Of course I'd love to make Japan, but how many Japanese do you see on these forums (Apart from ScotchEgg, who I believe is a British expat, and I'm quite jealous because I love Japan)?.

I don't think there is a possibility to please everyone and I'd love to be able to do that :). For a lot of simmers, the UK and Poland are boring or difficult (in real-life) places for GA and it's hard far me to show a screenshot of say Poland or the UK and say "wow, look at that!!!!!" when the screenshot shows my local supermarket or house. I'm sure nobody here would argue how cool it is to fly over somewhere where they recognise every building, but I can't expect someone who lives it Oregon or Tokyo to agree with me :-). I recently gave a GA pilot based in Warsaw an early version of Poland Pro and he posted some (to me amazing) screenshots, but as he rightly said, the screenshots have little meaning on someone who doesn't live or fly there. 

I've slowly learned to accept that you can't please everyone. I concentrate on those two countries (and Norway because it's my PNW) because they mean something to me and I have passion to make them look good. I am simmer like everyone else and I'd never release something I would consider unrealistic to other simmers (even for free) unless I am happy with it (and yes, GB Pro was amazing to me at some point, but now it hurts my eyes :-)). I want others to feel the same I do when flying over a region and if anyone wants to work with me to do this, then I'm all ears :)

Commercially, I would throw the UK and Norway in the bin and work on California which is a very interesting place for a GA pilot, but I have zero connection to the place and no experience of what seems real, etc, but if anyone wants to work with me then again "I'm all ears" :-)

 

2 hours ago, tonywob said:

Of course I'd love to make Japan, but how many Japanese do you see on these forums (Apart from ScotchEgg, who I believe is a British expat, and I'm quite jealous because I love Japan)?.

 

Sure, although I'd love to see it happen I'm sure there is a huge list of projects that make a lot more sense before Japan is ever considered. There is a simming community here but I'd guess it numbers in the lower 10s of thousands and tends to keep to their own language sites. Having said that I'm pretty sure that if bespoke scenery was released the majority of that community would buy it.

Yes, British immigrant in Tokyo (been here too long to say expat now!).

Germany would be cool too But Ireland is my favorite Country and i would pay for it.

On 02/03/2017 at 11:35 AM, tonywob said:

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)

(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).

 

 

Low quality?!! Haha at 2000ft these would look pretty good - more importantly the appropriate house styles alone make it sing!!

 

This looks marvelous!

I know it's a little off topic, but as i cant yet post on the XPlane forum this seemed as good to get the idea out...

I had this idea a while back - although i lack the skills to achieve it - of a scenery plugin that checks the notams and places objects in a layer that are referenced in the notam. As these provide lat/long, standard description and times and dates, would it be too hard to have something inject cranes, fireworks, air balloons, parachuting and other basic obstruction features into XPlane scenery? This would seem to be a really simple way to add an extra level of realism and challenge to a scenery system... It would make it necessary to check the notams when planning! 

Just wanted to get the thought out there where you genius scenery bods might be able to read and ponder on it :)

Any progress news on the scenery? I don't like fast food so don't rush, but wondered how it's coming along?

I really like to see some work in progress. Please keep feeding this thread with pictures. :)

@tonywob - been a while since we heard anything, have you managed to make any progress?

Thanks

Rich

Interested in any available progress reports also.

Well sadly, there isn't too much to update on I'm afraid. I paused this for a while to work on an airport and a tree generator utility. I'll probably release a small area to start with for testing and to gain performance feedback.

Anyhow, I still need to make commercial buildings autogen as well as integrate my tree scanning tool into part of the scenery.

Great! Thanks for letting us know :) Just glad it's still happening, it's too good to miss...

I'm happy to install the test area and provide feedback, if that helps?