Almost no conifers or palm trees, almost all deciduous?

[BijanStudio 896]

23 minutes ago, Greazer said:

To be honest the devs need to add a lot more types and fine tune the trees in the sim by location, and by doing so, the tree types will define what type of year they change color and the leaves fall (if at all).  This is the true and proper way to solve not just the trees but season colors.

I doubt that will ever happen. Changing seasons is not just changing tree colors. All the green ground grass textures must change too. That means taking pictures of the whole planet in different seasons which I don't think will happen.

[dobee51 349]

If you just need to test that your palm trees are working, download Catalina island mod and go to KAVX. There's palm trees there on both sides of the runway.

[Manny 1,293]

Your request (74960) has been received.

The world needs Coconut Trees.

I am not seeing any coconut trees in the tropics. South India (Kerala) and Sri Lanka have oceans of coconut trees... Even Hawaii do not have coconut trees. Please put oceans of of coconut trees.

[Noel 4,563]

9 hours ago, BijanStudio said:

I doubt that will ever happen. Changing seasons is not just changing tree colors. All the green ground grass textures must change too. That means taking pictures of the whole planet in different seasons which I don't think will happen.

Maybe not right now, but it's a pretty easy stretch to imagine assigning algorithms to shaders according to GPS location & elevation, day of the year, to affect coloration of deciduous trees n shrubs, turning wild grass fields brown during the dry hot season and taller and greener during the warm wet seasons, perhaps leaving metro grass areas greenish-brown.  It's a tall order for sure but this to me seems like the end game, not taking pictures to get the job done which is just crude by comparison.  I'm sure this is ultimately where it will go.

Edited November 24, 2020 by Noel

[Dylanear 26]

I'd love to see Blackshark Ai working with Speedtree! Something like that? More varieties of trees, more accurately placed around the world. 

Don't get me wrong. I started this thread because I think MSFS is amazing, but would be better with better trees. The ones it has look great. The biggest problem is they are not accurately placed and the conifers seem all pretty similar and rounded. Not pointy at top. I went to someplace that should be all conifers, redwoods and the like and when looking closely they weren't deciduous, but they just didn't feel, look like it. And places in the world that should be mostly or all palms have few to none. 

I can't fault Asobo that much at this point in the software's development, some things are actually a bit disappointing. But overall MSFS is so amazing, how could I complain much? 

But it does seem like a fantastic opportunity for the modding community/businesses. I'd buy Terraflora for MSFS if they improved the quality, variety and >placement< of the trees. My understanding Terraflora  doesn't change where tree types are placed, only adds more variety and better looking trees of similar types?

[Dylanear 26]

15 hours ago, Oldschool61 said:

after all its a "flight sim" not a tree sim!!!!!

Well, it's not a building sim either and yet there's a comparatively infinite variations of buildings. 

I spend a LOT more of my sim time over forests and rural areas than over cities, but seems like a lot more dev time has gone to urban areas? Flying the Southern California coast just isn't the same without palm trees. Northern California's majestic Redwoods shouldn't be hard to discern from deciduous trees.

[Dylanear 26]

16 hours ago, BijanStudio said:

Asobo has only made 7 species of tree for the entire world which is disappointing.  I hope they add some more in future.

here is a list what's available in the sim now:

Species name="acacia" 
Species name="deciduous"     
Species name="scrub"  
Species name="shrub"         
Species name="cactuc"
Species name="conifer"
Species name="palmtree"

I have been working on this and fixed some of the issues in my seasons mod, where certain areas were missing palm tree and vise versa. For example LA have lots of palm trees as well as Hawaii but there is almost non.

Added palm tree in Los Angeles: (fall season)

I've been meaning to look at your seasons mod, now I have even more reason to. 

Can you explain about how the biomes and species in the config work? Seems like the biomes are define as probabilities of a certain trees with certain size settings? But how does it place the biomes? Is there some kind of texture maps for the whole globe defining which areas get trees from which biomes in the species cfg?

[BijanStudio 896]

8 hours ago, Dylanear said:

I've been meaning to look at your seasons mod, now I have even more reason to. 

Can you explain about how the biomes and species in the config work? Seems like the biomes are define as probabilities of a certain trees with certain size settings? But how does it place the biomes? Is there some kind of texture maps for the whole globe defining which areas get trees from which biomes in the species cfg?

In the xml file, Biomes define a group of regions which you can select which kind of trees you want to place there. The good thing is you can select which species of trees you want to place in what region. That's how I was able to add palm trees in parts of California and added more in Hawaii. You can also define the density of each species in each region. It's a lot of work to study which trees grows in which part of world but it seems like, whoever did started the xml file, didn't finish it.

 

[Dylanear 26]

On 11/24/2020 at 7:15 AM, BijanStudio said:

In the xml file, Biomes define a group of regions which you can select which kind of trees you want to place there. The good thing is you can select which species of trees you want to place in what region. That's how I was able to add palm trees in parts of California and added more in Hawaii. You can also define the density of each species in each region. It's a lot of work to study which trees grows in which part of world but it seems like, whoever did started the xml file, didn't finish it.

 

That's kind of what it looked like to me. Biomes with lists of different trees and such with values to control density I think? Is there any visual representation of where it puts the different region/biome like a image map I can look at? How are those defined on the globe. There must be a image map or vector data to define these regions/biomes? And what data is telling it to place tree or not on any given spot? Those are even less clear than the biomes.xml.

Edited November 27, 2020 by Dylanear

[BijanStudio 896]

3 minutes ago, Dylanear said:

That's kind of what it looked like to me. Biomes with lists of different trees and such with values to control density I think? Is there any visual representation of where it puts the different region/biome like a image map I can look at? How are those defined on the globe. There must be a image map or vector data to define these regions/biomes? And what data is telling it to place tree or not on any given spot? Those are even less clear than the biomes.xml.

Yes, here:

https://ecoregions2017.appspot.com

[Dylanear 26]

Ah! Excellent, so reasonably scientifically accurate. So, It's really more a matter of the biomes xml and the limited tree types available that give it the gross inaccuracies?

While I'm picking your brain, do you know what kind of format the tree geometry and materials texture maps are in?

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,799]

I think I found one of your missing palm trees. It is in the old Port Kembla Steel Works where a smoke stack usually lives.  it must have snuck out and headed to Australia while no one was looking.

[Dylanear 26]

Hilarious! Yeah, that's the funny thing. I do see random palms, never many of them. And yet areas I know that are only palms will have the broccoli.

[Humble Jim 51]

I've also noticed that island nations or continental regions that are near to, or straddle, the equator, and which have exclusively coconut palm tree based canopy cover in reality, don't in the sim.

That said, in the case of the Maldives I see some changes have been done. VRMM seems to be purged of the broccoli deciduous cover it had at the first release of the sim, leaving just a few palms. But the many other tiny Maldives islands suffer from deciduous blight (along with too many improbable office blocks).  I'd like to see VRMM done properly BTW; I think there were third party versions done for older sims in the past.

Perhaps Asobo could tweak things to pay attention to global biome datasets or at least fix it so that anywhere immediately x distance North or South of the equator would have coconut palm tree cover only.

[fppilot 4,394]

The same thing (calling it a thing instead of issue to sooth nerves) is evident in SE New Jersey where the trees become almost exclusively pines (evergreens with needles).