Caruso

Hi Tony I have recently downloaded your GB Pro HD scenery and absolutely love it. Thank you for this! I only have one issue. I am using Simheaven's w2xp_europe scenery at the same time. It is sitting below GB Pro in the scenery.ini. After I installed GB pro all the w2xp scenery objects in Normandy have disapeared. Is there a way for me to fix this?

Hi Tony I was ill last week and not in the x-plane world. I am currently testing some of his w2xp sceneries for PilotBalu. Next week I should have time for other x-plane related things. I'll then PM you in regards of the "Swiss Look".

Hi Tony, You posted this a while ago. If it hasn't been done yet I could help to reduce the number of German buidlings to the desired 100 types. As I don't leave in Germany I would be able to do it only from a Swiss perspective. If that'd be fine just let me know.

Hi Tony, This thread may be of interest to you. It also mentions these guys work. Did you know their scenery system project?

Hi Tony, Thank you for keeping on further developing W2XP. For me it is by far the most important scenery add-on and made my virtual flying by 100% more enjoyable. When I was just about to post a reply to your latest developement news I saw Daikan's post. That saved me a lot of typing as I mostly wanted to comment your news in a similar way Your posted images look very promising in terms of regional atmosphere and plausibility. Also any developement that helps to improve performance is more than welcome (I am pushing the sim to its limits since I am using UHD mesh, photo scenery and W2XP HD sceneries at the same time...). Still the building-footprint accuracy of the current version of W2XP is a very important element of the enjoiment for me. Maybe this has a lot to do with the fact that I use photo scenery and fly mostly the area of Central Switzerland which I know very well. It would probably irritate me to see buildings that are not alligned with the underlying photo scenery. But maybe I am overestimating this effect? Could you possibly post some pics showing the examples from your Update Post more from above so we can better see how W2XP fits with the underlying photo scenery? Can facades only be used to generate rectangular flat roof buildings? (What about the hedges and docks that W2XP generates? Aren't those facades too?) Or could this type of building be generated using facades? https://www.dropbox.com/s/h4sqf0baxrd5ttu/S1810002.JPG?dl=0 Could it be a compromise to generate heavily built up inner city areas (where the buidlings form blocks along the streets and the underlying photoscenery can't be seen anyway) in the new way and on the other hand to generate rural areas and villages with the old building-footprint accurate method? Keep it up and let me know if there is anything I can help with (besides creating objects).

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.

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?

Hi Tony This is slightly off-topic. Just stumbled over this entry in Ben's x-Plane developer Blog: http://developer.x-plane.com/2014/12/nvidia-4-ben-0/ (Ben is writing about hardware instancing relating to a specific GPU driver issue that was discovered by Rob-ART Morgan while he did some Hardware tests for me.) The interesteting aspect in regards to W2XP are Ben's general comments about hardware instancing: "Hardware instancing is the ability to tell the graphics card to draw a lot of copies of one object with a single instruction. (We are asking the GPU to draw many “instances” of one object.) Hardware instancing lets X-Plane draw more objects with lower CPU use. X-Plane’s rendering engine will use hardware instancing for simple scenery objects* when available; this is what makes possible the huge amounts of buildings, houses, street signs, and other 3-d detail in X-Plane 10. X-Plane has supported hardware instancing since version 10.0." "In order to draw an object with hardware instancing, it needs to avoid a bunch of object features: no animation, no attributes, etc. Basically the object has to be simple enough to send to the GPU in a single instruction. Our artists specifically worked to make sure that most of the autogen objects were instancing-friendly." I was wondering if this is something already considered and applied in the wolrd models master library? If not, it could be very helpful for object contributors if someone who understands these things could write a little turorial/checklist about how one would have to edit his objects to be hardware instancing friendly.

Never mind. You are already helping! And I mean hey - these hedges and walls are a very useful and good looking tool for our sceneries I am no good in Graphic Design either. It takes me ages to have the tiniest thing done... But I am good in copywriting, if this helps somewhere. In the meanwhile I'll try to get sceenery designers to donate some of their generic buildings and objetcs to the library.

hi Tony and shaunus82 Im glad you picked up the "hint" about hedges and are working on these Great stuff! @Tony I had this idea about finding more buildings for the library: I could go and ask around scenery designers if they would agree to contribute some of their generic buildings to the world models library. Especially if they have created buidlings that are very typical for a certain area. I guess I would start with designers of Swiss scenery and see how it goes. Waht do you think? Would you take any kind of building and simplify them if necessaire or have they to follow certain rules? To make sure I explain things correctly I would like to clarify the following: Is it correct, that, if available, w2xp will use objects from the corresponding regional subfolder when generating scenery for this area? Is it correct, that the object has to match certain criterias regarding size and shape to be chosen? E.g. if I wanted the swiss countryside to be coverd with swiss looking farmhouses it would'nt be enough to put several differently textured objects of the same kind into the library, it would also need dfferent sized objects?

I found the culprit. It was another scenery in Alaska spawning ships all around the world. No idea how... There is a new airport scenery on the org that uses a hedge facade. (Marginal made the FAC from a hedge model especially for this scenery). It quite nicely depicts the straight hedgelines I have seen there.

Tony, there is no rush and good things take their time. One question: I recently (since 0.5.0) noticed new (ugly) big ships and fish trawlers in my ports. Do they have anything to do with w2xp as I couldn't find the objects in the library? One suggestion: since you work on left hand traffic in UK - dense hedges lining the streets of rural England could be a nice addition One hint regardig custom roads: These guys have created rescue sceneries and a library for helicopter pilots. The library contains custom roads to place in sceneries. Don't know if this is the kind of things you're after.

Tony, your creation keeps surprising me all the time. I have been test-flying W2XP for quite some time now and I keep discovering new details in the sceneries created with your tool Yesterday e.g. I was flying from Calais to Le Tréport. And what did I see standing near the docks of Calais? Motorhomes - at exactely the same spot where I spent a night in my van during my last Normady vacation! I couldn't believe my eyes tried so hard to get a better look that I almost fell out of the cockpit... That's why I especially love W2XP so much, Tony. It adds so many little, accurate and plausible details to VFR flying one could fly on and on and on and on And it seems this is not the end Thank you.

Hi Tony Hope you had a good time over summer. Thank you for these exciting news! Looking forward to the new features. You have mentioned lots of things I was secretely hoping for, like the allignment of bus stations, scrubs, beaches. But must of all the EU style of roads Just let me know how I can help (e.g. the ideas we exchanged before the summer). Cheers

I'll do that.

I found a statement of Ben Supnik which, I think, confirms that developers are allowed to use the X-Plane art assets, as long as this is done by using the library system. "You should also use the library when you want to use our art assets; do not copy our art assets out of X-Plane into your scenery pack. If you use the library, improvements to the art assets are automatically transferred to your scenery pack." Here you can find the whole article. Start reading from paragraph six. And yes, there is Ikea. If you want I can search the default scenery for historic buildings and Ikea.

My guess would be that we are allowed to use them - at least as long it is a freeware sceenery we generate. Lego brick airports are noting else: sceneries that are made using x-plane's objects, facades and textures and that are shared with the comunity.

Hi Tony. Sometimes one just posts observations and suggetsions for improvements so it's time again to say "thank you very much" for how you are developing this project. It has changed my flightsim experience completely and I really love it ) Nevertheless there is one thing that would add a lot to the realism of the scenery look in the area I live (Switzerland) and probably in the whole of Europe. The look of historic city centers. The placement of the buildings is already pretty excellent. I could imagine some improvement in the look, which is mostly too modern at the time. If it can be done I don't know. Let me explain my idea: 1. Correct shape Very often the Buildings in historic city centers are build one next to each other to form something like a rectangular apartment block witn inner court yard. W2XP has two ways to calculate this. A) In most cases the buildings of such a block are created as single houses next to each other. W2XP is using objects. This looks rather odd and only occasionally like a block. In some cases it creates a multy poligon facade. This is the case if the building has been createtd in osm as one single building. In this case the shape is correct but not the look of the facade. 2. Correct texture Osm has a tag called "construction_date". I am wondering if W2XP could use this tag to control which objects/textures are used. Supposed people tag the buildings in osm and supposed there exist according tectures and objects. While I checked out diffrent cities in found out that x-plane generates correct looking buidlings in many areas where there is not much osm data, some areas in Barcelona for example. I browsed x-plane's default scenery library to see where these objects come from and found some example objects that would suit the style (lib/g10/US/urban_high/uh10x29 ...uh 15x15 ...uh15x22_5 ...uh15x22_5_L ...uh22_5x30 ...uh22_5x30v4 ...uh22_5x30v6 ...uh40x40). I am not sure about the influence of the europe library. So basically the questions is if it could be ever possible with a future build of W2XP to control the look of the buildings accoring to their construction date? For us users it would be quite easy to add the construction_date tag to let's say the 50 most important buildings of our favourit flying area. I could imagine three different categories: 1400 to 1700 for medieval looking buildings, 1800 to 1930 for victorian looking buildings, no date for modern looking buildings. Here are some example screenshots: Google pic of original block of houses top https://www.dropbox.com/s/qwyy726ev940k94/Bruchquartier.tiff front https://www.dropbox.com/s/d74rqe8ho2j6rrb/Bruchquartier%20front.tiff W2XP scenery of the same area https://www.dropbox.com/s/j7p1x3tro1sxoqs/Bruchstrasse%20W2XP.png Autogen buidlings in Barcelona https://www.dropbox.com/s/y5j1mbuetntno8c/Barcelona.png

Below I post two example screenshots of the issue I posted yesterday (http://forums.x-pilot.com/topic/6388-xp-scenery-generator-wip/?p=74590) Missing Facades with object setting=too many versus setting=extreme https://www.dropbox.com/s/09g5evmjojq3lia/ObjSetToomany.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/xgzbaig1185v8vq/ObjSetExtreme.png Having the number of objects set to other than "extreme" results in - parts of facade buildings being rendered and other parts not. It looks pretty weird when a part of a buildig disappears after I lower the object density setting. Can this be helped? - significant parts of a town center are only rendered at maxed out object setting. Edit: added correct links

Speaking of performance and crashing: I was able to try yesterdays DACHbeta4.1 scenery from simsheaven on the latest MacPro. All kernels were working like mad horses upon loading the scenery. Sometimes it loaded soemtimes it crashed. And the FPS were only slightly better then on my old iMac (top model of 2011 series). It looks as with the W2XP sceneries processor and bus speed is much more relevant than GPU speed. The FPS on my machine is definitively CPU bound.

During the last days I have been trying different reendering settings in Xplane with the actual W2XP scenety installed to see how performance is affected by the settings. Now I understand why changing the object density didn't change the FPS a lot... I was already suspecting that lowering of object density only reduced fassades but it is difficult to tell just by the looks of the rendered scenery. Facades are reduced accordingly but this reduction can result in parts of a building being rendered and other parts not. It looks pretty weird when a part of a buildig disappears after I lower the object density setting. Can this be helped? Another thing is that city centres (especially with orthfoto underlay) look strange with the object density reduced because then some of the (importanta) buildings are completely missing. Would it be possible to priorise buildings closer to a city center so that buildings in the outskirts would be left out first when one reduces the density settings? The other renedering setting for number of roads and trees work correctly.

Sorry still no fotos from my side. The wether here has just been a nightmare. What kind of supermarkets were you thinking of? Standalone shopping center style? Around here we often have a supermarket occupying the ground floor of a residential building. It woud look something like this https://www.dropbox.com/sc/jxk9s33oxik8ndu/AAAa6MU0mCF0OEpOJID6hw0La#lh:0-Migros1.jpg https://www.dropbox.com/sc/jxk9s33oxik8ndu/AAAa6MU0mCF0OEpOJID6hw0La#lh:1-Migros2.jpg Here in Switzerland the most common Supermarkets are Migros and COOP, but you won't almost find these in other European countries. Still interested in fotos?

Have you tried Movavi Screen Capture? Works great with X-Plane on my Mac without any FPS loss. With the demo version you can record up to 15 minutes.

It is still pretty cold around here... guess you would have to wait too long for pictures

How would the fotos have to be taken?