Board index FlightGear Media

Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Screenshots, videos, sound recording etc. taken in/with FlightGear.

Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby vnts » Fri Oct 23, 2020 2:11 pm

Some of the improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC: http://download.flightgear.org/builds/rc/

- Erik's texture matching project (works really well), various improvements to airport keep textures and definitions starting from a revamped keep texture, implementing a new grass structure texture based on a high quality photo

- Gsagostinho's California work has been integrated

The screenshots I took earlier were bare landclasses with everything off. Here are a few quick ones, although some settings are still off in some shots:

Corsica is an example of improvement with texture matching. The mediterranean island has really nice definitions (from an older era than Norway or Hawaii), but pulls in textures with varying brightnesses e.g. see this old sotm screenshot: img.
Image

Image

Image

----

Welcome to Iceland:
Image

FG's default seasonal settings is valid for one point in time, with dry ground, no moss, snow, dust etc. In Iceland
the appropriate season setting a lot of the time is later on in autumn or towards the brown/bare conditions, with moss and wetness.

Later towards Autumn:
Image

Much later, just before bare/brown:
Image

Subtle water among the grass:
Image

Patches of thin snow patches among the grass:
Image

Iceland has several different volcanoes [1] modeled including the worlds newest island in the process of formation. I haven't really posted any close up screenshots of the huge eruption at Katla to not spoil it, but it's worth slowly going along the plume in the ufo to see the sheer scale and forces involved. Works well with snow by tweaking the snowline or METAR. Incidentally, a useful AW feature is Weather > detailed weather > advanced settings > temperature offset, which allows cooler weather while having changing weather with the modelling engine on (the weather scenarios are warm by default).

----

Grass structure, without 3d grass:
Image

Default grass:
Image

----

California/KSFO with OSM2City:
Image

The following screenshots have dust slider turned up a bit:
Image

Image

Note the rainbow-y scattering by ice crystals in clouds:
Image

Kind regards
vnts
 
Posts: 409
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2015 1:29 am

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby Johan G » Fri Oct 23, 2020 6:21 pm

If there is anything I love seeing on the forum it has to be amazing screenshots showing off improvements. Many thanks! :D

FlightGear have come quite a long way in the last 10 years. 8)
Low-level flying — It's all fun and games till someone looses an engine. (Paraphrased from a YouTube video)
Improving the Dassault Mirage F1 (Wiki, Forum, GitLab. Work in slow progress)
Some YouTube videos
Johan G
Moderator
 
Posts: 6629
Joined: Fri Aug 06, 2010 6:33 pm
Location: Sweden
Callsign: SE-JG
IRC name: Johan_G
Version: 2020.3.4
OS: Windows 10, 64 bit

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby wlbragg » Sat Oct 24, 2020 12:40 am

This goes to show how much a small amount of effort can have such a huge effect. Those textures are really top quality. A conserted effort in the texture and art department could really go a long way.
Really nice work, thank you!
Kansas and Ohio/Midwest scenery development.
KEQA, 3AU, KRCP Airport Layout
Intel i7/GeForce RTX 2070/Max-Q
User avatar
wlbragg
 
Posts: 7588
Joined: Sun Aug 26, 2012 12:31 am
Location: Kansas (Tornado Alley), USA
Callsign: WC2020
Version: next
OS: Win10/Linux/RTX 2070

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby erik » Sat Oct 24, 2020 8:33 am

I really like how the grass has turned out.
Great work.

Erik
Current: Parachutist, Paraglider, Pterosaur, Pilatus PC-9M and variants, ERCO Ercoupe, Fokker Dr.1, Fokker 50, Fokker 100
Less active: Cessna T-37, T-38, Santa Claus. Previous: General Dynamics F-16. Worked on: Wright Flyer
erik
 
Posts: 2245
Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:41 pm

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby GinGin » Sat Oct 24, 2020 3:48 pm

Impressive shots .
Third one with clouds bloked on the hill is tremendous.
GinGin
 
Posts: 1580
Joined: Wed Jul 05, 2017 11:41 am
Location: Paris
Callsign: Gingin

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby Fahim Dalvi » Sun Oct 25, 2020 7:09 am

These changes look wonderful. Thanks for all the effort!
User avatar
Fahim Dalvi
 
Posts: 1352
Joined: Sun Oct 14, 2007 2:08 pm
Location: Qatar
Callsign: Fahim
Version: 2020.3.11
OS: macOS

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby Avionyx » Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:20 am

Really does look fantastic. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to these, either recently or further back down the chain. It's very much appreciated.
Alex
Avionyx
 
Posts: 531
Joined: Mon Jan 11, 2010 4:07 pm
Location: EGMD
Callsign: G-AVYX
Version: 2020.4
OS: Manjaro

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby vnts » Wed Oct 28, 2020 4:34 pm

FG's procedural techniques can have just unrelenting detail :shock: , like with the keep ..detail from far away without tiling, medium distance, and right up to the grass mat in-between the grass blades if you look closely at the keep images.

The tech is there, even the structure overlay was already implemented with basically the same equation as an experiment. Sometimes it's just a case of flicking a switch when appropriate, like switching on the 3d grass to exactly follow patches of bare ground. A lot of the textures are reused (and recolored) in ingenious ways without access to new textures, adding new textures can improve things even beyond the current recent era definitions level. :mrgreen:

The biggest change is the global texture matching - just getting brightness and saturation convinces sort of convinces the eye that landclasses are part of the same surface even when they don't have matched soil colours or normally have different colours - polygonal boundaries don't stick out as much. It makes a big difference, and was subtly done.

As for the screenshots, they were just quick ones right at the airport, or on a hill/mountain visible from the airport. I had a cloudless sky in a bunch of them as I was trying to avoid cloud shadows when looking at terrain earlier. I did have anisotropic filtering turned up in the control panel - helps with reading cockpits markings/text at shallow angles and defines the ground detail a bit more at low angles. I had transparency AA turned up a bit beyond MSAA so the overlays were clearer from a bit further away.

Kind regards
vnts
 
Posts: 409
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2015 1:29 am

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby erik » Thu Oct 29, 2020 8:05 am

I agree, you can really get creative with the current scheme already.

And I'm working on a way to make the texture appearance also localized by setting the environment settings like wetness and dust cover automatic based on the location (if enabled).

Erik
Current: Parachutist, Paraglider, Pterosaur, Pilatus PC-9M and variants, ERCO Ercoupe, Fokker Dr.1, Fokker 50, Fokker 100
Less active: Cessna T-37, T-38, Santa Claus. Previous: General Dynamics F-16. Worked on: Wright Flyer
erik
 
Posts: 2245
Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:41 pm

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby Johan G » Thu Oct 29, 2020 8:24 am

erik wrote in Thu Oct 29, 2020 8:05 am:[...] I'm working on a way to make the texture appearance also localized by setting the environment settings like wetness and dust cover automatic based on the location (if enabled).

Looking forward to that. :D
Low-level flying — It's all fun and games till someone looses an engine. (Paraphrased from a YouTube video)
Improving the Dassault Mirage F1 (Wiki, Forum, GitLab. Work in slow progress)
Some YouTube videos
Johan G
Moderator
 
Posts: 6629
Joined: Fri Aug 06, 2010 6:33 pm
Location: Sweden
Callsign: SE-JG
IRC name: Johan_G
Version: 2020.3.4
OS: Windows 10, 64 bit

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby vnts » Fri Nov 06, 2020 10:26 am

erik wrote in Thu Oct 29, 2020 8:05 am:[...] I'm working on a way to make the texture appearance also localized by setting the environment settings like wetness and dust cover automatic based on the location (if enabled).


That would give a nice starting point :mrgreen: But it might need to look at the weather too? For example dust effect when it's actively raining in California. Some places would have really strong seasonal variation - e.g. very wet summers, and dusty dry winters. Sometimes wetness and really cold temperatures might not go well either (unless it's sudden and the water has not frosted/iced up yet). Wetness and really hot temperatures can happen I guess, e.g. start of an afternoon storm might be in 45 deg C plus in some parts of the world.

Automatic defaults could be toggleable per slider (with a check box or dropdown?), but then there has to be an acceptance that it's up-to the user to check for conflicting things like dust/wetness or maybe the UI would have to warn or make it mutually exclusive.

I was thinking of a slider mode that was relative to defaults - For a purely hypothetical future implementation of dry parched vegetation after a lack of rain (don't know the appropriate math to say the colour ranges and transformation - but maybe it could be tweakable per texture). The idea was that a default for each region would be set through material definitions, and the slider would be on the interval [min to max] with 0.0 being no change to defaults. Moving the slider to either side would interpolate between the default and extremes. So if the default was close to the limits moving the slider wouldn't change much. A mode that was relative to defaults could also be an option, but for normal sliders it's probably simpler to only have different default slider positions and ask the user to change when they arrive in a different place/climate - as it is a completely different place.

----

I noticed Erik's improvements to Littoral areas also made it into the LTS

The sun and moon position are used to calculate tides (Just for the release notice (potentially), the source of the position is the accurate ephemeris code which is used generally right? Was the tidal calculation already there - what other things was it used for?) .

Low tide in Morecambe Bay in England:
Image

High tide:
Image

Partially exposed, at a different date / time:
Image

Something that would be useful is a non-interactable slider showing the phase of the moon, so people can tweak it by changing the day of the month. The environment moonlight changes with the phase, and the tidal forces are larger during new moon or full moon (although the tides themselves are complicated depending on location and can be delayed).

Kind regards
vnts
 
Posts: 409
Joined: Thu Apr 02, 2015 1:29 am

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby Thorsten » Fri Nov 06, 2020 11:36 am

And I'm working on a way to make the texture appearance also localized by setting the environment settings like wetness and dust cover automatic based on the location (if enabled).


You can already declare a material 'wet' by default (for swampy areas), and the whole grond gets automatically 'wet' once rain has been falling long enough. There's also immunity against dust (that's for irrigated areas in deserts).

Like snow, the amount of dust on the ground is not a simple function of anything but depends on when the last rain/snowfall was and how the weather has been since - so what's left to automate is high-hanging fruit.
Thorsten
 
Posts: 12490
Joined: Mon Nov 02, 2009 9:33 am

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby erik » Fri Nov 06, 2020 2:09 pm

I'm implementing the Köppen-Geiger world climate classification which will provide a sort of off-line METAR with plausible values. It is already activated in next and adjusts the environment settings based on viewer lat/lon, sun lat/lon and the Köppen classification code for that 10x10km area.

Eventually it should be an option in the menu but for now it's always activated.

Erik
Last edited by erik on Sat Nov 07, 2020 1:11 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Current: Parachutist, Paraglider, Pterosaur, Pilatus PC-9M and variants, ERCO Ercoupe, Fokker Dr.1, Fokker 50, Fokker 100
Less active: Cessna T-37, T-38, Santa Claus. Previous: General Dynamics F-16. Worked on: Wright Flyer
erik
 
Posts: 2245
Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:41 pm

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby Necolatis » Fri Nov 06, 2020 7:04 pm

Could you please explain in some more details about that Erik?
Which settings are affected?
"Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo."
— Al Gore
User avatar
Necolatis
 
Posts: 2233
Joined: Mon Oct 29, 2012 1:40 am
Location: EKOD
Callsign: Leto
IRC name: Neco
Version: 2020.3.19
OS: Windows 10

Re: Some regional improvements in 2020.3 LTS RC

Postby erik » Fri Nov 06, 2020 7:21 pm

For now it is just the rendering settings under Environment -> Environment setttings
You can watch them change if you relocate from the default airport to KLAS or VTSW for example.

It does also calculate appropriate precipitation during the seasons temperature during the seasons and days (day/night) and a few other weather related parameters but this does not yet effect FlightGear like real-weather fetch does.

Here is an example:
Code: Select all
Climate report for:
  Date: 2020-11-6T13:12:1 GMT
  Sun Latitude:    -16.2152 degrees
  Sun Longitude:   -22.294 degrees
  Viewer Latitude:  63.985 degrees (adjusted: 80.2002)
  Viewer Longitude: -22.5925 degrees (adjusted: 0.298503)

  Köppen classification: Cfc
  Description: Warm temperature, fully humid, cool summer

  Season (0.0 = winter .. 1.0 = summer): 0.154996
  Daytime....(0.0 = night .. 1.0 = day): 0.998342
  Seal level temperature: 2.10981 deg. C.
  Ground temperature:     2.10981 deg. C.
  Monthly Precipitation:  86.2733 mm
  Annual precipitation:   990 mm
  Dew point: 0.5 deg. C.
  Wind: 3 km/h

  Snow level: 4296.81 meters
  Snow Thickness.(0.0 = thin .. 1.0 = thick): 0.00254172
  Ice cover......(0.0 = none .. 1.0 = thick): 0.11857
  Dust cover.....(0.0 = none .. 1.0 = dusty): 0
  Wetness........(0.0 = dry  .. 1.0 = wet):   0.518386
  Lichen cover...(0.0 = none .. 1.0 = mossy): 0
  Season (0.0 = summer .. 1.0 = late autumn): 0.689329


Erik
Current: Parachutist, Paraglider, Pterosaur, Pilatus PC-9M and variants, ERCO Ercoupe, Fokker Dr.1, Fokker 50, Fokker 100
Less active: Cessna T-37, T-38, Santa Claus. Previous: General Dynamics F-16. Worked on: Wright Flyer
erik
 
Posts: 2245
Joined: Thu Nov 01, 2007 2:41 pm

Next

Return to Media

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests