graphical possibilities?

  • Hey guys,

    Love the sim. The aerial photography is addicting, and I'm having a very hard time going back to FSX / Orbx patchwork texture-autogen when they are just abstractions of the real thing.

    However, flying low is not a good experience right now, and it's obvious trying to populate the world with 3D objects would take forever. However, I was wondering, would it not be possible to create bump or displacement maps to give the ground more texture when flying low? IE, areas that are green: any darker smaller object is likely to be a tree, bump/displace that darker value upwards. Or in urban environments, isolate road color and bump everything else (all the houses/buildings) up. That should allow them to catch light highlights and help depth. Some of this might need texture tagging or whatnot, but for relatively low maintenance maybe it would help. (or maybe it would be a mess, I don't know).

    For water: Clearly we are missing specular reflections of the sun and detail maps/animation of waves.. sorely needed. But at the same time, it is wonderful to have all the lakes/ponds/streams be the proper color of real life, rather than one solid hue like in FSX, which isn't great either. Would it possible to maintain the color and texture of your current water, and overlay a different specular material, with wave detail (bump map possibly?) overlaid to give it texture and catch highlights? I'd hate to super real ground texture run into cartoony water, but at the same time it's bizarre to fly over glasslike featureless deep water.

    Anyway, good stuff. I'd love to see boats leaving trails, road traffic on major arteries, street lights on urban centers at night, and air traffic in the sky (even if they are just flying loops or are magically appearing, I just want to swoop down on them!), or have mulitplayer where I can see other people's planes. That's my wishlist! Things that help immersion. I'm not so interested in ATC and proper procedures etc, I just love flying around. Many thanks!!!

  • I agree on the hopeful future use of bump mapping the terrain using color and/or some vector map data (like OpenStreetMap) to help. War Thunder uses that technique on some of its maps to great effect - any roads, rock area, mowed/plowed fields, etc look so much better than "flat". FS2 uses bump mapping to great effect on their aircraft - hope that someday (along with many other wishes) they can on terrain. I would like some houses and generic buildings as well wherever there is a reasonable size rectangle in the texture.

  • I think probably the biggest hurdle some current simulator users are having with Aerofly is the lack of auto-gen. I know it was considered and apparently rejected because of "lack of data" in the US but this might be a case of "Some is better than none." and in any case, there should be good data for Switzerland, right? At least to show whats possible.

    Even years ago, good results were within reach, and I think surely Ipacs could provide better textures than in the video below. Your texture artists and modelers seem extremely talented!

    Not a demand, I'm one of the patient ones, but it is a thought.

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    Devons rig

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  • Yes, that does look good. But from what I can read in the subtitles that is not default terrain generation anymore that could be hand placed or use custom building models. My biggest concern with auto-gen has always been that the houses all look the same, the trees are not really where I can see them on the ground textures, they have the wrong color and are of the same height. If auto-gen not done well it looks less authentic than just having just ground textures which is currently the case for default X-Plane and FSX terrain generation, if you ask me. And X-Plane have spend a lot of time on terrain generation and I still think it does not look authentic, I really hope they get there at some point in the future. Its nice to have all those cars, roads, buildings but right now it just does not look like the real world. The generated stuff just doesn't blend in well.
    And because I see what X-Plane has achieved so far I don't think its a good idea to chase after them and try to build a better looking auto-gen. We would spend years in development... I kinda like that Aerofly FS 2 is different, that we have hand modelled regions which look extremely realistic. I'd rather have a growing number of very high quality scenery "islands" in the future than have the whole world in an odd-looking state for years. And external developers like Orbx could contribute and expand the modelled world with us.

    I would love to have a decent terrain generation that just fills in the empty spaces, if we could just snip our fingers and have it. Procedual grass and tree generation, authentic looking riverbeds, so that I could actually fly very low to the ground and it would still look plausible and authentic. It does not have to match the real world terrain, it just has to look like it is real terrain.
    Now, I don't know if it would be possible to write a real time procedual terrain engine that can, for example, read texture color information and detect trees and buildings and place the most acurate ones or their closest color match.
    Otherwise one would have to pre-generate the terrain, that would be ok by me as long as it does not need that much extra storage space (less than 100GB for the regions I want to fly over).
    Maybe we could use some learning algorithm that we can train by feeding it some manually adjusted locations. For example, if I were to jump all over the world and pick certain very typical looking locations for that region, then fine-tuned the parameters so that the generated scenery looks authentic and realisitc, then this could actually work. We could of course use all the information that we have available as a basis, OpenStreetMap for example.
    So yeah, if we could get all that into a real time game engine, that would be great. But I am afraid the cost would be very high.

    Maybe for the forseeable future it would be enough to have procedual grass generation at airports and well placed trees in the surrounding area.

    Cheers,
    Jan

  • Thanks for the reply, Jan.

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  • I wonder if there is a flight sim based on Google Earth lurking in the future? Currently on Google Maps the 3D view from even a few hundred feet is pretty good and is different to, but as good as, lots of stuff in many flight sims. It has the accuracy though, better than anything out there in sims, and the 3D view generates a pretty convincing bump map effect on most structures. Obviously you don't get time of day, night flying etc, and it may involve an 'always online' setup, but it's an idea for the future.

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  • I wonder if there is a flight sim based on Google Earth lurking in the future? Currently on Google Maps the 3D view from even a few hundred feet is pretty good and is different to, but as good as, lots of stuff in many flight sims. It has the accuracy though, better than anything out there in sims, and the 3D view generates a pretty convincing bump map effect on most structures. Obviously you don't get time of day, night flying etc, and it may involve an 'always online' setup, but it's an idea for the future.

    You already named one of the major disadvantages, any other time than mid-day would look strange with the baked in shadows. Plus one would need to license the 3D model from Google Earth which could be pricey. And because that is an increadible amount of data for the entire world, one would need to stream the data, which would require a constant internet connection and a good download speed. In the future when large amounts of data will be less of an issue this might be a feasable option, but at the moment the global internet coverage isn't good enough to download all the data needed in real time as far as I know. Even Google Earth can't load the content fast enough so that I see loading updates on the screen all the time, and that is a Google product streaming data from Google's servers as far as I know...

  • I wonder if there is a flight sim based on Google Earth .

    John, Google Earth has had its own integrated flight simulator for years. You can fly planes around. Check it out.

    And: you can connect FSX with Google Earth. There is a tool for that.


    So this not a new idea. You can also connect Google Earth with Excel.
    Many poeple use these hidden functions.

    Just for info :)

  • My biggest concern with auto-gen has always been that the houses all look the same, the trees are not really where I can see them on the ground textures, they have the wrong color and are of the same height. If auto-gen not done well it looks less authentic than just having just ground textures which is currently the case for default X-Plane and FSX terrain generation, if you ask me. And X-Plane have spend a lot of time on terrain generation and I still think it does not look authentic, I really hope they get there at some point in the future. Its nice to have all those cars, roads, buildings but right now it just does not look like the real world. The generated stuff just doesn't blend in well.

    Dear Jan and dear IPACS team,

    The state of the art in FSX/P3D autogen on photoreal sceneries really doesn't match your depiction IMO.

    I would like to illustrate it with a few untouched screenshots:

    FSX example of automated placement of pure autogen based on free available databases (no procedural 3D). Everything is always perfectible, but you can see the relative variety and accuracy of both buildings and trees. The scenery is definitely better with than without.
    #1
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Comparatif_FSX_X-Plane/fsx%202016-05-15%2013-26-33-12.jpg]

    #2
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Comparatif_FSX_X-Plane/fsx%202016-05-15%2013-28-04-97.jpg]

    Below are P3D examples of a payware photoreal scenery seen at very low altitude, with a mix of autogen (vegetation and buildings) and, where necessary, procedural 3D for buldings :

    3#
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202016-12-31%2014-17-38-25.jpg]

    #4
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202016-12-31%2014-21-40-29.jpg]

    #5
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202016-12-31%2014-23-38-37.jpg]

    #6
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202016-12-31%2014-28-42-53.jpg]

    As usual, trees and buldings density and variety is the result of compromises in order to cope with the FSX/P3D's technical limitations.

    Looking at Aerofly FS 2's current autogen, I agree it rather matches your depiction : more or less randomly sprayed trees that don't blend in the beautiful base photo.

    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/aerofly_fs_2%202016-12-29%2022-33-09-66.jpg]

    I fully agree with your idea of "scenery islands", as far as "islands" are seen as VFR flight regions, not just isolated airports with a tiny local ground scenery.
    Aerofly FS 2 has a superb graphical engine that eventually could allow to overcome many old historical limitations in FSX/P3D/XPLANE. The NYC scenery is a superb demo of how AFS 2 could handle procedural 3D, it's way beyond what our "traditional" simulators could perform.

    Anyway, in order third parties developers to create add-on sceneries they will need adequate tools to integrate mesh + orthophoto, and generate autogen and procedural 3D out of available databases, with manual corrections where needed (because databases are databases and it will always be necessary).

    Lights and light effects is another topic. The shadowing effects on buildings in NYC is superb (but looks heavy for the graphic engine). However, ground mesh doesn't cast shadows, so that morning/evening flights in mountains look quite odd. Better fly mid-day anyway.

    My 2 cents
    Cheers
    Antoine

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  • My take, is that the demand for this will be so high in the current enthusiast community that if Aerofly doesn't do it, somebody with the sdk almost certainly will. Probably a variation of OSM2Xplane, World2Xplane, etc.

    For myself, its only a moderate issue, but I know for many this will be really important.

    And yeah...... Those trees...... :(

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  • The screenshots 4, 5 and 6 show some of the issues with autogen that I was mentioning. The trees have all the same color and height, are not even close to dense enough and don't blend into the ground textue coloring at all. having a lot of them makes large areas on the screen just one big color spot, same with the buildings roofs in 4 and 6. Its really the same texture over and over again and even the same house models are repeated way to often. Sure you have some sense of parallax effect this way but to me that destroys the immersion. My eye just focus on the reoccuring patterns and are not as excited as from a real world image or just the flat ground with the extremely variant ground images. I don't get the wow effect just because of the high number of objects, they have to be so mixed up that I think they are human-made not automatically generated with obvious patterns. The autogen shows me some abstract, generalized version of the real city, I can barely recognize a building that is supposed to be an iconic landmark...

    I don't know, maybe its the mix of 3D buildings next to flat polygon ground like in screenshot 5 or 6 (lower left) which I just find so ugly about auto-gen. And this is exactly where "procedual trees" or grass or however you would like to call it would really boost the looks.

    Have you ever heard about the uncanny valley? To me FSX and X-Plane fall into that. They want to create automatically generated scenery that has a lot more generated 3D detail but is not quite looking authentic and that looks way worse to me than just having the flat ground but details ground texturing insted.

  • My take, is that the demand for this will be so high in the current enthusiast community that if Aerofly doesn't do it, somebody with the sdk almost certainly will. [...]


    Sorry, but personally I don't see that. Sure there are quite a number of people that say they want auto-gen. But is that really what they want or do they actually want a lot more regions in the Aerofly FS 2 that look like the cities that we have modelled?

    Personally I want to have higher quality scenery and a lot of it, but I don't think any current auto-gen is going to give me that. I'd rather have some external company, like orbx for example, that use their high quality ground textures and hand place buildings and trees at least in the most important eye-catching areas.

    I am not against auto-gen per se, I am just implying that I have not seen good auto-generated scenery that conviced me or that would fit into the looks of the Aerofly FS 2.

  • Jet-Pack (IPACS),
    My preference is your preference - as evidenced by your incredible effort with New York City - especially in VR mode! Many times in FSX/P3D I would purchase 1 meter photoreal and then object by object add back in trees and buildings so as to make it fairly nice - a lot of work.
    However, the question might be what to do until the world is populated with that same level of quality. Everyone has their favorite spots to fly, and right now, FS2 is limited to small but beautifully done areas of the world.. Maybe some database (like OSM) oriented + AI tool (where are the buildings and the trees in the image?) could be used along with a object placer like Instant Scenery 3 over maybe a 4 to 8 meter (not sure what resolution is there right now for the entire world) imagery to add some reasonably improved areas - perhaps designated by the user. Note that some of the folks at fsdeveloper.com have done some of that for FSX. Along with a simple runway system generator for now, users could at least fly over areas of their interest. My preference is at least to have the underlying imagery be photoreal - even at lower resolution to begin with - I don't care for Landclass.
    This is a great topic for discussion - it's nice to have input to such a talented set of developers.

    Dave

  • John, Google Earth has had its own integrated flight simulator for years. You can fly planes around. Check it out.

    And: you can connect FSX with Google Earth. There is a tool for that.


    So this not a new idea. You can also connect Google Earth with Excel.
    Many poeple use these hidden functions.

    Just for info :)

    Thanks for the info, I shall look into those two :cool:

    Edit: Mmmm, interesting projects those, still seem to be quite a long way from what I'd consider a proper flight sim at this stage, but promising in terms of possibilities.

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    Edited once, last by John Hargreaves (January 1, 2017 at 1:41 PM).

  • Hey, so I had some spare time, and mocked up some bump maps and specular maps for water in my software (note, this is Maya, not a game dev kit, so YMMV). I simply threw the RGB into the bump channel. In some cases it need to be inverted, depending on if there are more trees than roads, which is bad news for consistency.. but it's neat to see the effect. The water is simple specular map with a mask, no change to the underlying photo. The images are screen grabs from google.

    For the most part, it looks neat! it's really nice how the bump map catches the light and breaks up the flat tile.

  • Wonder how many gigs it would take to do that worldwide........

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  • The screenshots 4, 5 and 6 show some of the issues with autogen that I was mentioning. The trees have all the same color and height, are not even close to dense enough and don't blend into the ground textue coloring at all.


    Each of us obviously look at what we want to see. Screenshot #5 would however have shown a handful of tree sizes, varieties and colours (look at the distant tree tops).

    The previous shots were taken on purpose at very low altitude so that distinct trees and house textures could be identified.
    Below are further shots taken from typical visual flight altitudes. You obviously have a lot of tree varieties, sizes and colours and they weld in as well as 3D object can weld in the scenery. The density is way higher than what you could reach with your manual placement.

    Following pictures are taken from P3D v3.3 with modified shaders and Regional VFR add-on sceneries from France VFR (for FSX)

    #S01 P3D v3.3 + PACA vol.2
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2015-57-41-40.jpg]

    #S02 P3D v3.3 + PACA vol.2
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2016-02-51-63.jpg]

    #S03 P3D v3.3 + PACA vol.2
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2016-12-44-21.jpg]

    #S04 P3D v3.3 + Alsace - note the electrical lines, also from databases…
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2016-38-44-00.jpg]



    Have you ever heard about the uncanny valley? To me FSX and X-Plane fall into that. They want to create automatically generated scenery that has a lot more generated 3D detail but is not quite looking authentic and that looks way worse to me than just having the flat ground but details ground texturing insted.


    Well, comparing the scenery with or without autogen + 3D makes the difference obvious. I definitely prefer with than without.

    #S05a P3D v3.3 Aquitaine without autogen + 3D
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2016-29-49-54.jpg]
    #S05b P3D v3.3 Aquitaine with autogen + 3D
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2016-30-26-41.jpg]

    #S06a P3D v3.3 Aquitaine without autogen + 3D
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2016-39-54-86.jpg]
    #S06b P3D v3.3 Aquitaine with autogen + 3D
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/Prepar3D%202017-01-01%2016-39-29-82.jpg]

    Ok, you can argue these are still 3D objects and you can say they’re not real, but generating ground data for a flyable flight region definitely necessitates some automation, you cannot do it manually.
    In NYC DLC you just have a tiny part of the scenery with the heart of the city beautifully covered with buildings, but 95% of the scenery is just more or less randomly sprayed with trees on a flat photo carpet. It doesn’t nearly look realistic.

    #S07 AeroflyFS2 EA.66 with NYC DLC
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/aerofly_fs_2%202017-01-01%2016-53-53-37.jpg]

    #S08 AeroflyFS 2 EA .66 with Californian HD DLC, in L.A.
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/aerofly_fs_2%202017-01-01%2016-51-12-51.jpg]

    Even in Manhattan there are almost no lights, no ground life, no street details, no ships in the rivers… just very nicely done 3D buildings and a bunch of trees here and there.
    You’ve flown across the “detailed” zone within 5 minutes in the Cessna…
    The main interesting point to me in that NYC DLC is that it demonstrates the graphical engine is able to cope with a high density of 3D buildings and that’s pretty good news.

    San Francisco alos show that “repeated textures effect”, but I think it’s ok, even if only a tiny part of the city is treated.
    #S09 AeroflyFS 2 EA .66 with Californian HD DLC
    [Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/93773613/Images/Autogen/aerofly_fs_2%202017-01-01%2016-45-59-83.jpg]


    Ground rendering in a flight simulator is a matter of tough compromises. Photorealistic scenery covered with this autogen + procedural 3D is the result of highly optimized compromises in order to keep acceptable framerates in FSX/P3D, and reach a homogeneous quality rendering across a whole flight region
    AeroflyFS 2 has the potential to go far beyond than FSX/P3D thanks to its outstanding graphical engine.

    If someone is willing to manually create micro sceneries with hand carved eye candy details, it’s very nice, but it doesn’t make a flight region. Tools are necessary for third parties editors to create the mesh + photo scenery where not yet available, and add autogen + 3D coverage from databases, and the micro scenery will integrate in it.

    The Google Earth rendering systme necessitates 3D laser 45° scanning and photos to recreate the volume, only a few areas are available by now. It looks fantastic at some 4-5’000ft AGL, but terrible at low altitude. Bump mapping would just tear pixels, since aerial photography are taken and projected vertically.

    Let me finish my lengthy proselytism by repeating my best wishes for all of you in 2017, and hope that AeroflyFS 2 grows to the next generation flight simulator we’re all expecting for…

    Cheers
    Antoine

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    Edited 4 times, last by Trespassers (January 2, 2017 at 1:45 PM).

  • Hello Antoine,

    thank you for sharing the screenshots with us. For those of us that are not good at depicing the flight simulator in use just from a screenshot, do you mind editing your post to include the source of the screenshots? (P3D with scenery add-on xy). People that just briefly visit this thread will probably mistake one simulator for the other. Thanks.

    And please also mention that this is not default P3D, is it?

    If you look at screenshot S06a and S06b you can see the mentioned mismatch in tree coloring. The trees are so dark that my eyes can only focus on them. Their placement is pretty good though, I don't like the placement of the Aerofly FS 2 trees either.

    S09 to me does not look as repetative to me. Sure if I wanted to I can find repeating textures but I don't think it pops into the eye as quickly. The colors of the textures blend in nicely with the colors of the missing buildings on the ground textures and there is no larger spot on the screen with the exact same colors or textures. Its randomized with enough variation, compared to S05b where there a large orange spot on the middle right of the screen, due to the same roof texture. On the screenshot S05a (plain, no auto-gen) you can also see some tiny trees on the ground texture near the wing tip and a lot of variation in tree density on the middle left in that small forest. With autogen on (S05b) all that detail information is replaced by a very boring looking patches of trees (all same color and height).

    If we want to implement auto-gen it has to be better than that. We need trees in variying sizes and types (a lot more than on these screenshots), their placing should be at least as good as shown on these images. And they need to blend in a lot better. Detail information should be preserved and the result should look photo realistic, not cartoonish. And to me photorealism is only achieved when the entire screen looks good. Otherwise I drop out of the immersion right away.

    Yes we all want more detail and the 3D is very appealing to our eyes. Auto-gen can create that sense of highly detailed scenery around the globe at a low cost compared to modelling the whole world. All I am asking is that we should not stop in the uncanny valley but give the extra 15% to 20% of effort to get it looking photorealistic, We should also consider adding an extra detail level of detail so that you can hover over the sub-urbs with a helicopter and barely know its automatically generated scenery. We should base the autogen on the visible textures underneath so that buildings and trees have the right coloring and sizes. We can use bump mapping to emphesise lines like roads/rivers or high growing farmland vegetation as an extra "bump" to more detail. I am just afraid that will require a long development time, lots of 3D models and clever algorithms to embed trees and buildings into the terrain in real time. Imagine how many of the large cities we could hand-build in that time.

    Cheers,
    Jan