Taking Baby Steps to add cultivation and Lights, maybe even trees to New Orleans

  • Well, thanks to the general encouragement of Spit40 and Kenneth to take Rodeo's tutorials and tutoring and run with it, I am now ready to give it a serious try. I would like to add cultivation houses and lights to the Big Easy. I now have functioning airports, all with full cultivation and multiple runways at the three major airports in New Orleans. After seeing the screenshots of Arcata with full lights, I fired up AF2 in that area to be greeted with the normal airport only lights. Now, I am eager to see it like Kenneth see's it.

    I am still fuzzy on the steps necessary to create and how to define the area of my choice. I specified a polygon of the New Orleans area that I wish to improve and downloaded the free OSM map file according to the steps in Rodeo's video Cultivation tutorial. I ran the Scenpro program that Rodeo generously provided for us and I updated the 3 lines to make it unique to my PC and my folders and filenames. No errors at the end. I ran it and got a TOC.

    I copied the toc file to my "places" folder for NewOrleans along with the "building_textures" folder with the proper ttx files. I added the standard runway.tmb file for good measure. The big unknown for me is the makeup of the tsc file. I understand the cultivation section and named the file in that section "map" as Rodeo did in the video tutorial. I am not sure about the rest of the tsc, other than I did make sure I used a proper IACO name - KMRY for the new Orleans airport.

    I have some loose ends someplace because the 3d houses are not appearing as desired.

    Regards,

    Ray

    <<<UPDATE>>>

    Partial success. I have cultivation houses covering about half the city. They just stop along a straight line about halfway east to west. Could be a map coord problem or a max number of houses, or heck anything, but I now have a lot of 3d houses. I am going to try a totally different location (smaller area) to see if I can get it done again. That SPC file from Rodeo saves a ton of tedious work, for sure. Thanks Rodeo.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • New Orleans, Louisiana KMSY airport

    The is a real head scratcher for me. The cultivation houses stop at a canal. I tried an OSM map redo, I tried to make only the west side of the city, I tried a small area of just the center and only the sliver along the east side of the canal has houses.

    Anyone have any ideas on what would cause this?

    Regards,

    Ray

  • Hello Kenneth,

    It appears to be devoid of everything. Just like it is not part of the defined area. You could take a quick look for yourself. The west part of the New Orleans metro area is Metairie and Kenner (cities within cities) and the main airport is KMSY located in Kenner with nothing but swamp to the west.

    I have tried smaller local areas with no luck. It is just like it doesn't exist.

    See map.

  • Hi Ray

    I just looked at the area in OSM. The problem does indeed appear to be the lack of building footprints in the area with your question mark. In the screen capture below (taken from a section of the OSM map relating to your area), you will see the left side of the waterway has no building footprints, while the right side does. This most likely corresponds to what you are seeing in the sim.

    I have the same situation in many parts of Canada.

    - Kenneth

  • Are there alternative data sources.......?

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  • Are there alternative data sources.......?

    I would be interested in another source. When half a major city has no data, something in not quite up to par. Surprisingly, some of the small towns around Mississippi are absolutely loaded with data to drive the cultivation while others are barely noticeable improvements. The good news is how quick and easy it is to get something showing on the screen when using the setup that Rodeo has prepared for us.

    I was going to prepare Mobile, Alabama for cultivation and I decided to map from Pensacola to New Orleans and it took about 2 seconds to prepare all the data. Some of my old stomping grounds from Pascagoula to Gulfport are just loaded with houses and buildings. We need to figure out how to get large fuel storage tanks displayed instead of one-story buildings but for the effort it is a great improvement to the raw scenery.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • Ray,

    I was looking at my little village here in Saskatchewan. No housing detail in OSM, and no trees. Only the street lights were added. I almost considered learning how to contribute to (edit) OSM data, just to cultivate the village in AFS2. I guess, when it comes down to it, OSM is created by an army of contributors. The coverage in an area will likely depend on the number of contributors in that area, combined with the degree of enthusiasm and activity level of those local contributors. That's my thinking anyway.

    This I will add... I have been busy adding buildings and street lights to the Swiss DLC. However, I am noticing a significant performance hit. On my old machine I typically get 36 FPS (yes, you read that right) in spot plane views (if lucky). Adding lights and buildings to about 10% of the country dropped me to 12 FPS. I think we need to be careful what we wish for in this sim. More detail, whether scenery, rain effects, active weather, ATC, more complex aircraft, might kill the goose that laid the golden egg in terms of performance.

    - Kenneth

  • Ray,

    I was looking at my little village here in Saskatchewan. No housing detail in OSM, and no trees. Only the street lights were added. I almost considered learning how to contribute to (edit) OSM data, just to cultivate the village in AFS2. I guess, when it comes down to it, OSM is created by an army of contributors. The coverage in an area will likely depend on the number of contributors in that area, combined with the degree of enthusiasm and activity level of those local contributors. That's my thinking anyway.

    This I will add... I have been busy adding buildings and street lights to the Swiss DLC. However, I am noticing a significant performance hit. On my old machine I typically get 36 FPS (yes, you read that right) in spot plane views (if lucky). Adding lights and buildings to about 10% of the country dropped me to 12 FPS. I think we need to be careful what we wish for in this sim. More detail, whether scenery, rain effects, active weather, ATC, more complex aircraft, might kill the goose that laid the golden egg in terms of performance.

    - Kenneth

    The performance hit doesn't sound good. I have a modern pc and thinking of upgrading to handle the 4k VR coming soon.

    I hope you decide to upload some of your Swiss DLC work for other users that are not able to do it for themselves.

    Shoot me an email at

    jaymar98 at hmail dot xxm should read jay rhymes with my first name, not 98 but the next higher number and using google's mail. Hackers are everywhere nowadays.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • I discussed the performance hit in another thread; you can reduce it a significant amount by cultivating only industrial buildings and trees, and cut your street light cultivation in half by dropping several of the street/hiway types.

    I actually prefer it because residential houses still look good when using FSET 1 m or better res tiles and there is plenty of night lighting. Having industrial 3d buildings gives you that occupied look vs. bare (for me anyway). Give a small area a try and see if it appeals to you visually and improves your performance, if not you can always revert back to full cultivation.

    Not trying to rain on the cultivation parade, but like you discovered there is a price to pay for full cultivation additions to the scenery. Fortunately I found a way around it that gives me a satisfactory outcome. :)

    Ken

  • Hi Ray

    I will email you. In the meantime, I would like to prepare a bit of Swiss cultivation to freely share with the community for their enjoyment. However, I need to ask Rodeo a question.

    Rodeo, since my cultivation efforts make use of your building_textures folder, (and it took me a wee while to find it in your tutorial originally), may I have permission to simply include the buildings_texture folder (and contents) in any cultivation projects I create? These projects would be for free distribution via the official forum only. It would make it a lot easier for a newcomer to just unzip my projects and be done with it, without them having to also search for a tutorial, and then search the tutorial for the required files.

    Regards

    - Kenneth

    Edited once, last by KJKsimmer (December 16, 2017 at 9:47 PM).

  • I discussed the performance hit in another thread; you can reduce it a significant amount by cultivating only industrial buildings and trees, and cut your street light cultivation in half by dropping several of the street/hiway types.

    I actually prefer it because residential houses still look good when using FSET 1 m or better res tiles and there is plenty of night lighting. Having industrial 3d buildings gives you that occupied look vs. bare (for me anyway). Give a small area a try and see if it appeals to you visually and improves your performance, if not you can always revert back to full cultivation.

    Not trying to rain on the cultivation parade, but like you discovered there is a price to pay for full cultivation additions to the scenery. Fortunately I found a way around it that gives me a satisfactory outcome. :)

    Hi Ken.

    Yes, I have been coming to the same conclusion. In some areas where there are no sources to create cultivated buildings, or just a limited number of buildings, I have indeed been doing without buildings and just creating lights to sit on top of an FSET-1 image. It does look good from 1000ft AGL. I have also been running separate scripts to just create one .toc file for lights, another.toc for buildings, and another .toc for trees. Then, the airport .tsc has been edited to call for these different cultivation .toc files. If one element causes a performance hit, I remove the call for that .toc from the .tsc.

    Thanks for sharing. We are all learning and growing here.

    - Kenneth

  • Thanks for sharing. We are all learning and growing here.

    - Kenneth

    You're welcome, happy to contribute my own experimentation results. I'm pretty sure IPACS is still working on the cultivation process and as easy as it is to produce they may provide a new tool at some point that makes choices even simpler to implement for the home user, depending on personal choices and taking their system specs into consideration when creating scenery.

    Ken

  • Hello Kenneth

    Fine with me. I have seen that you cultivated les eplatures. That is the airport of la chaux de fonds and le locle, the places where the history of swiss watches started. Also special and not typical for switzerland is the checkerboard pattern of the town, which can be seen in your night light pictures. The city has been rebuilt like this after a big fire.

    Best regards,

    Thomas

    Regards,

    Thomas

    i7-14700KF @ 5.6 GHz, Geforce RTX 4090, 32MB RAM, 1TB SSD M.2, 1TB SSD M.2, 2TB SSD M.2, 32" Monitor 4K, Pimax Crystal