alpilotx

Hey John, what exactly do you want to do ? Or where is your problem (and why would you want to replace Alberts fantastic ice textures - I am only joking )? OK, you could do a lot of things here, depending on how flexible you want to be. But I would recommend to do this: make your own folder in "custom scenery" (lets call it custom pack). make two subfolders like (all names are exemplary!): "my_ters" "my_textures" [*]create a library.txt in your custom packs root [*]In that library.txt ONLY copy the few lines (from original), where you want to change something! AND change where it points to (namely to your "my_ter" folder [*] EXPORT lib/g10/1000 world terrain/terrain10/ice_cld_wet_flat.ter my_ters/ice_cld_wet_sflat.ter [*]Of course, copy the original - example - ice_cld_wet_sflat.ter to your "my_ters" folder (as that is what your library.txt "overwrite" references now!) [*]Change your copy of the TER in "my_ters" to your liking! BUT you need to take care, that ALL textures which are referenced from within the TER are also available in your custom pack (all the paths are relative to the location of the TER) [*]For example make BASE_TEX point to: ../my_textures/ice_vcld_wet_sflat_d.dds (and have a ice_vcld_wet_sflat_d.dds in your "my_textures" ... of course) [*]And be careful, that this TER uses more textures which need to point somewhere, where you have a real texture, like: BORDER_TEX (it definies how soft or har AUTO_SLOPE_HILL (a shader trick ... in your example, beginning with slope 20-23 degrees, this texture blends in) AUTO_SLOPE_CLIFF (a shader trick ... in your example, beginning with slope 57-62 degrees, this texture blends in and will be projected from the side ... the cliff projection!) The good thing with this approach is, that your custom package will be completely selfsufficient ... You can put it in, and your changes take ove, or you can remove it, and the default comes back. And make sure, you read this: http://scenery.x-plane.com/tutorials.php?doc=library.php

I added some comparison shots to the set! Check out the subtle difference between default Global Scenery and HD Scenery. (start at picture 48 - and they are named accordingly with airport name) http://picasaweb.google.com/101666907909842492197/XPlane10AlaskaHD

I did a little excursion, which shows how Alaska with the experimental (like described in my thread Some experimental XP10 scenery shots ... - so the same applies here too) higher resolution mesh would look like ... see for yourself : http://picasaweb.goo...Plane10AlaskaHD

Ben has finally posted this detailed write up on his Blog! Read, learn and understand : When Are We Going To Get High? The Plan For Cities

Yes, thats the idea ... usually you don't very often need it until now. But that might change, when it becomes possible (like with my HD scenery).

64bit is not about performance, but about addressable virtual memory ... Read the link woweezowee posted.

Yes, for those who do cities, or code 64bit (but neither one is my specialty ... and neither do my experiments interfere with the work of the others).

And one funny thing is: other than the few farms I sketched up with Blender, there is no new artwork ! Its all the default artwork (same textures, same forests) used a bit more ... uhm ... "aggressively" ...

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.google.com/101666907909842492197/XPlane10SceneryExperiments

Yes, thats obviously a bug (to be seen in many different pats of the world) in the new "road draping" engine. With XP10 (compared to XP9), the way roads are rendered changed drastically. Until XP10, the scenery needed to specify the road grid in full 3D (explicitly specifying the elevation of each node). With XP10, the scenery only needs to have the road network in 2D (like you see it on the map), and it "automagically" puts it over the landscape (which has a lot of advantages, like less data needed in the scenery, roads adapting to any elevation mesh, simpler handling for devs). This is the "road draping" algorithm. But, of course, like with any new tech, its not without its problems ... and the things you see on the screenshots are very likely an example of those problems. To my knowledge, this issue is already on the bug list (as it was reported by different people, from different places already) and will be dealt with ... But as there are more pressing issues still to be fixed (well, the roads going haywire look ridiculous, yes, but at least they don't affect FPS or make the sim crash ) , it will not happen immediately.

EDDN showed a Tmin of -20 and -21 around last weekend (and Monday) ....

And if you thin this is technology "news" ... well, not really "new". Even Ben Supnik commented on this topi a bit more than one(!) year ago! http://developer.x-plane.com/2011/01/plausible-realistic-procedural-and-algorithmic/ But yes, as an engine its interesting ...

Still the question remains: how much ressources does this need? Because its nice to have fantastic clouds ... but if in the end you have not many CPU/GPU cycles left to render scenery/airplane (and compute flightmodel, ATC etc. etc.) ... then the 1-2 FPS will not mak you happy.

Do you report this to the X-Plane team too, or just post in the forum? The former can help, the latter not so much. http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html

Did you install Updates already? A few DSF (scenery) Tiles have been fixed - by Laminar - where this problem appeared. So, check that first. If the error is still there. File a bug with exact coordinates where you see this happen.

Aah, much better. Ben Supnik made his own write up on exactly the same - the water - topic on his Blog. So, head over, and read what he has to say (luckilyx, its not 100% different from what I am saying ) http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/12/where-is-my-water-the-roadmap-for-osm-and-vectors/

If you say you are a cartographer, then how can you say things like: ... do you imply, that in V9, Laminar had their own database? So, you think, that before V10, we at Lamianr have made our own geographic data? Well, I suppose you are vaguely familiar with the size of planet earth .... So. What did V9 have? V9 had other data sources, yes. On the vector side (from where shorelines, lakes, rivers came), there was either the TIGER data (more or less completely imported in OSM by their community - UPDATE: Ben sets this straight in his Blog: only TIGER roads went into OSM but not the water ) for the USA, or VMAP0 for the rest of the world. And especially with VMAP0 (let me help: http://en.wikipedia....ero_.28VMAP0.29), if you are a little bit familiar with it ... well, you can't wish that back. Yes, maybe it had a few more rivers (well, not more ... but other), but thats maybe the only thing which was "better" in a few places ... For everything else, well, its a relic of the past which we are happy to leave. OSM is vastly better - especially outside the USA - than VMAP0 ... The only "problem" with OSM is, that it is community driven (by the "masses") and as such, isn't a consistent data set everywhere. But at least its free (we can use it without the need to make X-Plane more expensive by ... say a few hundred dollars), and it is open! Open means, that everybody can improve it (and their community is doing so just as we are speaking). And it gives us a single source to work with ... because merging different geographic source (especially vector data), is - believe me - a big PITA, and can introduce more ugly features than it fixes missing features (we were thinking about this - and abandoned it)! So, there was a decision, which had to be made. And it is OSM, and it will remain OSM, because we believe, that OSM will grow and improve (and it is already much better than what we ever had ... even with the few little problems which we now have, and you brought up). AND Laminar will continue to better use what is there. We are not finished with OSM, and there is a lot of data in there which we could/should incorporate in future global scenery releases. The best example being the rivers ... in the current V10 global scenery, we don't use line water (only coastlines or polygon water) features. That means: rivers made of line segments ... usually the smaller streams. But its on our todo list ... (which not only means, we need to add them to the scenery, but also implementing new features in XP10 to render them). Finally, I invite you (if you didn't already) to read an interview done with me a few weeks ago over there: http://xplane10.word...n-mr-x-terrain/ There I describe a lot of - technical - things about the scenery, and also have a few thoughts on OSM

You are not seriously asking this (should we really go out and paint 123.421.102 lakes/rivers/coastlines instead of improving the sim itself ??). Or do you not understand OpenStreetMap? It is not Laminars tool or toy, but an open - completely open - Wiki like geographic data collection system. It lives from 100.000s of users around the world, who feed it with data (just like Wikipedia), and everybody is free to use the data for what ever he likes. BUT, still everybody has to respect the basic principles and rules of OSM. Its definitely not a good stile to edit it, just to make it work in X-Plane (but maybe ignore rules of OSM itself). X-Plane is a guest in the house of OSM and we should adhere to their rules. As long as this is respected, everybody is invited and encouraged to improve OSM as you will see the results of it in the next release of the Global Scenery. But in the end, its not just for Laminar, its for everybody out there who uses OSM (there are even navigation systems which use it already)!

I think, you are not entirely correct about OSM ... You comment shows, that you not really know OSM. Of course, its far from perfect, but calling it generally inaccurate would be a gross statement. In some countries of the western world (for example Germany) it has much more detail than even Google Maps has ... And small lakes? In some places you get them all: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=47.101&lon=-78.702&zoom=11&layers=M (and in others, you get nothing - yes, the inconsistency is one of the problems of OSM ... but then, its completely free and open too!).

The tool solution is not very probable ... at least from todays perspective (but you never know what the future will bring one day ). But correcting/ updating OSM data is always a good idea. On the other hand, you need to be careful! Very careful! Never - I really say NEVER - edit OSM data just because of X-Plane. We - the X-Plane community - are only guests in that big project, and if we do something only for our own good but maybe completely disobey some general editing rules ... thats a bad thing (and might result in negative sentiments from the OSM community in our direction). So, I think its reasonable, to leave small rivers (streams) as linear date in OSM (as below some size, it just doesn't make sense geographically to make it as a polygon). First, we filter out extremely thin polygon data anyways (as it "overloads" the triangle mesh - water polygons are always part of the mesh!). Second, we hope, that a next release of the Global Scenery can support linear rivers ... well, and not only the scenery will need to support that, but also X-plane getting a feature to render those tiny, line based rivers. Even if it won't happen tomorrow, this feature is definitely on our internal "wish list", and will come at some point in the future!

UPDATE: PascalL already had the right idea whats going on (while I was typing) ... but read the details here: Aaah, now I see what you mean. Well, this is something that will not get "fixed" in this release of the Global Scenery (as this is some feature that is either in the DSFs, or it is not ... and as they are now shipped, you know whats the case here). This is some point a tried to push internally for, but it just couldn't make it in our production because of time constraints (and because of the thousand other features which needed to be coded - and might have made people equally upset as "missing rivers"). So, whats going on here. The problem is (and I answer to iamfallen too), that we switched our data source entirely. All vector data is coming now from OpenStreetmap (the following is vector data: roads, railroads, powerlines, coastlines, rivers). And yes, you see rivers in that list. So they depend on OSM too. But they also have another constraint, that we couldn't work around until the deadline ... We only use polygonal rivers (those qualify for the current scenery). Rivers, which are defined as area features in OSM. But not rivers, which are only drawn in as line features (usually the smaller streams). Now comes the problem ... Although OSM is a fantastic treasure chest of gigabytes of data, it also has a little-big drawback. Its like a wiki, and everybody does to his/her liking (many adhere to common rules, but not all). So, while sometimes, some users create the tiniest rivers as area features (this made us headaches too!), some others don't waste their time, and just quickly draw in even bigger rivers as line features ... And then you see what happens. All river segments which are only lines, are not in the scenery ... (and yes, I have seen many areas where I really miss this). But why don't we have those line rivers? Because area water features (and coast --> the big seas) are not draped but "burnt" into the triangle mesh of the DSF (scenery) ... something which we couldn't afford with myriads of very small - line based - streams (as it would induce a triangle explosion in the mesh, which hurts quality of the rest of the mesh or FPSs). And also, the mesh based water is not very good at steep, sloped landscape. So, for this reason, we will need some kind of draping technique (remotely similar to how roads work now), a technique which paints those line rivers over the mesh (and not makes part of the mesh) ... And this is what didn't make it in XP10 in time (and because this, we didn't care to burn it in the DSF either - and so this kind of tech will have to wait some time .. there are enough, higher priority, burning issues at the table for the near future). I hope you understand it now i(and neither I am happy with this decision, believe me ... but sometimes decisions need to be made).

Do you mean this river? http://www.openstree...oom=12&layers=M Hmmm ... thats strange, because at first sight (as far as i can see from OSM data - don't have my X-plane at hand at the moment), this river should qualify to get into our scenery ... I would need to re-check what our data processing does with it. Then I could tell you why it did disappear (or if it disappeared at all )

Yes, for screenshots, that would suffice ... but usually I have far more than 1 FPS. Outside, in the natural landscape I easily get 25-40 FPS (sometimes more) ... which allows very smooth flying. In cities, of course, I see it drop to 8-10 FPS too ... then I lower my shadow settings one (max two) notches, and I am back around 15 FPS (which is usually enough to fly). I don't know !

Well, rivers ... Those are a mixed bag. The problem is, that we completely changed our data source for roads/railroads/powerlines/coastlines and RIVERS (all the vector data) to OpenStreetmap. So, we only have what OpenStreetmap has (well, had at the time when we pulled the data - don't ask the exact date, I would need to ask Ben, as he did that). So, this might sound on the one side like a little bit "sad" thing in some places (yes, even I have missed some rivers) BUT it has a very very bright side (if you think in a bit longer terms). As X-Plane intends to use OSM for the future (even more extensively than now), you can (everybody, all OSM users - OSM is like a Wiki) improve the landscape around you. So, what ever you improve in OSM now will show up in future releases of the Global Scenery (don't ask me about the distribution - time line/method - of future global scenery, as many thing mights or might not change in that filed :-) ). PS: but I always need to remind people not to just pimp OSM for X-Plane alone. That is a big, community map source, where X-Plane is "only" a guest. Please, always respect heir rules/ideas/methodology when it comes to map editing!

I work with an Core i7-2600K,. GeForce GTX 570, 16 GByte RAM (and all this on Linux!) And see my rendering preferences in the screenshot.