XP Scenery Generator [WIP]

[Caruso]

Just, I wish someone could come along and help create/identify these 100 buildings

 

I certainly could help you identify representative buidlings for Switzerland. (Unfortunately I am no good (yet) at creating any.)

Let me know what to do.

 

"Behind the curtains" I have been contacting creators of Swiss scenery and asking for permission to use some of their generic tipically Swiss buidlings for the World Models Master Library. I am still waiting for approval and should try to get some feedback over Xmas.

 

One thing I am still missing in the library are good objects/facades for historical buildings/blocks in the center of European Towns (style around 1900). Have you considered using some of X-plane's default buidlings as I sugested some time ago?

[tonywob]

One thing I am still missing in the library are good objects/facades for historical buildings/blocks in the center of European Towns (style around 1900). Have you considered using some of X-plane's default buidlings as I sugested some time ago?

 

Yes I did have a look through them, those buildings aren't facades but fixed in size, so they're not too suitable to recreate complicated city centres. Also, I'm wary about linking to X-Plane objects as they can be removed at any time during an update etc, and break the scenery for everyone. Cities are going to be very difficult to get covered with a small number of objects, and the best bet is to have nicer looker facades. At some point it will happen, and there is a user "Thomas" who is working on some facades at the moment.

[Caruso]

I see. Can you tell Thomas he can use the photos of 1900ish facades I sent you if he wants? I also could try and take more photos over Xmas if 1900 style facades would be a project that someone is working on.

[tonywob]

Thanks Caruso, I will do. There's no promise when they'll get done though. I was hoping for some more time over Christmas, so let's see . At the moment I'm trying to fix the powerlines which are misbehaving, and then I'll probably push out another minor release.

Edited December 14, 2014 by tonywob

[osprey05]

Hi Tony,

 

I am downloading World2xplane now. It looks terrific and thanks for all of your hard work. My donation is on the way. Good luck.

[tonywob]

I am downloading World2xplane now. It looks terrific and thanks for all of your hard work. My donation is on the way. Good luck.

 

Thanks Jim, your support is very much appreciated

[mmerelles]

I was born in a very small town at Argentina, x-plane only populates the runway.

 

I managed to recreate the flying club over WED (taxi, parking area, hangars, fueling, fence, etc)... but how can i populate a small town in the vicinity as it should be? can i use world2xplane to populate a small town from no other input than coordinates/size? Haven´t found any internet database that covers that area to convert. I am not concerned about it been realistic, but having a town at least for flying in my area.

 

thanks for your support.

[tonywob]

No, W2XP uses OSM, so if you want to the town to appear in OSM, you'd need to begin adding it into OSM (Which is very easy). 

[mmerelles]

ok thanks for the tip, i will try to populate my town into osm and convert

[tonywob]

It's possible to add autogen based on roads and residential zones to fill out blank areas. The issue is that it's so slow to generate. I was working on it for 0.6.0 but left it unfinished. Hopefully, I'll get back to looking into it.

[mmerelles]

that would be GREAT!!! i had a look into OSM (open street map) and all my town streets and avenues are there but no single house. I will try to put the manually and see if i can convert

[RollnThndr]

Great tool!

 

Tried grabbing this today but it appears the link for the R2 Library is not working any longer (www.xplane.cz/en/). Any chance of find thins somewhere else?

 

Thanks for any info.

[AngeloM]

New link for the R2.

[RollnThndr]

New link for the R2.

 

Thank you!

[tonywob]

It's been a while since I've posted any updates or news on World2XPlane, but I'm at work little by little. The latest feature I'm working on is autogen (which may seem like a step back for some). I've found the problem with OSM data, especially in places like the UK or Spain is the very patchy coverage. With this new feature, the entire country will be populated with realistic regional autogen. The trick is to make it as convincing as possible. Here are few screenies of the latest progress:

 

Since I'm using autogen, I have exact control over how the buildings are rotated, placed, and more importantly I can include objects along with them. So trees will only appear in people's gardens, cars in driveways, and the buildings will perfectly align up with the roads.

 

At the moment, I have only created a few autogen files for the UK (In fact there are only 4 types of buildings used in these shots), but even with just a mixture of 4 buildings the result is quite nice. There is also a peak of the new facades and placement engine I've created for highrise blocks in the screenshot below:

 

The entire country is populated like shown in these screenshots, and when used in combination with third-party data such OS VectorData to populate forests which are missing in OSM, we end up with 100% coverage.

 

I intend to make it blend with the existing real OSM objects, but this is still on my todo list. The autogen objects actually look superior to the OSM placed objects because they are all lined up and consistent, but hopefully I can work out a way of making the autogen engine actually use real data and/or blend in and not add autogen when there is real data (Think of smart exclusions without exclusions).

 

Performance wise, I'm hoping it will be an improvement (but only if you take a well-populated OSM area and replace it with autogen). This is because there are fewer varieties of objects and hardware instancing comes into play. In areas that where previously empty, like the below screenshot, of course you will get a FPS hit (just as you would with the default X-Plane autogen).

 

There is still much to do. Especially in the artwork department. I don't have the time to create regional objects for every country. Once I'm done with the UK, I may create some artwork for the US, but this as always is where I need help from others.

Other features which are almost completed are:

 

1) Using multiple OSM files for the same scenery. e.g. You might just download 2 or 3 states, and generate them all together as one scenery.

2) Using different datasources (ESRI ShapeFiles) on its own or in combination with OSM data. I have managed to populate Wellington and Christchurch with every single building using this method. However, at the moment there is no user friendly way to do this. You will need to understand the basics of working with GIS data, projections, etc..

3) I've also fixed numerous problems with roads, added a best-fit facade algorithm and also improved other reported issues, e.g. Banding of trees across fields or runways caused by a geometry bug.

[AngeloM]

Great update Tony, thank you very much!!!

Will you release a new beta for testing purposes?

 

Angelo

[Souf]

Nice Tony!!!

[tonywob]

Will you release a new beta for testing purposes?

Yes as always . But there is still a lot to do before the autogen stuff looks decent. It needs more variety of building shapes and sizes (and they have to fit together naturally). It's not simply a case of creating a model in Blender/Sketchup and plonking it into world-models. The buildings have to be grouped, aligned, etc. I also want it to look good without photoscenery, which is why the buildings have simple overlays for the garden and path.

 

It also needs to be a bit cleverer on how it places buildings, e.g. Using a hotspot map of towns/cities and villages to work out which groups/styles of buildings to use, etc.. Not to mention the enormous task of getting autogen for other countries (and since nobody wants to help out, I don't think I'll ever get it done to a high quality). 

 

Also, the other major features I've added regarding additional data sources will probably not be testable by most normal users (nor would I want to make them generally available due to the support and documentation I'd have to write and provide). If you understand the basics of working with GIS data (and using something like qGIS), and you also understand how to do things like reproject map data (if it isn't in WGS84) and find attributes yourself then you can make use of other data. I suspect in this case, most of the advanced mixed scenery will be ready made for people to simply download and use by myself or others who are clued up on this sort of thing, as an example for the UK I had to

 

a) Download the OSM data as before

Download about 30 groups of shapefile data for OS VectorData.

c) Open up qGIS and find how what data I have in the shapefiles and how they are attributed, e.g. How do I know what is a forest, etc..

d) Write configuration files for World2XPlane so it knows how to read it.

e) Write a configuration for World2XPlane to reproject the shapefile from OSGB36 to WGS84 (Which is what X-Plane uses)

 

As you can see, it isn't the easiest of things. However the rest of World2XPlane will continue to work as before and has bug fixes, etc..

[AngeloM]

Not the easiest thing and I think that will involve (or should have involved) a lot of coding.

[tonywob]

It's not too bad if the data is already projected correctly. Example, for New Zealand, the building shape files where already WGS84, so I only had to point World2XPlane at that as an additional data source and say they are buildings and it all worked fine.

[HiFlyer]

You really are plugging away at this. Nice work!!

[jaemmerson]

Tony, this is incredible work! I've been religiously mapping out my own area but I'm guessing with the update that won't be needed as much? I've got to say this already creates probably the best scenery for any flight sim at the moment, all the extra work you're doing can only make it better. Orbx England is already pretty much blown out of the water! Thanks so much for all the effort you're putting in. 

[tonywob]

I've been religiously mapping out my own area but I'm guessing with the update that won't be needed as much?

 

Thank you :-). Autogen will never be as clever as real data placement, so it's always worth mapping areas you know well. If you find the autogen looks incorrect, then this solution at least allows it to be easily fixed by just adding the correct buildings into OSM. Additionally, besides buildings which is the bulk of the work on OSM, forests, rivers, roads etc all still need doing. So please do continue mapping ;-)

[saied45]

tony i have a question in regards of the extended DSF range that will be coming in the next update.

Phillip mentioned that once the update has come people who select the extended DSF range will probably have a hit in FPS if they are combining XP scenery generator . is it possible to make your software somehow allow range limits and draw details based on how high an airplane is?

[HiFlyer]

Looking at these streets, both here and in X-plane itself, I sometimes notice sharply angled corners in places where in real life there were probably smooth (but probably sharp) curves. Is this due to something in the Osm data itself, or in the way its used in X-plane, or is it something else entirely?

 

Does the Osm data contain fine-grained enough information to render these areas (and some intersections) more smoothly?