2 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Already does

I understand you are under NDA  for 12 but is it 11? Because the infrastructure (if data driven not 3D library assets) seem much more detailed than 11 facades

 

I 

1 minute ago, Claviateur said:

but is it 11?

yes, they are old, very rubbish xp11 screenshots.

top is nyc

heres someone youtubing it 5 years ago

 

Edited June 2, 20224 yr by mSparks

13 minutes ago, mSparks said:

yes, they are old, very rubbish xp11 screenshots.

Ok and the more I look at the screens the more I see that these are not Facades that ate performance but detailed 3D objects that are deployed using multiple ways including putting infrastructure on one side and/or another of roads or in lots or in defined areas etc as W2XP scripting allows...

The thing is if one needs to extrude an OSM footprint, then a facade technique must be used... And this is when performance is affected... 

Yet if the exact shape of the infrastructure is not important because there is no ortho underneath to contradict the shape but generic textures as in these screens, then using generic 3D objects from a library is a better option as each is loaded once in memory...

What I showed in the MS Sim examples are not 3D objects from a library but rather extruded footprints with facades like method but with more 3D aspect...

And I hope XP12 will have the facades tech revamped to allow the same performance and details because those who will generate ortho, would prefer to have the same footprint over the Ortho...

Edited June 2, 20224 yr by Claviateur

1 hour ago, Claviateur said:

Facades that ate performance but detailed 3D objects

fac procedurally makes complex 3D shapes from building footprints, as I said earlier when I get back Ill do a quick video, because I couldnt find an example.

format spec is pretty hard to digest but its here:

https://developer.x-plane.com/article/x-plane-10-facade-fac-file-format-specification/

• A “type 2” facade has its walls defined by a series of 3-d meshes; the facade is built by warping the mesh (as needed) and placing them adjacent to each other.  The result is a prism with 3-d relief.  Type 2 facades can also have 3-d objects “attached” to the wall segments; they will be placed along the walls for additional detail.

ags places complex 3D objects along a line.

1 minute ago, mSparks said:

fac procedurally makes complex 3D shapes from building footprints, as I said earlier when I get back Ill do a quick video, because I couldnt find an example.

format spec is pretty hard to digest but its here:

https://developer.x-plane.com/article/x-plane-10-facade-fac-file-format-specification/

• A “type 2” facade has its walls defined by a series of 3-d meshes; the facade is built by warping the mesh (as needed) and placing them adjacent to each other.  The result is a prism with 3-d relief.  Type 2 facades can also have 3-d objects “attached” to the wall segments; they will be placed along the walls for additional detail.

ags places complex 3D objects along a line.

Yes, I am familiar with both facades types, as I mentioned I created scenery for XP11 (since I bought the beta) including procedural scripting with W2XP using OSM data...

But when Facade type 2 came out as terminal kits, I wished if these will make it to the urban world...

In fact I even used facade type 2 (traced them in WED) for some city buildings by using some terminal components that could look like offices or shopping centers...

I then stopped creating scenery for XP11 after Vulkan so no idea what happened with Facade type 2 (if still only for terminal kits or went beyond)..

I hope facade type 2 will be the new world facades in XP12 instead of the older default types...

18 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

these will make it to the urban world.

generally the urban space has been done with ags, placing buildings along either side of the street by street type.

There are significant changes coming there and support has been added to WED already for editing road networks and other details that were historically overlay editor only.

As per that simheaven link they already have the msfs building footprints ready for XP11 and XP12.

We are part of the X-Plane developers workspace and thanks to the access, all of the packages (X-EUROPE, X-AMERICA, X-AFRICA, X-ASIA, X-AUSTRALIA-OCEANIA, X-ANTARCTICA) are already adapted for XP12 and actually in the final generation, including the new vegetation and with (besides the current OSM data) much more (exactly 788,235,841) Microsoft global building footprints to complete the landscapes all over the world.

3 minutes ago, mSparks said:

As per that simheaven link they already have the msfs building footprints ready for XP11 and XP12.

We are part of the X-Plane developers workspace and thanks to the access, all of the packages (X-EUROPE, X-AMERICA, X-AFRICA, X-ASIA, X-AUSTRALIA-OCEANIA, X-ANTARCTICA) are already adapted for XP12 and actually in the final generation, including the new vegetation and with (besides the current OSM data) much more (exactly 788,235,841) Microsoft global building footprints to complete the landscapes all over the world.

This is exactly what I look forward to seeing: how XP12 will be able to digest that scale of footprint data (vs XP11) as we fly in dense cities (default or with the Simheaven packages)... 

Ok I did not know that Simheaven used the MS footprints that are by the way AI generated... 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/building-footprints

So finally it seems MS and AI did not completely fail but succeeded to do something useful for XP12 expansion packs if we can call Simheaven packages this way... 

I can't wait to try all this in XP12

7 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

So finally it seems MS and AI did not completely fail

Its not that its in any way a fail.

Its just already taken a long time to get right, and MS is late to the party, while presenting it as groundbreaking never done before.

Its the lies I find objectionable, and thats in no way MS specific, they just spend a lot more money on them than most. 

6 hours ago, mrueedi said:

The innovation is the AI generation of a digital model of the earth in minutes.

You are suggesting that the AI algos are rerun every time a user starts the program? Any proof of that? I'm guessing the time needed to crawl the world's ortho and generate a digital model of the earth is far more than a few minutes.

I'd bet the AI is run a few times a year to generate the autogen positions and types...not run on everyone's xbox when it is started up, even for a few miles' radius.

2 hours ago, blingthinger said:

You are suggesting that the AI algos are rerun every time a user starts the program? Any proof of that? I'm guessing the time needed to crawl the world's ortho and generate a digital model of the earth is far more than a few minutes.

I'd bet the AI is run a few times a year to generate the autogen positions and types...not run on everyone's xbox when it is started up, even for a few miles' radius.

No, the AI does not do that obviously...

The machine learning / scanning process worked during production phases to produce the data and that was it.

Then Algorithms were written based on data and metadata (OSM + Bing + AI fetched) to filter and produce the infrastructure (Scripts that could be similar to W2XP) but the 3D extruded infrastructure are more advanced in terms of detail and adaptation to the environment (roof types, colors etc) than the basic facades in XP11 and previous gen.  

Same process for vegetation data...

Any new machine learning scanning process that might happen or have happened could be either for the Regional Addons or World Updates (with better Bing and other data) or if new worldwide sets of Bing are processed and implemented... 

Edited June 3, 20224 yr by Claviateur

11 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

No, the AI does not do that obviously.

Doesn't make sense to me either. That's precisely why I asked for evidence. Either the description got lost in translation or... it's actually not obvious to everyone.

45 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

Doesn't make sense to me either. That's precisely why I asked for evidence. Either the description got lost in translation or... it's actually not obvious to everyone.

What does not make sense? That the AI builds the scenery on the fly or that it scans Bing imagery and detects footprints and other metadata?

MS did this before MSFS and the data is available to download and use...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/maps/building-footprints

And I learned in an earlier post that Simheaven are using MS data for XP world overlays in addition to OSM...

https://github.com/microsoft/GlobalMLBuildingFootprints

So no magic in that at all, machine learning can do more than this but in this specific workflow, the AI was used to detect and build a database for infrastructure and vegetation footprints and other attributes...

Edited June 3, 20224 yr by Claviateur

9 hours ago, mrueedi said:

The innovation is the AI generation of a digital model of the earth in minutes.

 

 

18 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

What does not make sense?

The quoted statement above yours doesn't make sense. There is a miss in either explanation or understanding. Or both?

Using AI for scenery generation checks out but I have no reason to believe that the algorithm run time is mere minutes for the entire planet.

 

9 hours ago, blingthinger said:

I'm guessing the time needed to crawl the world's ortho and generate a digital model of the earth is far more than a few minutes.

In the recent news reports that MS is investing again 20 millions in blackshark, they are speaking about near-realtime processing:

Blackshark.ai announces US$20m funding to drive innovation | AI Magazine

Quote: “Our platform can process petabytes of satellite data in near real-time and accurately extract semantic information such as building footprints/heights, land use, bodies of water or infrastructure assets such as streets or rail tracks.”

Of course, this does not run on the end-users PCs. The ai processing run is massive Azure stuff. Also, re-processing is only required if the aerial imagery changes, which is not so frequent.

In my first linked document, on slide 19, you can see that the ai processed data (like building footprints) is streamed to the user.

11 hours ago, mSparks said:

Its just already taken a long time to get right, and MS is late to the party, while presenting it as groundbreaking never done before.

mSparks at his best! Reliably mixing up right and wrong...

• MS is not late to the party because what we got is unprecedented.
• They have produced the first digital 3D model of the whole earth with this level of authenticity. No other product came close before or is coming close now.
• It is groundbreaking, because authentic global coverage (e.g. with vegetation and buildings) was a pipedream before.
• XP is nowhere near "there already".
• Simheaven has less than 20% of the coverage. For 1 building, you get via Simheaven you miss 5. Tell me, who needs to catch up? You are lying to yourself, if you think that this is representing the globe well.
• So, as a result you are restricted to fly within some well modelled biotopes.

I am building a series of flight sim missions right now, which cover a real world flight from Europe to the Himalaya over 8 days and 17 stops. Every square meter of terrain along the route represents reality as realistic as any other. This is groundbreaking.

And, btw. the VOR are visible on the aerial images and the blackshark ai even is placing some round structure on it. So if ever anybody wants to use VORs as visual cues for navigation (rather than using the radio to find them), you can do that...

19 hours ago, blingthinger said:

However.....slide 10 lists all the things they use vector data for. Vector source in this case is OSM (slide 6). Another XP first. Why one would need OSM when you have access to Bing is odd...but here we are. Another shot at LR maybe?

My understanding of how this works is that they will use OSM buildings if there, otherwise they use Bing/AI... You can clearly see this with things like the Melbourne megalith (a building incorrectly tagged in OSM as 1000m tall), I also see that they have used it to determine the types of buildings (industrial, etc). 

Also, on a side note, Bing/Microsoft have offered their aerial imagery to OSM mappers for a few years now, and even have provided several opensource datasets of AI mapped buildings ready to import back to OSM (Australia, Canada, USA and some areas of Africa and South America). Microsoft have supported and helped the OSM movement over the years, and without the bing imagery layer they provide, it wouldn't have progressed as it had.

 

14 hours ago, Claviateur said:

I hope facade type 2 will be the new world facades in XP12 instead of the older default types...

The type 2 facades basically allow you to model some walls (e.g. Walls on a highrise block with balconies etc) or a 3d fence and the engine will use it to wrap around a polygon rather than a simple texture sheet. It has various rules where developers can choose different walls under different circumstances, but it's clear to me after having worked with them extensively for the Orbx TrueEarth regions, they're simply not suitable for modelling large areas due to the huge performance hit (There are some ways I've tried to optimise, e.g. Having several variants available for different heights of buildings). They also are fairly limited and are nowhere near the building/autogen tech we see in MFS in terms of the power and performance they have. This is old tech now in need of an upgrade, but I'm not so sure LR intend to use the facades engine in the way I've wanted to use it (rather they use it for airports and simple industrial buildings)

LR's preference is to use pre-made 3D models that can use hardware instancing and this is how X-Plane's default autogen manages to perform really well, as it's the same repeating objects rather than unique per building models that fit specific footprints