This is a very exciting development. Using Google Map API key (paid product) this program download and inject photogrammetry in X-Plane 12. See the demo video below. This could be a stop gap measure until Laminar Research release next gen scenery.

GitHub

GitHub - fishstickle/neighborhoods: Neighborhoods scenery...

Neighborhoods scenery generator for XPlane. Contribute to fishstickle/neighborhoods development by creating an account on GitHub.

Hi

Thanks for sharing, could you explain how this differs from the Map Enhancement Mod for XP12?

From the title does it focus on urban areas? It infers that it generates objects from the downloaded tiles in a similar way to sim heaven (I believe?).

3 hours ago, sloppysmusic said:

Thanks for sharing, could you explain how this differs from the Map Enhancement Mod for XP12?

It's not streaming it in, it's downloading the data from Google beforehand and creates a scenery package. You need to select the area you want, generate it and drop it into the sim.

To be fair, this looks dreadful. The blocky deformed trees etc that I loathe in MSFS don't need to make their way to XP. At this point in tech, photogrammetry doesn't need to be in flight sims, IMO.

I certainly don’t think it’s a bad addition – but it would, of course, be a lot easier with an interface featuring a map where you could simply select the area and configure the rest of the settings in a separate tab – that would make the tool a lot easier to use – but you have to be grateful for every little help, especially when I think about how tedious it was to import all my photogrammetry buildings via add-ons in Blender! - I still need to try it out – I’ve already got a Google API key!

This has been around for quite a bit and I recall similar efforts to get the Google scenery into FSX and P3D. Not such a bad idea but the Google world is limited - to start with Googles fantastic planet coverage is day only. Some aspects does not seem any better visually than what Asobo achieved with PetaBytes of data on MSFS.

Think best to wait out what is happening with Laminar - think they are on the right track - that is Laminar's secret - their ability to handle scale or scale down to points without losing clarity and shape.

3 hours ago, BostonJeremy77 said:

To be fair, this looks dreadful. The blocky deformed trees etc that I loathe in MSFS don't need to make their way to XP. At this point in tech, photogrammetry doesn't need to be in flight sims, IMO.

I agree, dreadful was my first thought as well. It stuck out like a sore thumb with the large tree blobs in comparison to the trees seen in the non-photogrammetry areas. Microsoft blends their photogrammetry with in-game elements like trees, buildings, etc. Often times blobs tree are covered by the in-game trees. I think this addon looks bad because they are dropping the raw files into Xplane(no post processing).

Photogrammetry on its own will not look good, it has to be combined with other assets. It also needs to be cleaned up before injecting it into the sim.

Edited Thursday at 09:54 PM3 days by brinx

I gave it a go (I don't like just running random exes from the internet without any source-code, but I took one for the team)

It's fairly hacky at best, but a decent proof of concept.

The major problem is that it can't remove the mesh underneath, so it slightly raises the elevation essentially having one world floating on top of the other. It also converts in raw format, so the sceneries will be extremely heavy.

This is not the fault of the tool, it's just a currently limitation of the X-Plane DSF format.

Well, it’s also tricky to adjust the height of the mesh when loading it via the WED – it’s all made up of individual parts rather than a single scenery file – so it’ll be hard to change that!

I’ve no idea if that’s actually useful !

Edited Friday at 01:49 PM3 days by AUA425