Any new info on XP12 ground scenery / autogen?

[Claviateur 789]

53 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

Oh, it still is. Indiana Jones is still looking. Given how poorly the photogrammetry often looks and how 95% of the world's surface is still autogen...we're not there yet folks! But don't cry for MS. Or billy gates. Neither of them cries for us.

Sure but I believe that Photogrammetry sooner or later will become the tech to represent the world in engines and apps simulating virtual earth. Obviously the coverage will be bigger and the resolution vs system will match.

Like anything else in the history of PC graphics, it will evolve and match hardware and will be the norm most probably.

For now, from the air it is very convincing but if you fly a helicopter and land on a roof in a Photogrammetry city, it looks weird indeed... 

When MSFS was out, it was the first time in a sim (since 30 something years of using sims) that I could see my real city as I saw it from a real cessna in the early 2000... But certainly it's a bad idea to go as low as roof or ground level with the actual resolutions of Photogrammetry
 

Edited May 30, 2022 by Claviateur

[blingthinger 671]

17 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

Sure but I believe that Photogrammetry sooner or later will become the tech to represent the world in engines and apps simulating virtual earth.

*Photogrammetry + a metric ton of hand edits. There will never not be a need for scenery designers, whether it's building plausible models in blender or massaging geometry point clouds from lidar. For now, just don't go too far away from that downtown area!

[mSparks 2,123]

59 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

Now to go back to logical talks about world engine and scenery tech, did you hear about this initiative? And what do you think?

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/antoinette-project-tools-to-create-the-next-generation-of-flight-simulators

wow, first sensible reply Ive read on this topic for years.

I hadnt, mildly interesting to read the marketing speak, which I would basically summarise as "Asobo failed, maybe Unreal Engine 5 can do better now they support global maps".

I would expect it to do better than Unigine, They may even, with an investment similar to that pmdg just put into MSFS, get a single aircraft configuration into a few peoples hands in 5 or 10 years.

But the reasons to doubt are the same MSFS went exactly the same way I expected:

Lots of lovely marketing talk, but once you take into consideration the gap between what the marketeers promise and what the tech guys can deliver you will quickly realise there isnt really anything new or innovative being discussed.

Flightsim is complex, highly specialist and insanely time consuming, not even the marketing addresses how to effectively address this, bringing in flightgear is very likely the best option they had. Easy to guess what that would be like

with a better graphics engine.

OTOH, hope it does well, I have an ATC solution ready to drop in if they ever make it out of alpha.

 

[Claviateur 789]

11 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

*Photogrammetry + a metric ton of hand edits. There will never not be a need for scenery designers, whether it's building plausible models in blender or massaging geometry point clouds from lidar. For now, just don't go too far away from that downtown area!

Yeah today I see it like the early days of "bitmaps" or 3D in the early 90s... Yes they need to edit it a lot manually now and the geometry in a simply building shape is absurd vs a custom 3D... But again, our friend the machine learning will be able to do that at one point no doubt.

And as mentioned, coverage and resolution will be wider and bigger and hardware will be able to digest it as it was the case with bitmaps then 3D in the 90s

Edited May 30, 2022 by Claviateur

[mtaxp 666]

1 hour ago, Claviateur said:

Yeah today I see it like the early days of "bitmaps" or 3D in the early 90s... Yes they need to edit it a lot manually now and the geometry in a simply building shape is absurd vs a custom 3D... But again, our friend the machine learning will be able to do that at one point no doubt.

And as mentioned, coverage and resolution will be wider and bigger and hardware will be able to digest it as it was the case with bitmaps then 3D in the 90s

Maybe when AI will be able to:

1) Have an absloute 100% perfect mesh.

2) Choose a desired texel density properly for the scene.

3) Clean all undesired baked elements that will conflict with the renderer (i.e. shadows)

4) Bake perfect materials.

5) Bake perfect night lighting.

6) Bake perfect weather effects data.

And note I didn't talk about normal maps, nor micro bump maps of mm/px assuming that maybe in 10 years there might be polygon budget like CGI movies (what UE5 poligon is all about) but for the entire planet.

Only then, photogrammetry will look better in every possible scene and lighting condition.

And you'll never have a world 100% photogrammetry, think about govermenets.

Autogen is not going away anytime soon.

[Murmur 3,978]

10 hours ago, Gulfstream said:

This technology now gets us "study level" airliners, with fully three-dimensional cockpits with every switch and screen working ... all of this over accurate terrain depiction.

Even better than that! You could dogfight your "MSFS study level airliner" against an F16!

Or win the 1st prize in unlimited aerobatics with physics-defying Lomcevaks!

But who cares about those little inaccuracies when you can fly above your house?

Edited May 30, 2022 by Murmur

[blingthinger 671]

1 hour ago, Claviateur said:

But again, our friend the machine learning will be able to do that at one point no doubt.

It will eliminate a lot of the manual work, yes, but never all of it. In fact, the AI/ML in this case are nothing more than "plausible" scenery generators...with really really good initial conditions. There will always be outliers generated by those data structures. The only absolute way to accurately model this stuff is by hand. AI will help but it won't replace.

[Bjoern 1,183]

3 hours ago, Claviateur said:

Now to go back to logical talks about world engine and scenery tech, did you hear about this initiative? And what do you think?

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/antoinette-project-tools-to-create-the-next-generation-of-flight-simulators

This could work out for a flight simulator at DCS scale, i.e. in a very limited area, but I'm sceptical that UE5 can handle an entire planet with all requirements regarding procedural generation of terrain features.

[Gulfstream 416]

5 hours ago, mSparks said:

But But But Blackshark AI, and you never explained to us why Laminar cant compete with MSFS's zero budget for 2023.

You love to rib on Blackshark AI, but do you understand what this technology actually does?

You post about your auto-removal of clouds in satellite imagery for XP ... that is what Blackshark AI does.   But it does it for the entire globe automatically.  Extrudes buildings from satellite footprints.  Removes clouds.  Places trees.

I'm sure you know this ... you find that technology joke worthy?  I find it insanely impressive.

It's not the melted buildings in phtogrammetry ... it's "this is a tree", "this is a building", "we should remove this cloud".

[mSparks 2,123]

42 minutes ago, Gulfstream said:

but do you understand what this technology actually does?

No, that's why I asked.

42 minutes ago, Gulfstream said:

it's "this is a tree", "this is a building", "we should remove this cloud".

"This is plane"

This is a skyscraper

Gotcha.

So its basically a bad solution to a problem Laminar already solved a decade or so ago. How exciting and unexpected.

This is how xplane does that

Also mostly automated, but with more than a decade of bug fixing and the option to touch it up by hand easily with stand alone dedicated tools for the job when something is wrong. A LOT of very very nice new toys coming there for XP12.

Edited May 30, 2022 by mSparks

[Kopteeni 819]

You know MSFS is doing something right when sparksy has stored screenshots in his hard drive about flaws in the sim and is monitoring their website and clinging on to any crumb of information that could in some imaginative way mean the end of the sim.

[mSparks 2,123]

4 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

when sparksy has stored screenshots in his hard drive

imgur

https://imgur.com/user/mSparks43/posts

[mtaxp 666]

2 hours ago, Gulfstream said:

You love to rib on Blackshark AI, but do you understand what this technology actually does?

You post about your auto-removal of clouds in satellite imagery for XP ... that is what Blackshark AI does.   But it does it for the entire globe automatically.  Extrudes buildings from satellite footprints.  Removes clouds.  Places trees.

I'm sure you know this ... you find that technology joke worthy?  I find it insanely impressive.

It's not the melted buildings in phtogrammetry ... it's "this is a tree", "this is a building", "we should remove this cloud".

All this stuff x-plane had since v10. It has special art formats (.fac) dedicated to take foot prints and heights but also build custom scenes using autogen files that reference a collection of art assets. I personally recall to build complete cities in a matter of minutes. But back then it wasn't that scaleable to have a complete city built like this that will take ages to load + performance problems since each facade will create a new draw call unlike "fixed" objects. Days where I had a 4 core 5 2300 and GTX 460 with 1GB VRAM 🤣

All the (big) difference is the amount of data LR can handle and ship to the customer compared to MSFS + fancy terrain shaders (stuff that LR will catch up soon post 12.00 like 3d grass and a new mesh system, according to quotes I mentioned earlier).

But frankly I don't view the way MSFS builds it's world as any new fancy practice (SDK and design wise). We had orthos + accurate everything for ages now that Im personally sick of it's low quality and this now includes MSFS, the fact that it's global and more accesible is a plus no one can deny, but "next gen" graphics? Not really, just more of the same with some last gen shaders.

Edited May 30, 2022 by mtaxp

[Claviateur 789]

2 hours ago, mtaxp said:

All this stuff x-plane had since v10. It has special art formats (.fac) dedicated to take foot prints and heights but also build custom scenes using autogen files that reference a collection of art assets. I personally recall to build complete cities in a matter of minutes. But back then it wasn't that scaleable to have a complete city built like this that will take ages to load + performance problems since each facade will create a new draw call unlike "fixed" objects. Days where I had a 4 core 5 2300 and GTX 460 with 1GB VRAM 🤣

All the (big) difference is the amount of data LR can handle and ship to the customer compared to MSFS + fancy terrain shaders (stuff that LR will catch up soon post 12.00 like 3d grass and a new mesh system, according to quotes I mentioned earlier).

But frankly I don't view the way MSFS builds it's world as any new fancy practice (SDK and design wise). We had orthos + accurate everything for ages now that Im personally sick of it's low quality and this now includes MSFS, the fact that it's global and more accesible is a plus no one can deny, but "next gen" graphics? Not really, just more of the same with some last gen shaders.

You are totally right, the facade technique comes from XPlane. Footprints are extruded vertically to build walls then a roof on top procedurally.

And you are right it was not scaleable and XP facades (old versions or type 1?) ate performance a lot because they were many shapes and textures unlike the object library where every object is loaded once and then placed multiple times... This is what XP dev explained to me back then 

You can draw the footprint in the World Editor as well (as it is shown in the above post).

I also used World2XP to generate thousands of Km2 using OSM data and scripting. It was fun to make empty lands become populated with 3D buildings...

Sorry if I am explaining something most probably you know already!

With the early days of Vulkan facade scenery was killing performance in my custom scenery and users of the scenery were all over the place because of that 🙂 

100%, MSFS took the same concept but used more complex facades types similar to what LR introduced in XP 11.X as Facades types 2 that were only meant to build terminals back then. The facades type 2 had more 3D details on walls and roof...

Also it's good to note that during the late days of FSX, Arno the developer of ModelCoverterX created ScenProc, similar to World2XP, to make OSM data extruded as 3D building in FSX using scripting. FSX did not have this technique either..

And yes MSFS used this technique to generate tons of footprint data that is a mix of AI Scan + OSM + Bing to create the planet with every footprint on Bing (MSFS generation of tiles) to be extruded with the fancy facades.

This is why I mentioned earlier that 90% of MFS scenery is precisely the Plausible World that Austin spoke about in XP10 and always wanted to have.

Now to be fair, aerial imagery such as Bing, although sometimes inconsistent, with electric vibrant colors or blurry, still in my opinion create an accurate reference for VFR if mixed with the 3D data above it...

This is also the Ortho4XP concept but that users need to manually operate and generate and store on their disk... I did that too

MSFS made all these concepts happen out of the box, worldwide and to be fair and just in our evaluation, and as you said, they did not ship tons of data to store on users disks but this data is streamed to the user... And it works... Here at least... (either we are afraid that they will go out of business or not, I personally don't care)

The World Engine technology in every concept that is deja vu or not, is still the most advanced precisely because out of the box, for any user on this planet, you can just open the sim and have fun (yes fun because it is an entertainment title)

Add to this the lighting, weather etc that are out of the box as for now the most immersive and life like... And I've seen simulators since 1991 of all kinds...

Like any simulator and even more here, it is a complex piece of software (it has a local code and server side as well)... And no doubt difficult to control with all the addons and hardware... XP11 too was not always smooth in every update

All in all, what makes the World Engine as a whole next gen are the screenshots taken by users on MSFS forums. They are most of the time simply breathtaking and they come from every corner of this virtual planet... And they are from the default scenery most of the time...

MSFS has bugs? Yes a lot... Does it have glitches in the way data is rendered as someone is showing above? Yes it does, same with my XP World2XP scenery generated from OSM data with buggy or inaccurate tags... 
 

Edited May 31, 2022 by Claviateur

[Claviateur 789]

3 hours ago, Kopteeni said:

You know MSFS is doing something right when sparksy has stored screenshots in his hard drive about flaws in the sim and is monitoring their website and clinging on to any crumb of information that could in some imaginative way mean the end of the sim.

Sadly, this is the weird feeling I was talking about... It's like a cult behavior... It's like let's find a little tiny thing in the other cult and make it a big issue..  What we have is ok...The same there is a big deal... And let's play down or deny things there because they do not serve our cult interest or agenda and let's twist things to make our cult always superior and feel good about ourselves in it... 

While the whole discussion is simply about world engine technology for entertainment flight simulation that is obviously evolving like everything else... 🙄