XP Scenery Generator [WIP]

[tonywob]

Hi Peter

 

Yes, you can select the config-hd.xml file instead of the config.xml when generating your scenery. If you click on the Advanced tab, and in the config box, browse for Resources/config-hd.xml in your World2XPlane directory,  then this will include the street lights.

 

Also, I think Simheaven hosts 2 versions of every scenery file, the HD one includes the street lights, the SD one doesn't

 

Tony

[CaptCWGAllen]

Thanks for the swift response as ever Tony.

[tonywob]

v0.5.0 Update

It's been a slow month, but work continues slowly on v0.5.0. Unfortunately, I've been quite busy with real-life work, but making slow but steady progress:

1) New farm buildings, as shown below. Both myself and Blacky have added some farm buildings, so rural areas look "more rural". I've also tweaked a few things, so that, for example, a tractor is placed in parking areas on farmyards to add a bit of life to the scenery.




2) I've created some more regional artwork for the UK, so less red-roofed Eastern European buildings, and more darker-roofed UK styled buildings.


3) Blacky has created a new facade set shown below for industrial areas. These looks more industrial than the bright blue buildings from the OSM2XP set, and also have nicer looking roofs. A German user Tom has also submitted some great and efficient models for industrial tanks and water towers plotted around the scenery


4) I've done some working on the code used to generate hedgerows around fields. I'm working on giving it more variety and a more natural/random look. There is still some work to do here, but scenery looks better now and performs a little better to.

[Souf]

Tony and Blacky you rock!!!! Thanks!!!

[cabnz1]

I 2nd that - you two rock!

[robbxp]

Also I like how you generate street lights. I tried a little hack a while ago, and basically filtered out all roads except motorway junctions and residential roads using osmfilter, and then generated the street lights using OSM2XP. It looked really good, as only residential areas where lit up :-)

 

Newby to XPlane... re comments above , very interested in that as also with FSX, road lighting is one of the things that make rural night lighting so unrealistic.  ... at least here in australia. We simply do not have street lights every 50 m not even on freeways. Lights exist only at intersections and dangerous bits of the road. Definately need a user friendly way of selectively reducing the number of night street lights.

[Ironmaiden]

@Tony,

 

 I may need to be off W2xp till i get a powerful system .

 

 I need to get the Intel (Haswell or Broadwell) and I am going off AMD GPU (just because of the drivers) and going for a GTX series .

 

 Or going to save up for a gaming laptop

[tonywob]

Or going to save up for a gaming laptop

 

That makes two of us , badly need a better comp.

[Ironmaiden]

That makes two of us , badly need a better comp.

 

 

I think the Asus gaming series or the Lenovo gaming series should be nice.

[blacky75]

a bit OT, but to get a real good gaming rig, is building it yourself... I always take an ASUS mb, Intel CPU, and NVIDIA GPU... never ever had any probs with thoose.

 

OT OFF

[Ironmaiden]

a bit OT, but to get a real good gaming rig, is building it yourself... I always take an ASUS mb, Intel CPU, and NVIDIA GPU... never ever had any probs with thoose.

OT OFF

I am going laptop this time ,mostly broadwell but maybe after a few months

[crisk73]

I think I'm going laptop again, but a gaming one, just for w2xp! I'm watching the MSI GE series, very good rigs with haswell and gtx cards.

Edited June 1, 2014 by crisk73

[qdavweb]

Hi Tony.

 

Since w2xp does such a fantastic job generating Melbourne CBD, I thought I would see how it goes with latest New York data - which has plenty of OSM 3D building data.

I downloaded latest New York region .pbf from Geofabrik ( http://download.geofabrik.de/north-america/us/new-york.html ) and ran it through w2xp 0.4.1a with default config file, it generates no problem but X-plane crashes when loading the scenery.

Tried it with and without hd-global-scenery in case it was a memory issue but no luck.

Haven't had any other crashes with other w2xp sceneries (Australia, California, Netherlands) which are larger size - they work flawlessly.

 

I saw earlier posts about an issue with negative building heights in New York (which I did see come up in w2xp log file when generating it).

Is this still to be fixed ?

[alpilotx]

My recommendation for anyone building a new rig (which I am doing soon too) : get as much RAM as possible! 16 GB should be the minimum ... 32 GB would be optimal! With the upcoming "long range visibility" in  XP10.30 (or 10.35 .... don't ask me when exactly Laminar puts this feature in), the loaded amount of DSF data will double! Then, especially with world2xplane and something like HD Mesh Scenery v2, you will easily surpass the 16 GB border! Of course, if this is a problem (or loading times become too long - yes, those will be longer too!), you will always be able to disable long range visibility (which, AFAIK will be the default setting anyways).

[tonywob]

I saw earlier posts about an issue with negative building heights in New York (which I did see come up in w2xp log file when generating it).

Is this still to be fixed ?

 

You're right, that was due to negative heights, and it was fixed, but looks like something else is now causing it to crash. The problem seems to be that certain facades in the library don't like going over about 300/400m in height, although it's completely random. I submitted a bug report to Ben about this, as it's really really difficult to find out what the problem is, as X-Plane just crashes without warning. I've had to put a hard-restriction on the height of buildings in 0.5.0 (out soon), as people had incorrectly tagged some buildings in Switzerland using their elevation instead of height, which also caused X-Plane to crash. I'll give New York a try again this evening and see if I can find the culprit and forward it to Ben (It's horrible to try and find the problem, and often involves removing bits of the scenery until it loads). We really need better error messages in X-Plane to troubleshoot issues like this.

[blacky75]

My recommendation for anyone building a new rig (which I am doing soon too) : get as much RAM as possible! 16 GB should be the minimum ... 32 GB would be optimal! With the upcoming "long range visibility" in  XP10.30 (or 10.35 .... don't ask me when exactly Laminar puts this feature in), the loaded amount of DSF data will double! Then, especially with world2xplane and something like HD Mesh Scenery v2, you will easily surpass the 16 GB border! Of course, if this is a problem (or loading times become too long - yes, those will be longer too!), you will always be able to disable long range visibility (which, AFAIK will be the default setting anyways).

 

check out you're not placing a super CPU on a lowend motherboard... make sure also the graphic card won't be bottlenecked by the Motherboard.

16Gb RAM yes, but not sure that games are using soo much.  I just launched XPX on a fully loaded scenery. The XPX tasks says 3,2Gb  used... but I checked the ram amount before and after launching.... and looks like 7Gb of ram are used. TBH I never saw a game eating more than that, even reaching it is a bummer (just checked under Watchdog... 2Gb only ^^)

 

Now having more than needed, RAM, isn't false anyway (leaving options open like doing ramdisks for temp folders and so on).

 

At the moment, as long as they don't tune XPX to fit todays material, everything's nearly an overshoot ^^ :-) Last version 10.30 is a bit better on FPS :-) :-)

[Daac]

I successfully converted New Zealand, but get an error when loading it in the sim.  Please, review my log.txt and let me know what I'm doing wrong. Thank you.

[Daac]

I successfully converted New Zealand, but get an error when loading it in the sim.  Please, review my log.txt and let me know what I'm doing wrong. Thank you.

Log.txt

[tonywob]

You need to install the world-models library, https://github.com/tonywob/world-models/archive/master.zip

[alpilotx]

check out you're not placing a super CPU on a lowend motherboard... make sure also the graphic card won't be bottlenecked by the Motherboard.

16Gb RAM yes, but not sure that games are using soo much.  I just launched XPX on a fully loaded scenery. The XPX tasks says 3,2Gb  used... but I checked the ram amount before and after launching.... and looks like 7Gb of ram are used. TBH I never saw a game eating more than that, even reaching it is a bummer (just checked under Watchdog... 2Gb only ^^)

 

Now having more than needed, RAM, isn't false anyway (leaving options open like doing ramdisks for temp folders and so on).

You are talking about now(!) ... But you didn't see what happens with long rang visibility (an upcoming feature in X-Plane), when double the amount of DSFs gets loaded. With that and HD Mesh Scenery v2, you will already come very close to the 16 GB limit ... add world2xplöane on top, and you will surpass the limit. Thats what I am talking about, when recommending 16 GB (or even 32 GB!!). If you don't need the "long range visibility", then of course, you can live nicely with 16 GB (or sometimes even 8 GB - sometimes).

 

So, here we see, that XP10 is a bit more than a game (definitely more than most other games). And thanks to its 64bit nature it CAN use all the RAM you give it.

[Daac]

Thanks, Tony.  Where does the world-models library reside within custom scenery?  I don't see mention of it in the qhttp://world2xplane.com/2014/03/12/quick-start-guide/uick start guide and have missed it with a search of the forums.

[tonywob]

Extract it to your custom scenery folder, as with the R2 and other libraries, shown here http://world2xplane.com/scenery/

[Daac]

That did the trick, thank you.  I also found this which was helpful: http://world2xplane.com/2014/05/21/scenery-order-in-x-plane/

 

I look forward to the success of this program!

[CaptCWGAllen]

Hi Tony,

Just to let you know that I have had quick fly around Liverpool/Wirral with v5beta. I must say it is looking very good. Have changed objects to 'a lot' and am mostly getting great frames rates - bearing in mind I use 3 wide screens hitting high 20s with the occasional drop to 17/18. But the rest of my settings are pretty high - roads is set to tons, trees to overgrown and world detail is set to high. So very excited about this release. Will spend more time on it soon and see if I can give you some more considered feedback. Loved the fact that I could see what is obviously the B&Q building at J2 of the M53 and the puffs of smoke from the water cooling tower at Shotton. Brilliant.

I saw on another forum that someone was saying it took for ever to load. 2 - 3 ins for me.

Cheers Peter

[tonywob]

Thanks Peter

 

I'm over in the UK at the moment, and will take the opportunity next week to grab some shots of some buildings (I've already done a picture of the Travelodge I was in). I noticed somebody has mapped all of the industrial estates around Runcorn as one huge building, so I had to correct them in OSM, so hopefully this area looks better now, and the approach into EGGP much more realistic. Yes, the B&Q is visible, as is Tesco and Halfords and also I think even the petrol station is there :-). It's great flying around and actually picking out real buildings knowing what they are :smile:

 

The UK also loads very quick for me, 2mins maximum normally. Germany takes much longer, but there is much more data there.

 

Also, everyone please remember that 0.5.0 scenery only works on X-Plane 10.30+, if you want to use 10.25, you'll either need to download older scenery, or generate scenery using the config file from 0.4.0.

Edited June 7, 2014 by tonywob