Object generation utility

Top notch lenidcamper,

this was overdue for a long time!

Stu, great work - looking forward to giving it a try!

I was exploring the powerlines situation over the holidays but tabled it due to concerns about having +100 3D objects in a single TSC file for a big city. What are your typical pylon counts in your generated TSC files?

lenidcamper thank you for your work, for our community.

For sure, and by far, AFS2 is the best flight simulator. But we need talented gents like you - and of course others - to enhance in the future our global immersive experiences. And Power lines are part of them. Would be so glad that in a near future, a quality scenery like Switzerland DLC can be enhanced by such remarkable obstacles, at least main power lines. Thank you very much formyour work: with people like you, as well as other AFS2 pionners in planes design, sceneries development and utilities creation, for sure, the flight simulation’s future looks bright

Quote from lenidcamper

A significant feature of VFR flight are lines of power pylons stretching off into the haze.

In the absence of a MakeAF2Object directive in scenProc, I created a utility PYLONGEN to parse OSM files and generate a TSC file with entries

for each node along ways tagged with k="power" v="line".

PYLONGEN will use the bounds defined in the OSM file to calculate the coordinates

for the TSC and reject any pylon points out of bounds.

PYLONGEN expects the arguments

- path to OSM file

- [optional] relative path to PowerPylonModels folder in the deployed scenery folder structure. Assumes the same folder if arg not provided. This allows positioning the

PowerPylonModels folder to be shared by multiple tsc files in a folder hierarchy. I place the generated tsc (along with other cultivation files) in places subfolder

for each 0.1x0.1 cultivation tile. The PowerPylonModels folder at a higher level in the hierarchy can be shared by all tiles.

The utility will produce TSC and log files in the current directory.

Model selection precedence

If the power="line" way has a tag model="yourSiteSpecificModelName", the specific model will be used for that line. This allows customization for distinctive pylon styles.

If no model defined but the line has a cables tag defined for the way, a generic N-cables model name will be be selected based on number of cables. A number of generic pylon models have been provided. if you encounter cable arrangements not supported there will be "not found" errors in the tm.log for the missing tmb files. You have the choice of creating a model for that configuration or setting a specific model for the way .

As a last resort the defaultPylon model will be used.

Way and node ids are added to the TSC to track back to OSM file for any missing or spurious towers.

Model development

Example models were converted from SketchUp 3DWarehouse (I found ZoSoChiles 3d Model conversion post most helpful in getting the pylon models converted.)

The model base must be centered on the drawing origin.

No geo-position info should be defined in the model.

The model should be aligned for a east west cable run.

The piers should be extended well below grade to allow for slope placement. Steep slopes may require manual elevation tweaks in the TSC.

Limitations

You may need to set the time of day to align 3D generated shadows and ortho image shadows.

Ortho image of power cables are sometimes highly visible and may not be aligned with implicit line of sight from the camera position. I do not think anything can be done to fix that.

The PYLONGEN utility has been uploaded to flight-sim

/Stu

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Sorry, I can’t figure out how to run the program with his "expected arguments"

Is it possible to have an exemple or something that could help me to understand ?

Thanks

I'm interested to learn too.... Is it possible to teach us with an example ? Do we have to write a dedicated .tsc file ?

Thanks, I have generate the TSC file

So great

I only had a problem in the TSC file, it has generate this :

...

<[file][][]

<[tmsimulator_scenery_place][][]

<[string8][type][object]>

<[string8][sname][]>

<[string8][lname][]>

<[string8][icao][]>

<[string8][country][]>

<[string8][coordinate_system][lonlat]>

<[vector2_float64][position][3,235 45,515001]>

<[float64][height][0]>

<[float64][size][5000]>

<[vector2_float64][tower_position][0 0]>

<[float64][tower_height][0]>

<[bool][autoheight][true]>

<[string8][autoheight_method][]>

<[list_tmsimulator_scenery_object][objects][]

...

I've just changed it by

...

<[vector2_float64][position][3.235 45.515001]>

...

And it was ok.

I love the rendering

Quote from lenidcamper

I suspect something to do with culture dependent number formatting for the mid point.

The pylon positions were formatted correctly?

/Stu

Yes, perfectly

Thank you Stu for your great tool.

Would it be possible to also add objects like transmitter and cooling towers based on their OSM position?

Cheers,

Thomas

Quote from TomSimMuc

Thank you Stu for your great tool.

Would it be possible to also add objects like transmitter and cooling towers based on their OSM position?

Cheers,

Thomas

Great tool! I wonder too if this tool can easily be adapted for other objects e.g. farmhouses. I mean just generate the TSC with coordinates, reference to object name can be entered manually by user.

Hi lenidcamper : thank you very much : your Pylon system looks great !

In the future, it will be perhaps necessary to optimize the Pylon models, to avoid CPU or GPU saturation.... With thousand of pylon in a wide zone, I experienced some visual artifacts or bugs in the sky (reminds me sinister RAM usage problem of fsx years ago...). But I'm sure the models can be optimized.

Anyway thank you very much to offer us this tool !

Regards from Switzerland

Quote from HerveF

In the future, it will be perhaps necessary to optimize the Pylon models, to avoid CPU or GPU saturation.... With thousand of pylon in a wide zone, I experienced some visual artifacts or bugs in the sky (reminds me sinister RAM usage problem of fsx years ago...).

A very good and important points.

First: it is a great tool and the power pylons add a lot to the VFR experience.

Such a tool makes me thinking. How can it be used outside of the power pylons.

So I replaced the pylons in a region north of berne by a swiss alpine hut. The big advantage over ScenProc is that the tool generates a tsc-file. If we can change the arguments ourselves we can extract anything from the osm file and generate a tsc. 'Search and replace by' does the rest. It repeats in this case the model but this is just a first approach.

It would be helpful to have some performance guidelines from IPACS regarding TSC based objects otherwise we may start to slide down the FSX path of add-ons where the smooth frame rates are impacted and new users get cold feet.

Maybe someone has the time to run their own performance test - take a level 9 tile and fill it with 100 poles, then 1,000 poles, then 10,000 poles using a single TSC file. Does FS2 crash? If not, what's the frame rate?

Performance may be tied to the polygon count of those 3D objects - 1,000 simple poles may be the same as 100 water towers. It's probably a function of your graphics card memory size too.

You can have big numbers of trees and cultivated houses because only the ones within about a 6 km radius are processed and displayed - you can test this out by modifying one of your scenProc buildings so it's 100 stories tall.

TSC objects, however, can be seen from +60 km if the object is big enough - if TSC objects eat away your graphics card memory, stutters can't be far away. If we had some guidelines, we could optimize the 3D models (polygon count) and better manage the object count in the TSC files.