogen. So the buildings don't sit perfectly on top of orthos, but with a matching ground texture under the building, it's not noticable.

2. By autogen (since I think the term is misused when referring to W2XP building placement), I'm talking about filling areas with buildings using the standard X-Plane autogen system, spacing them out so the buildings are generated close to where the real ones are. W2XP didn't autogen buildings, each building was placed from real data, so there was no auto-generation

3. Autogen lets you have things like the below: (Sorry for the low quality shots, these are done on my dev computer, not my gaming one)

1.thumb.jpeg.104c8d8cbdd406334fd102a97a838f5e.jpeg

2.thumb.jpeg.e3700d1b3de34e326d33ce89e746058f.jpeg

3.thumb.jpeg.5e7ba79be5464bfbb7382b4d9bc207f5.jpeg

(These to me look so much better than a simple square building placed seemingly randomally in a field).

4. For large industrial buildings and tall buildings, these will be no different than what you see in GB Pro, I will use the footprint directly. 

5. I'm not targeting users of ortho imagery, but it works very well with it. At the moment it's just autogen, forests, roads and some objects. When placed on default scenery, it makes it look less German or American, and towns, villages, small housing estates should easily be identifiable. The autogen is placed based on the type of building that is there in real-life, so where you see terraces is because there are probably terraces there in real-life, and where you see large detached houses is similar. It's very possible you will see a single autogen house exactly where your real home would be.

6. The initial release is not going to be a full-landclass texture replacement. Autogen on its own is a huge amount of work (especially since the formats aren't amazingly well documented and I am having to create my own tools to author them). I may include some things like parks, plazas, football pitches, etc, but I'm considering it to be an upgrade to the default scenery to make it look more regional, and this is what I'm aiming for. A full landclass scenery will take a lot of work (and I have lots of issues to work out), but I am working on it.

7. ..and finally, if this is something that people like, I'd like to regionalise other areas (not just Europe).

 

 

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Be assured that people...will like and even pay if you go for a payware solution.

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1 hour ago, Desaix said:

Be assured that people...will like and even pay if you go for a payware solution.

Indeed.

 

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9 hours ago, ca_metal said:

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.

I agree, and I'd pay for it as a commercial product. It's not easy though, because it requires creating a bunch of new 3D objects from scratch, with enough variety that repeating objects aren't too obvious.

We have the new buildings and roads for Europe in XP11. Now we need that for the rest of the world. That means generic upscale houses with orange tile roofs for Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean (and Miami), along with some downscale buildings and houses with galvanized metal roofs for surrounding areas. Then houses and commercial buildings with scattered blue tile roofs for major cities in Japan, the ability to place dirt roads where appropriate in places like South America, Asia, Africa, and so on.

Not exactly a small project. Boot up Google Earth and zoom in on these different parts of the world and you'll see how challenging it will be. The good news is that 3D objects are very compact on disk compared to orthophotos, so worldwide coverage with regional building styles is actually a practical idea, once we have enough objects and placement data to work with. 

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X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator on Windows 10 
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Japan would be an excellent place to fly with those Japanese houses. But yeah a quality payware for England would be real good.

Next India Pro but sadly no good data available


Ryzen 5 1600x - 16GB DDR4 - RTX 3050 8GB - MSI Gaming Plus

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7 hours ago, tonywob said:

By autogen (since I think the term is misused when referring to W2XP building placement), I'm talking about filling areas with buildings using the standard X-Plane autogen system, spacing them out so the buildings are generated close to where the real ones are. W2XP didn't autogen buildings, each building was placed from real data, so there was no auto-generation

...

Autogen on its own is a huge amount of work (especially since the formats aren't amazingly well documented and I am having to create my own tools to author them).

So are you talking about the Autogen Block (.agb) format as documented here? Good to see someone digging into them if so as they were trumpeted as part of the 'plausible world' for the XP10 release and have some neat features. Odd in many ways that the format hasn't had more attention.

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16 hours ago, tonywob said:

(These to me look so much better than a simple square building placed seemingly randomally in a field).

They look superb indeed.

So if I understand this correctly, this is using the standard X-Plane autogen system, but using OSM data to generate more realistic placement of the buildings?

One of my biggest issues with default X-Plane autogen is that it insists on placing buildings beside roads in places where they have no such business being. For example, leading south from my city (Edmonton) is a wide dual highway, 3 lanes each direction, with a very wide median in the middle, cut with overpasses every mile or two until it reaches the town of Leduc, which happens to be right across said highway from CYEG (Edmonton International). X-Plane insists on placing houses in that median, and around all the overpasses, and the roads & service roads leading from the overpasses. It looks horrible. Using pure OSM data for building placement removes the issue.

Other thoughts:

- Even though you are playing with the idea of landclass textures, the actual autogen is separate from those textures, correct? Meaning, it's not annotated textures aka MSFS style? A potential idea might be (in the far future, when you're ready to release anything with landclass) is to keep the landclass textures as a select-able option for those who might prefer the default X-Plane textures. Sometimes they work quite well.

- If you were to be successful in refining your autogen tools to work good enough for general use, will you be open to sharing them as you did with world2xplane? I would love local scenery with the quality of the images you've shown, but it wouldn't make financial sense for any sort of a payware effort to be made in my local region.

- You deserve our thanks, in advance of you even releasing any of this, for even making the effort. It's stuff like this that makes X-Plane such a rewarding sim to be involved with!

 


Jim Stewart

Milviz Person.

 

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12 hours ago, Paraffin said:

I agree, and I'd pay for it as a commercial product. It's not easy though, because it requires creating a bunch of new 3D objects from scratch, with enough variety that repeating objects aren't too obvious.

We have the new buildings and roads for Europe in XP11. Now we need that for the rest of the world. That means generic upscale houses with orange tile roofs for Mexico, Central and South America, the Caribbean (and Miami), along with some downscale buildings and houses with galvanized metal roofs for surrounding areas. Then houses and commercial buildings with scattered blue tile roofs for major cities in Japan, the ability to place dirt roads where appropriate in places like South America, Asia, Africa, and so on.

Not exactly a small project. Boot up Google Earth and zoom in on these different parts of the world and you'll see how challenging it will be. The good news is that 3D objects are very compact on disk compared to orthophotos, so worldwide coverage with regional building styles is actually a practical idea, once we have enough objects and placement data to work with. 

That´s what I´m looking for. Sure I´d pay for that too.

Would be really amazing to actually notice the difference between flying over italy and UK for example.

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12 hours ago, HumptyDumpty said:

Japan would be an excellent place to fly with those Japanese houses. 

It really is. It's all mountains so the terrain is quite dramatic. (Although the vast majority of housing in Japan is pretty ugly)

Unfortunately I don't think the dimming market is that big so probably wouldn't be worth the time, but Tony if you ever decide to give it a go and need someone to take pictures of the buildings, let me know...


i910900k, RTX 3090, 32GB DDR4 RAM, AW3423DW, Ruddy girt big mug of Yorkshire Tea

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38 minutes ago, scotchegg said:

It really is. It's all mountains so the terrain is quite dramatic. (Although the vast majority of housing in Japan is pretty ugly)

Unfortunately I don't think the dimming market is that big so probably wouldn't be worth the time, but Tony if you ever decide to give it a go and need someone to take pictures of the buildings, let me know...

Well what about those architectural houses ? That's where it could shine. Africa / Asia needs to be there in flight sims you know what i mean


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1 hour ago, scotchegg said:

It really is. It's all mountains so the terrain is quite dramatic. (Although the vast majority of housing in Japan is pretty ugly)

Unfortunately I don't think the dimming market is that big so probably wouldn't be worth the time, but Tony if you ever decide to give it a go and need someone to take pictures of the buildings, let me know...

 

21 minutes ago, HumptyDumpty said:

Well what about those architectural houses ? That's where it could shine. Africa / Asia needs to be there in flight sims you know what i mean

That's true. Although Japan has some fantastic landscapes, the current houses and buildings are in most cases absolutely boring, rather unattractive and built primarily functional. Aside a very small number, almost all of the traditional houses are no longer existing - be it due to the fact that Japan is hit by earthquakes and various other natural disasters on a regular base or due to the fact that lots of old and traditional infrastructure was destroyed during and/or after WWII. Now i am not referring to temples or so here but the vast majority of casual houses and buildings that shape today's japanese landscapes. However, the good thing is, that those houses and buildings could be remodelled rather easily as autogen-types for X-Plane. And - another good thing: Lots of these rather simple types of houses, which are typical for Japan nowadays, are also quite common to Taiwan, South Korea and parts of China, which means that they could be used to cover a very large area.

:smile:

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7 hours ago, Jimmy RFR said:

So if I understand this correctly, this is using the standard X-Plane autogen system, but using OSM data to generate more realistic placement of the buildings?

Not OSM data, but much better data which gives good coverage (the same data I used for GB Pro). So it's using the standard X-Plane autogen system (with custom artwork), but the placement only happens where there are actually buildings.

I also know the issue of the autogen being placed along roads where they aren't in real-life. The autogen system (at least my version of it) will spawn buildings along the sides which are facing the road, so if an area around a highway is tagged inside a residential zone and an autogen zone is placed, it will spawn buildings along the highway. The chances of it happening using my approach is much less because if I don't see that there are actually any buildings in the area to be spawned, it won't spawn any buildings, so yes it possibly still can happen, but much less that it normally would. Of course this is for the UK, other countries will differ based on available data.

--

Japan would be an interesting place to do. I remember on my last visit there taking the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka and it was non-stop grey buildings along the coast most of the way.

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Yeah Tony that be wonderful if you could make Japan in your list of do countries. Tokyo would be a fantastic night time area to fly in I guess.

When I was using HD Japan I really liked flying in Sapporo.


Ryzen 5 1600x - 16GB DDR4 - RTX 3050 8GB - MSI Gaming Plus

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