1 hour ago, tonywob said:

No it's not a placement issue and as I pointed out above, it's because trees have all their normals pointing straight up.

I think what he means is displacement maps, which manipulate geometry points to resmeble a bump map and when you have a shader for grass it'll result in seamless transitions between lods so you will not suffer performance wise.

Edited August 27, 20205 yr by akita

1 hour ago, tonywob said:

11 hours ago, mSparks said:

this is actually a placement issue, it is possible to get good 3d vegetation

No it's not a placement issue and as I pointed out above, it's because trees have all their normals pointing straight up

But in no way can these monstrosities be described as trees.

.for works ok for blades of grass, not bad for shrubs.

But actual trees, that stopped being 2d quads in 3d space 20 plus years ago, can only be placed individually, doing so has a massive hit on the memory bus and cpu time and there is a severe lack of actual assets to use.

individually placed the trees look fine, e.g. the vegetation in

This is not suitable for placing forests and greenery on wider scenery, and .for only supports placing 2d quads with a single normal.

On 8/26/2020 at 11:00 AM, Bjoern said:

This is the developer gateway: https://developer.x-plane.com/

Note that "World Editor" is a bit misleading as it's almost exclusively used for airports.

If you want to manipulate terrain art assets, you want the file specification documents on the scenery page here: https://developer.x-plane.com/docs/scenery/
These will tell you how art assets are placed.

Since XP is really open about everything but its flight modeling equations (baked into the binary) and mesh (binarized with MeshTool), you can simply study the default art assets, libraries and processing files. If an edit goes wrong, simply delete the broklen file and run XP's installer to fetch the original one.

User experience with the terrain system is a bit hard to come by though. Most of the lower level edits will have to be done by trial & error or studying other add-ons for reference (MisterX6's Japan, PilotBalu's XEurope, etc.).

 

As for the clouds, this project offers a free, open source replacment:

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/65005-enhanced-cloudscapes/

I placed the cloud download into my plugin folder leaving my SkyMaxx and RWC folders in place and it looks great.  Thanks.

John

On 8/26/2020 at 5:15 PM, tonywob said:

I've used it to do lots of general scenery editing that has nothing to do with airports, so it's very capable and has improved a lot over the years

On 8/26/2020 at 7:12 PM, Paraffin said:

Agreed. I've only done a little bit with it, but after fleshing out my local GA airport, I moved on to adding two 3D objects to my home town that are important visual landmarks for navigation -- a factory with tall smoke stacks and a lighthouse.

I found objects in a free online 3D library somewhere that weren't perfect representations, but good enough. It wasn't hard, so yes you can easily edit scenery outside airports. 

I stand corrected then. For off-airport work, I've only ever used Overlay Editor.

 

On 8/26/2020 at 5:32 PM, akita said:

The freeware clouds look nice, will try for sure, but clouds engine upgrade should come directly from Laminar and then developers build upon it. Current default look like based on billboards and visually horrible and seems to bottleneck cpu->gpu connection unlike modern ways which can look much prettyer and still perform better. In this regard, MSFS really is outstanding, though not unreachable, many use those, some I hope something will be done about it soon.

Depends. MSFS clouds apparently lose a lot of detail at lower settings, looking like featureless marshmallows.

But we'll see how XP12 will do it. Laminar's advantage is at least that they can work absolutely close on the rendering engine level and therefor iron out some bugs that Enhanced Cloudscapes possesses.

 

21 hours ago, akita said:

Starting to learn x-plane's scenery anatomy, obviously a rough "proof of concept", this is gonna be really fun.

got the object from: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/26611-3d-people-library/

Those are auto-gen kids 😉

 

Nice!

If you need a concrete project, try adding some vegetation to the default grassland textures. I never really understood why Laminar added at least some sparse trees or tree lines to them. Makes the landscape look really odd between the detailed cities and dense forests.

If you're into regionalization and can get a hold of corresponding asssets, try regionalizing the road traffic and signage (this can be done by means of library). There used to be an XP10/11 package that swapped out the generic cars, trains, signs and supermarkets when in Europe, but the author has disappeared from the scene and the download alongside it.

 

19 hours ago, Paraffin said:

Meanwhile, I load up a similar Cessna in XP11 11.50 RC1 at the same airport with Orbx TE WA loaded, and I'm seeing frame rates in the 90's. I just saw 104 fps this afternoon (using Rivatuner onscreen display for FPS on both sims). That's nuts, I don't need that kind of frame rate to fly!  🙃 

Granted, part of that is I haven't dug into the XP settings that much after upgrading to a 1660ti card a few months ago, so I should start looking at things like ground shadows and reflections I've turned off. But there does seem to be a ton of performance overhead on systems like mine that Laminar could use in XP12 to improve scenery and weather.

Trim your display settings and framerate for the worst of situations (737-800X over a huge city with lots and lots of dense clouds) and then launch X-Plane via batch file with the "--lock_fr=xx" flag, "xx" being next to the lowest framerate you've observed in your test. This works just like the slider in FSX and will limit your FPS to that value without the penalty that Vsync will incur. A steady framerate is worth a lot, especially when using headtracking or VR.

 

11 hours ago, tonywob said:

Not to turn this in to a sim war, but Asobo's method is very clever. Their trees are still 2D, but the normals on the trees are mathematically manipulated as if they're 3D changing they're viewing angle with the viewer, meaning unless you get really close to the trees, you are fooled to thinking they're detailed 3D with the correct lighting. I wouldn't be surprised if LR are doing something like this as well, as detailed 3D trees is out of the question for our current hardware.

Uh, this sounds like rotating billboards to me.

 

1 hour ago, Old_As_Dirt said:

I placed the cloud download into my plugin folder leaving my SkyMaxx and RWC folders in place and it looks great.  Thanks.

No problem. The plugin uses default weather datarefs, so it should work with any weather injector.

If you need some real-time, persistent tweaking capability, you can try my controller utility: https://github.com/JT8D-17/Enhanced-Cloudscapes-Controller-for-X-Plane

I found that a resolution of 40% incurs nearly zero framerate hit and even allows using 2xSSAA+FXAA to improve the black outline issue a bit (which does not affect the cockpit where one spends most time, btw).

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

If you're into regionalization and can get a hold of corresponding asssets, try regionalizing the road traffic and signage (this can be done by means of library). There used to be an XP10/11 package that swapped out the generic cars, trains, signs and supermarkets when in Europe, but the author has disappeared from the scene and the download alongside it.

As I see, regions can be achieved with as much needed black and white pixel bitmaps so whites represent the region, then those regions can be defined in the library using the mentioned bitmaps.

I think you can create sub-regions too for special cases.

So in theory, a big opensource regional library for every country in the same pack is achievable, like an opensource gateway for auto-gen. It's tricky for laminar to do since they need to keep some consistency in performance and storage. 

But the foundations for this kind of system is there.

16 hours ago, tonywob said:

No it's not a placement issue and as I pointed out above, it's because trees have all their normals pointing straight up, so they glow like the ground does. You can add more planes to a tree, but it will never eliminate the problem and just bog down X-Plane even more in terms of performance. In P3D, the billboards are rotated to face the viewer, essentially masking the problem. I've created trees from lots of planes in my airport projects, and they'll still have nasty lighting effects that clearly shows the geometry on how they're made up and it's simply a fight we can't win with the current engine and LR have even told me it needs a next-gen lighting engine to fix.

The xVision PBR hack that stopped the trees glowing seemed to work only because it caused the trees to simply not show lighting effects at all, essentially remaining static like they were in X-Plane 10. The hack also caused PBR problems in cockpits as it exaggerated PBR.

You can also add normal maps to trees that can help a bit, but it's still "plainly" obvious it's a cardboard cutout, and X-Plane .for files don't support normal maps anyway.

Not to turn this in to a sim war, but Asobo's method is very clever. Their trees are still 2D, but the normals on the trees are mathematically manipulated as if they're 3D changing they're viewing angle with the viewer, meaning unless you get really close to the trees, you are fooled to thinking they're detailed 3D with the correct lighting. I wouldn't be surprised if LR are doing something like this as well, as detailed 3D trees is out of the question for our current hardware.

Anyway sorry to the original poster for going off-topic a bit, I just wanted to clarify that problem that I've moaned about for years 🙂

This is actually a legit discussion.

From what I saw for now, what x-plane needs to do is to open .for files for 3d object scattering, the new .for format can have handy controls to define the placements rather random (forests) or in a strings manner (like agricultural fields).

Seamless lods for vegetation are the key though, I saw many games manage to this almost perfectly while avoiding normal artifacts in thr 2d lod.

Then those can leave foot-prints to give the general color on top of the base mesh terrain. Looks like they already do that with auto-gen buildings. 

Edit: Also, it seems grass can be made using .agp file format, you attach 2d grass blade (think of it a tiny tree) object and then scatter it using control texture, they do that with buildings.

Edited August 27, 20205 yr by akita

6 hours ago, akita said:

Then those can leave foot-prints to give the general color on top of the base mesh terrain. Looks like they already do that with auto-gen buildings. 

Edit: Also, it seems grass can be made using .agp file format, you attach 2d grass blade (think of it a tiny tree) object and then scatter it using control texture, they do that with buildings.

yes, "a start" but then you run into the issue that agps were all created by hand.

I also dont rate asobo's trees that highly tbh, reminds me of this from 8 years ago

What I want/expect today should look more like

I will gush when someone finally connects a decent flight model with decent vegetation, still waiting.

In all other aspects xp scenery and tools are very good, its really the veg that lets it down.

Edited August 28, 20205 yr by mSparks

12 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Uh, this sounds like rotating billboards to me.

It's not... since it's actually a snapshot of a 3D model, so you're not seeing the same face constantly rotated towards you, but an actual representation of the original 3D tree model from the viewer's angle (i.e. It does not look the same on all sides like in X-Plane and P3D)

18 minutes ago, tonywob said:

It's not... since it's actually a snapshot of a 3D model, so you're not seeing the same face constantly rotated towards you, but an actual representation of the original 3D tree model from the viewer's angle (i.e. It does not look the same on all sides like in X-Plane and P3D)

which will look every bit the cardboard cutout in VR as current xplane quads.

OK hack for a single 2d screen, but probably even worse than XP .for when you have depth perception.

HD forests is a decent upgrade and ok placeholder

but still lacking anything resembling a canopy

Edited August 28, 20205 yr by mSparks

4 minutes ago, mSparks said:

which will look every bit the cardboard cutout in VR as current xplane quads.

Oh yes, no doubt... same with the parallax interior (Spiderman effect) on windows... I'll be curious how they get around this...

2 Things after some testing 11.50RC2.

1) AI aircraft are way over-detailed than they should be, with the cockpit and cabin rendered! Really wasteful.

2) For anything beyond sea-planes, reflections should go to low. To me this is the difference between 35-40FPS in heaviest conditions and 50-55FPS. 0 visual impact other than scenery reflected off water surfaces; unless you are in a seaplane or free camera mode and get a good angle, you can't even see them even if you really want to.

Other than that, everything is literally maxed out here, performance in x-plane are second to none.

 

 

Edited August 28, 20205 yr by akita

17 minutes ago, akita said:

2 Things after some testing 11.50RC2.

1) AI aircraft are way over-detailed than they should be, with the cockpit and cabin rendered! Really wasteful.

2) For anything beyond sea-planes, reflections should go to low. To me this is the difference between 35-40FPS in heaviest conditions and 50-55FPS. 0 visual impact other than scenery reflected off water surfaces; unless you are in a seaplane or free camera mode and get a good angle, you can't even see them even if you really want to.

Other than that, everything is literally maxed out here, performance in x-plane are second to none.

 

 

Laminar I think quiet a while ago asked developers to provide a basic ver of their planes to use as Ai. some do. But even in FSX it was users that provided most of the ai models

2 hours ago, tonywob said:

 I'll be curious how they get around this...

I'll be (happily) surprised if we actually see it.

I expect this Reverb exclusive (wat da f'?) release to get even worse reviews than the main install has then they kill it.

27 minutes ago, akita said:

0 visual impact

Unfortunately not, if the aircraft has PBR, while only obvious once you know what's missing those reflections disappear from the cockpit, glass and especially external views.

Edited August 28, 20205 yr by mSparks

10 hours ago, mSparks said:

Unfortunately not, if the aircraft has PBR, while only obvious once you know what's missing those reflections disappear from the cockpit, glass and especially external views.

I do appteciate neat little detail but i don't feel i need this, it's good to have the option though.

Anyway I believe that cockpits should be ray traced, this is where perforamnce for it is managable as a "closed scene", of course keep the normal option for those who can't have it.

 

Edited August 28, 20205 yr by akita

It is good to see scenery being discussed. A better presentation of the world in X-Plane would be big plus. It's nice to fly low and slow and see some of the great sights in our world. I like flight-seeing as well as commercial flight simulation.

Good luck with X-Plane 12. Make it great.