4 replies to this topic

[alpilotx]

Just wanted to show you a set of screenshots from my latest experiments with the Scenery.

Essentially, you can see three things here:
- increased mesh resolution (and thus, increased landclass accuracy). This makes mountains (but many other places too) even better. Only drawback is, that DSFs are much larger, and 32bit X-Plane chokes on them sometimes (but the 64bit version should "fix" this one day).
- tuned forests a little bit (little bit smaller trees, and increased density).
- my new, experimental add-on of tree-lines (trees along roads) + farms in USA and Europe (all derived from OpenStreetmap data with a few "little" algorithms).

http://picasaweb.goo...161752934793634

[Daube]

Thanks a lot for these screenshots. Once again, some of them are very impressive.
First of all, one of the things that are especially interesting for me is the improvements on the mountain meshes. Mountains in XP are FINALLY starting to look like FSX mountains, instead of these ugly polygonal shapes we could see so far. That's definitely a huge achievement for the global visual realism, and it's already visible in some of the shots, the scenery looks almost like some of the OrbX areas. Which means: very good. Not only the shapes, but also the placement of rock/mud/snow textures looks much more consistent.

Concerning the forests, this is also a very interesting point, at least for the bush-flight addicts like myself. In some of your screenshots, the forest density finally reaches a believable level. Forest are starting to look like forest. There still some shots however, where the tree density seems too low. I don't know if it was intented... but for example, the shot where the road in the forest dissappears after a turn, hidden by the surrouding trees, is absolutely fantastic. I wish all the XP forests were that dense.

The isolated trees alongside the OSM roads are a nice touch too!

I'm really looking forward to your next screenshots showing your next improvements.

[alpilotx]

 Daube, on Mar 5 2012, 12:11 PM, said:

There still some shots however, where the tree density seems too low. I don't know if it was intented...

Yes, its definitely intended to have different densities! As I pointed out somewhere before (I think at least) we use real landclass data. And this data sometimes says "sparse forest" ... and we try to follow this hint by putting down other ground textures, and using a forest where trees stand less dense ... Of course, this doesn't always works visually, but it at least tries to mimic the reality (as its "told" to us by the data )

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That's definitely a huge achievement for the global visual realism, and it's already visible in some of the shots, the scenery looks almost like some of the OrbX areas.

And the cool thing is, that we achieve this without hand tuning the landscape (its all algorithmic) ... of course, it best works, where the landscape has naturally lots of variations, and the data we get has lots of fine details (as a contrast: in the big, flat, US midwest its much much harder to achieve this - if at all)

But this also tells, that with OrbX style hand tuning, a lot is possible!

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Which means: very good. Not only the shapes, but also the placement of rock/mud/snow textures looks much more consistent.

Yes, thats something we worked on a lot for XP10. On the one side, we have much improved artwork (which is still worked on as we speak) with many new shader tricks. And on the other hand, we use much better data (especially landclass data) which was essential to make the algorithms work "better".

[Daube]

Indeed, even with the best algorithms and the best textures in the world, if you don't have a good-quality landclass, then the final scenery will not be good.
It's basically what happens in FSX in 99% of the world: the textures for the ground are not so bad, and the mesh is sometimes acceptable. But the total lack of precise landclass makes the general landscape look totally dumb most of the times. And as soon as a very good landclass is added, even without changing the textures or the mesh, then suddently the world starts to look like an actual world.

From what you said, a similar mecanism applies to XPlane. If this is true, then I'm confident we will soon see some excellent scenery worldwide. Once again, I'll keep a close eye to your progress Please keep us informed.

[alpilotx]

 Daube, on Mar 5 2012, 04:05 PM, said:

Indeed, even with the best algorithms and the best textures in the world, if you don't have a good-quality landclass, then the final scenery will not be good.
It's basically what happens in FSX in 99% of the world: the textures for the ground are not so bad, and the mesh is sometimes acceptable. But the total lack of precise landclass makes the general landscape look totally dumb most of the times. And as soon as a very good landclass is added, even without changing the textures or the mesh, then suddently the world starts to look like an actual world.

From what you said, a similar mecanism applies to XPlane. If this is true, then I'm confident we will soon see some excellent scenery worldwide. Once again, I'll keep a close eye to your progress Please keep us informed.

Well, I can assure you, that the default Global Scenery already uses quite good quality landclass data. Especially Europe and USA (+ Alaska) have very good quality, but even the rest of the planet got a big improvement over the XP9 data. Had it covered in a few words here:
http://xplane10.word...n-mr-x-terrain/

And my experimental scenery uses the same data (but can show more details of it, because of the improved triangle count - simply put)

Edited by alpilotx, 05 March 2012 - 09:11 AM.