XP Scenery Generator [WIP]

[crisk73]

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

The problem for me is only Germany, all the other countries get loaded just fine.

Edited June 7, 2014 by crisk73

[CaptCWGAllen]

and the approach into EGGP much more realistic

 

Yes fabulous - I particulalrly noted no more tall trees on final approach to 27.

 

everyone please remember that 0.5.0 scenery only works on X-Plane 10.30+,

 

Didn't realise this - have been using in 10.25 but all seemed to work fine????

 

 

I noticed somebody has mapped all of the industrial estates around Runcorn as one huge building, so I had to correct them in OSM

 

Yes I noticed this looks much better.

 

Hope you have an enjoyable trip back home.

[tonywob]

Didn't realise this - have been using in 10.25 but all seemed to work fine????

 

It all depends on whether the scenery contains minor power lines or ski lifts (Which isn't going to be a problem in the North West :smile:). If one of the tiles references one of these road definitions, then no roads will be displayed at all.

[Prophet]

I noticed somebody has mapped all of the industrial estates around Runcorn as one huge building, so I had to correct them in OSM

 

Yes these large groupings are/were a problem around the metropolis that is Runcorn. I have put some serious time into this lately but have concentrated on areas more towards Warrington, and the M56 corridor where the fields are absent. But it really needs more people to update the OSM data.

 

CC

[tonywob]

Yes these large groupings are/were a problem around the metropolis that is Runcorn. I have put some serious time into this lately but have concentrated on areas more towards Warrington, and the M56 corridor where the fields are absent. But it really needs more people to update the OSM data.

 

I applaud you, it's really great that people are doing this. Indeed, it's a huge task trying to do this on your own. The entire area (Liverpool, Runcorn, Wirral, Chester) including North Wales has seen a large increase in editing recently (and it seems optimised for World2XPlane), and I'm hoping more and more people join in. Here's a few things I do, and recommend for best results in World2XPlane

 

1) Using OS OpenData layer, trace the water areas in the middle of fields and tag them as (natural=water, water=pond). World2XPlane will place a few little small trees or shrubs around these, and it looks very realistic and matches the photoscenery perfectly

2) Trace the blue-lines on OS OpenData as (waterway=drain, unless it's a stream). Often field boundaries are separated by drains, and these are accurately mapped in OS OpenData. World2XPlane will use these drains for placing small shrubs, hedgerows.

3) Tag each field using Bing as (landuse=farmland, or as a meadow). Don't group lots of fields together and do one big farm area (try to map each field), as although it's not incorrect to do so, you won't see any benefit from it. World2XPlane will use the boundaries of the farmland and meadow for adding hedgerows. I've broken a few of these large farm areas up into smaller areas for better results, so if there is already farm areas mapped, try and split the farm areas up per field.

4) Mapping towns is a real pain with thousands of buildings, but if you decide to do this, break the houses up, e.g. Don't map an entire terrace of 20 houses as one big building, use the "terracer" tool in JOSM to break the building up into 20 houses. You will get nice rows of terraced houses this way, and not a big industrial building.

5) Using either OS OpenData or Bing maps, trace buildings standing on their own, e.g. On a farm, or industrial areas. This, when used in combination with 1,2,3 above makes the countryside look fantastic, and isn't that much effort.

6) Trace the outlines of villages and small towns with landuse=residential if they haven't been already. We use this obviously for residential roads and residential trees, however we will be making more use of this tag in the future for other things, and I've noticed many villages are completely missing.

[cabnz1]

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.

What New Zealand scenery did you convert?

[Daac]

I ran the OSM file from http://download.geofabrik.de/australia-oceania/new-zealand.html in W2XP and installed to my custom scenery folder.  

[cabnz1]

I ran the OSM file from http://download.geofabrik.de/australia-oceania/new-zealand.html in W2XP and installed to my custom scenery folder.

Thank you for your reply, I'll have a look. Cheers

[qdavweb]

Thanks Tony - 0.5.0 seems to fix the crash for New York CBD. Would be nice to be able to see very tall buildings (say 150m +) from 30km+ now so city buildings become a nice backdrop and VFR reference point - and we can more appreciate the marvel of w2x and osm 3d buildings.

[CaptCWGAllen]

Hi Tony,

 

I have started on adding houses to OSM in the area where I live. So easy and quite cathartic. My question is: Will these automatically show in X Plane or does it require a new update to W2XP before they will show? If this is a really silly question, I give my apologies in advance.

 

Thanks

Peter

[tonywob]

Hi Peter, it just requires you to regenerate the UK when your changes have been uploaded (normally you need to wait a day before they will appear on geofabrik.de). i.e. You download the UK from there and regenerate.

[CaptCWGAllen]

Right I see - thanks Tony.

[CaptCWGAllen]

Hi Tony,

 

Thought you might enjoy this  - W2XP, Sim Heaven, HD v2 Mesh - Netherlands near Rotterdam. Best viewed on a iPad or iPhone or similar for less blurriness. I think it is amazing - so real. You will see that I am no film maker though

 

 

http://1drv.ms/1kqUxJt

[tonywob]

Thanks Peter, that's a nice video and I really like the scenery in the Netherlands as it's very complete and well populated :smile:

 

BTW, Ill regenerate/reupload the UK next week when I get time (along with with Runcorn Bridge) and upload it for you somewhere (maybe on Simheaven). So, all your recent changes to OSM should also appear here. I added some more farmland and farm bulidings around the Welsh border, but when I get back I will try and model some more buildings and landmarks to the area.

[CaptCWGAllen]

Great thanks Tony. I haven't had a whole heap of time to add much - but will spend some more time over the weekend - it is a big old job. BTW you have mentioned in a previous post about terraced house and buildings plugins in JOSM - I haven't located these yet - could you point me in the right direction when you get a mo. I get the terraced house plugin principle - but what does the buildings plugin do - I assume you still have to draw around each building? Thanks.

[tonywob]

Great thanks Tony. I haven't had a whole heap of time to add much - but will spend some more time over the weekend - it is a big old job. BTW you have mentioned in a previous post about terraced house and buildings plugins in JOSM - I haven't located these yet - could you point me in the right direction when you get a mo. I get the terraced house plugin principle - but what does the buildings plugin do - I assume you still have to draw around each building? Thanks.

 

The building tool really helps when the building is just a square, so you hit the "b" key, and simply trace lots and lots of squares. Works well when there are lots of simple houses to map. Although I try to be as precise as possible when mapping houses, some people simply trace squares (i.e. An approximation of the building) and this is fine for World2XPlane. Also, if you use the OS OpenData layer in JOSM, most of the houses and buildings will be simplified to rectangular shapes.

[Fabio Pittol]

Hey Tony,

 

I'm getting the "Can't find coordinates for node..." error. I'm not sure in which part of the process I'm doing something wrong.

 

I've downloaded the south-america-latest.osm.bz2 from http://download.geofabrik.de/

 

Unziped the .osm and then I used Osmosis to extract a bounding box around my city with the following command:

 

osmosis --read-xml file="south-america-latest.osm" --bounding-polygon top=00.00 left=00.00 bottom=00.00 right=00.00 --write-xml file="vitoria.osm"

 

*With the appropriate coordinates.

 

After that I filtered highway, power.lines and railway, each using the this command:

 

osmosis --read-xml vitoria.osm --tf accept-ways highway=* --used-node --write-xml vitoria_highways.osm

 

And later on, merged them together (osmosis --rx 1.osm --rx 2.osm --rx 3.osm --merge --merge --wx merged.osm) resulting a vitoria_network.osm which then I converted to .pbf using Osmconvert.

 

Any clues?

 

Thanks in advance!

[tonywob]

I've seen this error before, and it happens when something is clipped incorrectly, i.e. An object has had nodes removed which it needs, e.g. A road might have been removed, but a forest might share nodes with the road and still reference them. I believe you need to pass this into osmosis, but I can't remember what the command was, something like "clipIncomplete". 

[Fabio Pittol]

Worked perfectly! Thanks!

[Fabio Pittol]

Hey, another quick question.

 

The app is able to generate draped polygons? So I can cover more realisticly some "open"/flat areas without making a huge photoscenery covering everything.

 

[tonywob]

Yep, you can just use the facade rule. This works just fine if you point it to a .pol file, and I've used it before to make rudimentary beaches and mud flats

[Fabio Pittol]

That's awesome, cause the XP landclass data in Brazil is pretty messed up!

[tonywob]

Please do share screenshots if you get it looking good ;-)

[alpilotx]

Hey, another quick question.

 

The app is able to generate draped polygons? So I can cover more realisticly some "open"/flat areas without making a huge photoscenery covering everything.

 

Yeah, but if you doo that extensively, you will very likely completely kill your frame rate ... you will also realize, that this way you will get sharp texture transitions too. You need to use some technique to take care of "smooth" transitions where landclass changes (the scenery generator of X-plane takes care of this with some complex, overlapping of parts of the triangle patches making up the base mesh - its complex) ... then you will also need to find the right data to cover enough area, at enough detail etc. (there is a reason why I didn't cover that area until now - because of the lack of sufficiently good data in South America ... t least I still don't know of such data ... even if i already got some hints). Ohh ... and a good texture choice is also part of the problem.

 

So, even though draped polygons might be a solutions in some cases ... they are quite likely not the ideal tool to take care of large areas of landclass coverage!

[Fabio Pittol]

Please do share screenshots if you get it looking good ;-)

 

I might take a while, but I'll do, yes!

 

Yeah, but if you doo that extensively, you will very likely completely kill your frame rate ... you will also realize, that this way you will get sharp texture transitions too. You need to use some technique to take care of "smooth" transitions where landclass changes (the scenery generator of X-plane takes care of this with some complex, overlapping of parts of the triangle patches making up the base mesh - its complex) ... then you will also need to find the right data to cover enough area, at enough detail etc. (there is a reason why I didn't cover that area until now - because of the lack of sufficiently good data in South America ... t least I still don't know of such data ... even if i already got some hints). Ohh ... and a good texture choice is also part of the problem.

 

So, even though draped polygons might be a solutions in some cases ... they are quite likely not the ideal tool to take care of large areas of landclass coverage!

 

Actually the plan is just to fix some parts of the terrain closer to the airport that even when filling up with objects looks pretty weird - there's seems to be some kind of dumpsite landclass on large areas around SBVT - and as there are some parks and stuff, a somewhat grassy draped pol will help.

 

Here's an example. SBVT RWY05 is about 1 mile north of that park, and the planes overfly it at very low altitude. And yes, this part looks like a dumpsite by default.

 

 

Don't worry, in no way I'm planning do to large cover ups, just correct places near the airport that won't look nice at all.