Posts by qwerty42

Quote from nickhod

I'm still not clear how Aerofly decides what to show on top if it has multiple scenery files for the same grid square, for the same level. I believe it does load all of them. (?)

Assuming it does (I might be wrong) if you could get things to layer in this order

OrbX Lowi

Swiss DLC

AeroScenery Austria download

There would be no need to create transparency, since the transparency of OrbX Lowi and Swiss DLC would blend into the downloaded scenery "underneath".

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hmmm... I thought that it could only load 1 file for any given tile at a certain geoconvert level, where priority is given to paths outside of the default installation directory (e.g. My Documents or any additional external path you've defined in its config file). There is a single unique filename for each scenery tile at each level, and based on the log file it looked to me like it would only pick 1 to load if it saw duplicates. But, I could definitely be wrong! I never actually did any in-depth testing to see if this really is the case. Hopefully it is capable of loading multiples of the same tiles and layering them somehow because that would make it a lot more feasible to seamlessly blend sceneries together.

Quote from Trespassers

I'm afraid not. Hervé doesn't want to make a square carpet of aerial pictures in the middle of nowhere : he wants to make the junction between 2 existing sceneries.

Therefore the big challenge is to tailor cut masks according to the existing sceneries and then edit the colors of the aerial photo textures he can gather to both match the Swiss DLC and Orbx's LOWI. No automated tool can do that for him unfortunately.

For the junction with the Swiss DLC, the best would be if IPACS would be neat enough to generate a simple mask outside their scenery. Hervé would just need to invert it and use it as a mask layer for his orthophotos => they would fit exactly to the Swiss DLC border without overlap.

Without getting such a mask from IPACS, Hervé can spend days hand tailoring the border of his scenery to match the Swiss DLC.

I don't think this will work either unfortunately. Since AeroFly's imagery is broken into discrete tiles, you can't have two of the same tile in order to overlap them with masks. The only way I think this would work is if the scenery you want to 'blend' with is only converted up to a low-res level, say like level 12, and then you add your overlapping scenery at levels 13-15, for example. But even then you will not see what you want when you are far away and only the level 12 tiles are shown.

Quote from loco667

Hi everyone, new user here.

I'm Having trouble with geoconvert. It's not writing anything under scenery/

My geoconvert folder copied here:

Please help.

Tomek

Hi Tomek, I took a quick look at your files. I think it's a combination of a couple things:

(1) In your .tmc file, you have mask files globally disabled with the line at the top:

<[bool] [write_images_with_mask][false]>

I'm pretty sure this overrides whatever comes below it in terms of enabling or disabling masks.

(2) Your downloaded imagery from FSET doesn't completely cover an AeroFly tile of any level up to level 13, and since mask tiles are disabled, geoconvert won't write any output at all.

To further explain, AeroFly has its world map sliced into a grid, and the size of the grid cells get smaller with each increasing 'level' (level 9 is a large grid cell, level 15 is a small grid cell). If your source imagery doesn't completely cover one of these grid cells when you try to convert it, no output will be written unless masks are enabled. If masks are enabled, it will write a partial tile and a second mask file that goes along with it, which 'blocks out' that part of the tile in AeroFly.

It's a good idea to disable masks when using geoconvert as much as you possibly can. The reason is that masked tiles will make it hard to ever add more scenery around your converted area unless you manually go in and delete the masked tiles later, which can be quite a hassle. This is because those areas that get 'blocked out' by the masked tiles will be permanently blocked out until the mask is deleted. This means you also have to regenerate the file that went with the mask too, or you'll have black stripes appearing in AeroFly.

The best way to address this is to start with a downloaded imagery area which is already snapped to AeroFly's grid. Then you won't have to worry about enabling mask tiles and you know that your FSET imagery will fully fill AeroFly's grid cells. There are two tools we've created to be able to do this here, one which shows you the cells in Google Earth and another that uses Excel which will calculate the coordinates for your directly and you can copy/paste them into FSET. You can find both tools here:

Excel tool Image tile coordinates

Google Earth tool Image tile coordinates

And there is some more explanation/discussion about this in this thread, starting here and read through to the last page:

Scenery Loading Distance

I guess I should've explained that better, sorry about that FWIW, you actually can use either the (oculus) OR (steamVR) launch options with the Rift. They'll both work, but what I was saying above was that the Oculus one will perform better I just use " -othervr " as the launch option like J van E said so I never have to think about it.

Just wanted to clarify something that I think isn't clear in this thread: for anyone using an Oculus Rift, you'll get better performance if you don't use the SteamVR build at all. IPACS supplies a build with the native Oculus runtime that you should be using, which bypasses SteamVR entirely.

Agreed on the Oculus tray tool, it's very handy for fine-tuning your performance since you can view the GPU headroom real-time.

I also would help with this as I'm able. I don't have too much free time to invest, but I've got most of this stuff figured out well enough that things like adding custom scenery, terrain maps, and even custom runways with taxiways and such really aren't too difficult. Most of the time expenditure goes towards letting my computer crunch on it while I do other things.

Hi vogel69, I could be wrong, but I suspect this issue might be a lot less apparent (or go away altogether) if you used your own data to convert level 7 too instead of using the AeroFly mesh. There might be significant elevation differences between the original data IPACS used to generate level 7 and the data you used for your tiles, which is making this problem visible.

In addition to that though, it does seem like an issue with how it caches the building elevation without updating them like TomSimMuc explained, which is probably the fundamental problem.

Quote from higgy

50 Ghz EXTREMLY NICE how you keep it cool ?

Quote from Oldar

It's water cooled. In fact it was delivered at this speed and I haven't messed with it lol.

Please tell me too where I can get one of these legendary 50 GHz CPUs!!!

Oldar Thanks for the nice write-up on how the Pro works with AeroFly and the visual experience in general. I do wish the price wasn't so absurd, but I have a feeling they won't be able to keep it there for too long -- other competition is going to emerge that forces it down eventually.

Also very interesting that people with these top-spec'd systems are now having framerate issues with the Pro. I've read the same thing from other users with other games/sims too. The 1080Ti is certainly no slouch, and historically each generation of Nvidia's GPUs isn't *that* big of a performance bump relative to the Ti series of their previous gen card. (FWIW a 980Ti is almost exactly equivalent to a 1070 in performance). Also the Ti version of their cards usually comes about a year after the newest gen, meaning we may not see an 1180Ti until... Sept. 2019?!

I'm really wondering what Nvidia's next gen of graphics card will really be when they finally give out info and release it. Unless it's a revolutionary leap compared to their current offerings, I think we're going to have a GPU-imposed bottleneck on VR for the foreseeable future... until other technologies like foveated rendering can take some of the load off.

Quote from HiFlyer

For myself, I think the community tends towards standardization. In other sims you have a base mesh, and people tend to stick with that on a local level just because things can quickly get confusing otherwise. Proliferation of meshes eventually requires somebody with time, resources, and infinite patience, like Orbx, to rectify anomalies with a tool like the FTX airport elevations configurator, or for somebody like apilotX to step forwards with his various Hd Mesh versions to eventually get everyone more or less all back on the same page.

I noted DrHotwing1 telling everyone to be careful on this, and I realize once the genie is out of the bottle that it ain't going back in.......

With that in mind, my post was more about giving Ipacs a "poke" on the subject, since I suspect they might want to exert some overall control if possible, before it becomes the wild wild west out there.

On the other hand, maybe they don't care at all, in which case....... nevermind!

I do very much see your point, and if it were an ideal world where they could realistically just supply us with highly-detailed terrain meshes directly from IPACS, I'd certainly be in favor of that. The need for user-customization stems from the fact that it isn't yet practical to be able to supply a very detailed mesh to cover everywhere that anyone might want it, the same way that having maximum resolution photoscenery isn't practical for a entire large areas either. The available DLC add-ons are pretty good, but they still don't come close to what you can make yourself if you are converting a small area and going for maximum quality. I understand I'm probably not the 'typical user,' but it's hard for me to go back to the default or DLC scenery having seen what is possible!

It would be great if they'd improve their default mesh that installs with the sim, but having tested all of this I can say I still wouldn't be happy if it wasn't as good as what I'm currently using The improvement in the visuals, appearance of photoscenery (due to it being mapped to a correctly shaped geometry), and possibilities in the kinds of airstrips (e.g. backcountry or unpaved airstrips in mountainous regions) that can be created with a high-res elevation mesh is huge.

I can understand why they'd want to control it and not allow the custom stuff. But I'm basically pleading here for them to ignore any requests to do so in my own selfish interests, until they can replace the stuff I've made with something just as good

Quote from HiFlyer

I hope Ipacs can maintain some overall control over this. Right now, in the interests of better mesh, users are beginning to create their own, and I eventually see a situation arising where there is a crazy-quilt of mutually incompatible user meshes all over the Aerofly world partially because Ipacs never made its own move and headed the proliferation off at the pass a little bit.

It would be a shame (to me) if the Aerofly world splintered into a confusing kaleidoscope of random user and vendor solutions on this like X-plane.

I definitely see your point, but I disagree somewhat. I'd like to see it remain as-is with the option for those of us who want to do these things still be able to do them. It's very unlikely that they will give us an ultra-high-res topo mesh that covers the whole globe, or even the remote areas I particularly care about. Just the file sizes on that alone would be enormous. So, being able to improve those areas for my own purposes is very important to me, even if I'm not sharing them with anyone else.

The way they've implemented custom add-ons is very smart and very easily undone. If you want to restore the original sim as-installed, you just remove the files you've added to the folder in Documents.

For commercial companies selling expansion areas, then I think they should definitely coordinate with IPACS to ensure compatibility and not create 'kaleidoscopes.' But to take away our individual ability to customize things on our own would take away one of the things I like most about AeroFly (and at this point would break 90% of the areas I fly now because it's all custom stuff I've made). I think the method of letting people customize if they want is great (and obviously those people will know they might make things worse instead of better), while those who want everything to be by-the-book via IPACS can stick to the commercial products and add-ons.

FWIW, I think in a way it already is this 'kaleidoscope' you describe. The whole sim is built around having varying detail levels, and even with the default installation it changes quite a bit all over the map, including the existing topo mesh. In some areas the mesh is converted up to level 10 right now but for most larger areas it only goes to level 7. The same is true of the scenery. The cool thing about it is that you can add files to refine the 'stock' sim, which (for the most part) seamlessly integrates with everything else.

IMO, all they really need to do regarding the mesh is fine-tune the algorithm that merges edges of refined levels to ensure it doesn't create any invisible wall artifacts at the boundaries. That's the only thing I've seen so far that risks creating broken behavior in the sim.

Quote from Trespassers

We should check if the airport__outside flatten is mild enough to both keep the terrain natural shape while preventing bumpy landings, without having to feature a fully-modeled 3D runway...

I have tried this, and I think all the combinations of ideas I've seen mentioned in this thread, and I can say it really depends a lot on what the un-smoothed mesh looks like to start with. If you're dealing with significant faceted lumps or spikes, the airport__outside smoothing usually is not enough to correct it on its own and make the surface land-able.

The airport__runway does preserve some small 'sloppiness' of runways, like elevation changes. I have some sloped backcountry airstrips where it has worked quite well, but it required me first refining the terrain with a better surface mesh.

By far the most realistic surface I've gotten for unpaved runways has been using a higher-res topo mesh to start with, and then using airport__outside on top of that. This has given me unpaved airstrips that do make the aircraft appear to bump and vibrate but not so much that you're getting kicked into the air repeatedly.

Quote from Spit40

My request to IPACS to make my FSCloudPort project more effective is a new option like [decal] but without reflections called, say, [layover] so you could use __runway over an entire airport to flatten it then lay the asphalt at 0.1m using [layover] and finally overlay with [decal] at 0.4m.

I'd still like to see a way to define areas as __runway while still leaving them transparent so the original imagery shows through. (Or create a new class that we don't call __runway but still uses the same flattening strength, or give __outside an adjustable flattening strength). In some cases where things are really lumpy, you need to define the __runway areas beyond even the actual runways and taxiways to get things smooth enough. In this case, you're stuck with remapping textures to get your original imagery to reappear.

FWIW, you can make the 'decals' look like you want by using Photoshop, and first adjusting the image with Exposure of -2, and then applying Contrast +10. This is what I've used to re-map orthophotos back onto my large __runway areas and it gives an appearance that is almost indistinguishable to the normal scenery. I realize this probably isn't helpful for an automated tool like FSCloudPort, but for anyone trying to brute-force it right now it's one solution that works.

Also, you may already be aware, but you don't need to adjust height offsets of decals to change their appearance order when converted. Using the __priorityX tag on the end of the decal name determines its stack order in the sim, where X is the priority number.

Quote from Dholm

I have the Rift and love it. I do not see any screen door. But to look out the window and look down at 30,000 ft. is amazing. I have never flown a sim without VR But for those that do not have VR try to demo it at a store or a friends house. I can get off work and fly miles from home and I feel great even if I land in Zurich. I still get to work on time the next day.

I feel the same way, also using a Rift. The screen door is definitely there but I only notice it if I'm intentionally focusing on it. To me this generation of vr devices have clear room for improvement, yet they are good enough that I find the overall experience totally enjoyable and very worthwhile. If it weren't for VR, I never would have purchased AFS2, and I have zero interest in flight simming on a 2D screen. Honestly, I hate to admit it here, but I don't really see the long-term appeal of 2D flight simming I have plenty of RC planes and toys that I'd much rather use than spend that time simming on a 2D screen. But in VR it's that sense of scale, depth, motion, altitude, speed, and really being inside the cockpit that makes it a completely different experience. It blurs the line between pretend-flying vs. actually being able to fly the aircraft from the same 3D visual cues you'd use in real life. I can't land the Pitts to save my soul in 2D but I can grease it in nice and smooth in VR because in 3D I know exactly how far off the runway I am, as just one example. There's also no substitute for flying beside mountains that genuinely appear several thousand feet tall!

Also if you'd like, I can see about getting you an improved terrain mesh for that area, which we can probably freely distribute since the USGS data is open to the public. The thing to be careful of though is the short 'invisible wall' that it creates where the refined mesh merges with the default mesh, so we'll have to make sure the refined mesh extends reasonably beyond the airport where nobody will be colliding with the invisible wall on approach.

I've encountered this issue quite a bit with those backcountry airstrips I've been playing with. Like Rodeo said, one way to deal with it is to define larger areas as airport__runway, beyond just the runways themselves. I've actually covered very large areas as airport__runway and it doesn't seem to have any negative effect on how the airports are built in the sim, it just flattens the terrain more.

There is one big problem with this trick though -- unlike airport__outside, when you define things are airport__runway it doesn't let the original imagery show through, so you have to apply an image to texture it. I've dealt with this by actually re-mapping the orthophoto scenery as textures in AC3D (honestly, a huge pain and takes a lot of time, far from ideal). AeroFly also seems to render texture colors quite a bit differently than terrain imagery, so I figured out the right combination of adjustments in photoshop to make the mapped textures look identical to the original orthophoto scenery. I had a thread a while back where I explained this and asked IPACS if they'd consider adding an option to allow airport__runway areas to be transparent when converted, or allow us to define a smoothing strength of the airport__outside regions.

The best way I've found to deal with it so far is definitely by refining the terrain heightmaps. It's actually a lot easier and faster than re-texturing the areas with the orthophotos, and the end result is a lot better too. Instead of forcing spiky terrain to flatten, you end up with a ground surface that looks more realistic and is already smooth enough that the normal runway flattening works perfectly.

Thanks once more to you vogel69 and Rodeo for this helpful info! I really appreciate the thumbnails of the different tree/shrub types... I've been meaning to do more with this in my own airports and now you've just made it a lot easier for me!

Hi Ken, it's your choice really. In some places the Virtual Earth photos look better, in other places Google's do. They also tend to have a bit different color rendering.

I'm not really sure if we're supposed to be giving this info out due to copyright reasons, so if a mod wants to edit this out feel free, but: there are two other google server numbers you can try that are currently active, 748 and 781. For the most part they're the same but 781 has newer imagery in some areas.

Hi Saltgrass,

I don't have the Odyssey, I have the Rift, so I can't give you specific feedback for your HMD. However I might be able to at least tell you what you should expect if things are working correctly.

Firstly, current gen VR devices (even the Odyssey and Vive Pro) are not going to look as sharp as any modern monitor. This is because they are using about the same number of pixels as a typical monitor to represent a MUCH larger angular field of view. (This isn't totally accurate but close enough for getting a basic idea.)

Because of this, you likely will be able to see individual pixels if you go looking for them, as well as the very tiny space between the pixels (this is referred to as 'screen door effect'.)

Despite this, you still shouldn't be having that difficult of a time making out the gauges in the planes. In a plane like the Pitts biplane where the gauges are very close to your face, they should actually look quite sharp, because they are taking up a relatively sizable chunk of your field of view and therefore are being rendered with many more pixels than if the gauges were further away from you.

As far as things that could affect the visuals in your HMD, I can think of a few very important ones:

(1) I don't know how it works with the Odyssey, but on the Rift and Vive there is an adjustable spacing between the lenses, called IPD adjustment (that stands for inter-pupillary distance). This is an adjustment that matches the horizontal distance between the lenses to match the spacing between your own eyes. If this isn't set correctly, it will not only make things blurrier for you, but also might contribute toward discomfort or headaches when using your HMD.

(2) Lens 'sweet spot.' It sounds like you're already aware of this, but yes, it's real. It's critical that you have the HMD placed at the right height in front of your eyes to get the central field of vision sharp. This is similar to the importance of IPD adjustment, except instead of adjusting the lenses sideways for sharpness, this is a matter of moving the lenses up and down relative to your eyes until you find the range of peak sharpness.

Again, I'm not sure about the Odyssey, but since it's higher resolution than my Rift, I'd expect it to look better than the Rift. If (1) and (2) are set correctly, then what you see in the center of your field of vision should be 'sharp', but somewhat pixelated. In other words, it won't look crisp due to being able to see individual pixels, BUT those pixels themselves should still look sharp, not blurred.

The last thing that makes a very substantial difference is supersampling. Supersampling is a method of anti-aliasing that can really clean up the visuals in VR but requires a lot of extra processing power to do so. There are two places where this is set--SteamVR has its own settings for this, and within AeroFly they also have a slider for supersampling (it's called 'Render Scale Factor' in the Aerofly menus). If your graphics card can handle it (and a 1080ti should definitely be able to), setting in-game supersampling to something between 1.5 and 2 should give you a clearer and crisper view of gauges and smaller text. Ideally you should only have this set either from SteamVR or within Aerofly, not both places.

If everything is working correctly and the above items are setup correctly (and assuming your own vision is good too), the gauges in all the planes should be readable from normal distances (though probably not as clearly as you'd like), and easily readable if you move your head a little bit closer to them. From your posts, I can't really tell if your problems are just due to your expectations being too high for current-gen VR systems, or if there is legitimately something wrong with your setup.

TL;DR Gauges in VR will definitely not look as good as even a 1080p desktop monitor--you will see some visible pixellation. However they should still be readable and if you move your head closer to them they should be *easily* readable.

Quote from flightxtreme

But sure I have Pedals.

Good moment to introduce me a bit.

I had a break for two years from flight simulation but my first simulator was the C64 Flight Simulator 2. I really got started with the FS 2000, then FS 2002, FS9, FSX, XP 10, P3D. I designed the Dornier Greenland Whale, the 10t whale, the Dornier Libelle and an Extra 300L for the simulator, wrote article for the flight simulator magazines flightXpress and FS Magazine, organized approximately for 10 years the virtual aerobatic world championships, was once a speaker at an Aerosoft conference, presented at such an event a VR Solution at the time, the Oculus Rift was still in development.

In real live I am working in the IT as a software architect for business solutions and my hobby is judging at real aerobatic competitions. 2015 I was judge at the world aerobatic championship in France.

Wow! That's quite a resume! With a history like that you probably have several sets of pedals I guess I'm glad to see people like you, with so much existing flight sim experience and obviously a passion for aviation, are part of the community here. Gives me even more hope for the future of Aerofly

Quote from Dholm

Did you bind a Rift button if show how and how and where is the setting for 'take screenshot w/o overlays'

I have a joystick + throttle and bound it to one of the buttons on that. It's under the control options in the sim but I can't remember exactly which category it's in. I do recall it's toward the bottom.

As Jeff said, you won't be able to do it with the Touch controllers, but you can map it to any other controller button (stick, throttle, xbox controller, etc)

AMAZING work Phil! I hope IPACS buys you lunch because this is exactly the sort of tool that will help Aerofly grow, and turn every user into a custom-content creator.

I can tell you've poured your heart into this and it really shows. I haven't tried it yet, but from watching the video it looks like you've created a very well thought-out UI that is clean, easy to use, intuitive, and efficient too. Getting all of this up and running with so much functionality and such a polished UI must have been an immense amount of work!

Thank you very much for all the time you invested into this, and for making and sharing such an awesome thing for us all to use. Great job / major kudos / firm handshake and a pat on the back!