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FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

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FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby erik » Sat Mar 13, 2021 2:23 pm

It's almost unbelievable how far FligthGear has come lately. Everybody has done a great job!

These are random images from the Netherlands west coast (Amsterdam to Rotterdam) and not a single thing looks out of place:
Image
Image
Image

Even in less than perfect weather the scenery looks amazing and I get a decent frame-rate of 20Hz almost all of the time on modest hardware for today's standards (GeForce GTX 750 in a quad core i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz
system with just 4Gb ram).

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby erik » Sat Mar 13, 2021 3:28 pm

Here's a video (not mine) which comes to the same conclusion:


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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby dg-505 » Sat Mar 13, 2021 4:02 pm

Looks really impressive! 8)
Many thanks @all who made this possible! :D
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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby merspieler » Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:15 pm

erik wrote in Sat Mar 13, 2021 2:23 pm:These are random images from the Netherlands west coast (Amsterdam to Rotterdam) and not a single thing looks out of place:


In your screenshots, there's actually one thing, that still looks out of place... the ground texture. Add photoscenery to it and you're right.
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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby tom_nl » Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:51 pm

Agreed - great work everyone. I was flying Ameland-Texel the other day and it's looking good and getting good frame rates too, even though i'm running a similar vintage system stretched over three monitors at 5760x1200! (officially unsupported by the hardware, but it works - this is on quad core i7 2014 MacBook Pro with 2GB GeForce 750M graphics). I seem to be missing some building textures though - any tips for good graphics settings? I have multithreading set to 'Automatic'.

One thing I noticed - The NL scenery for Den Helder seems to be very lacking in buildings? is this simply because this part of Noord Holland hasn't been updated yet to OSM scenery? OSM seems to have the buildings, so I"ve been trying to recreate the scenery myself, but still working out osm2city, and there's a lot to learn.

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby erik » Mon Mar 22, 2021 1:29 pm

I have the feeling it sometimes takes rather long to retrieve the OSM data, but it really is a queston for the osm2city thread

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby tom_nl » Wed Mar 24, 2021 8:19 am

tom_nl wrote in Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:51 pm:One thing I noticed - The NL scenery for Den Helder seems to be very lacking in buildings? is this simply because this part of Noord Holland hasn't been updated yet to OSM scenery?

I solved the problem - it turned out I was being an idiot, and maybe a gotcha for others to be aware of when using custom airports. I've made custom airports for EHKD and EHTX and defined them as custom scenery. Of course, with the airport .btg you also need the corresponding wider scenery area .btg and .stg files in the same directory. I'd copied the 'old' non-OSM files into the custom scenery, so this was overriding the 'new' OSM files. Temporarily disabling the custom scenery forces terrasync to download the 'new' OSM scenery complete with buildings which can then be copied into the custom scenery folder.

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby vnts » Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:14 pm

tom_nl wrote in Wed Mar 24, 2021 8:19 am:I solved the problem - it turned out I was being an idiot, and maybe a gotcha for others to be aware of when using custom airports. I've made custom airports for EHKD and EHTX and defined them as custom scenery.

This has happened to quite a few people by now I think, it's really easy to forget - especially for scenery folders added many years ago.

I added a note to the page on quirks, tips, and information on this OSM2City build under troubleshooting:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/OSM2City_1s ... nformation

The updated wiki is also super easy to use - much easier than the forum :mrgreen:
tom_nl wrote in Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:51 pm:..this is on quad core i7 2014 MacBook Pro with 2GB GeForce 750M graphics). I seem to be missing some building textures though - any tips for good graphics settings? I have multithreading set to 'Automatic'.

There is a section on performance tips in the wiki page above. The bottleneck is the CPU with this OSM2City rollout, even on Erik's faster 750. The main issue is the objects in the old OSM2City format. Buildings are mostly in the new instanced format, except for the large buildings in city centers. You can leave buildings on, and try turning off folders for pylons, random scenery objects, roads in order of importance for the flight to see if it helps. It's not worth upgrading hardware until after WS 3.0 comes out (and hardware will be faster by then, as well as being less expensive due to the pandemic).

V12 found [1] increasing OSG_NUM_DATABASE_THREADS on a 8 core Ryzen helped with loading only, but it was unstable.

The good thing is if FG is CPU bound graphics settings that are mostly GPU only can be turned right up including AA and transparency AA :mrgreen:

----

FG looks fantastic on the rc build. This is Erik's agriculture regional definition improvements, and random objects update (including things like silos/farm-buildings):
Image
2020.3.7 is very close to being ready to go live AIUI.
erik wrote in Sat Mar 13, 2021 3:28 pm:Here's a video (not mine) which comes to the same conclusion:

Here is a similar video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dFlF688kPQ

The 1st one has lower tree density, the 2nd one (LOWI) appears to have advanced weather off, and both have overlays etc. off, and no real configuring of environment settings. But it gives a rough idea of the difference OSM2City makes :mrgreen: The 2nd is using photo-scenery - it looks like the rocks in mountains are done by ALS, which is a good idea as rocks are often in steep areas which is hard to do with overhead photos. It's hard to tell, as LOWI looks like this even without photoscenery 1 , 2
merspieler wrote in Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:15 pm:In your screenshots, there's actually one thing, that still looks out of place... the ground texture. Add photoscenery to it and you're right.

It's a tradeoff, that loses the crisp definition of the textures elsewhere like the surrounding agriculture, even if reasonable photoscenery exists for that area. If photoscenery had a mode where it was only active for city/urban textures then it might have a use, but that's likely not worth implementing as people are more likely to set up photosensory when they want to use it everywhere.

The solution to the issue is to switch textures on the fly to bare ground at close ranges. That will hopefully come with WS 3.0. Including data in OSM2City where to place trees and garden objects is also helpful. The problem applies for forest textures in areas where the ground isn't green, unfortunately photoscenery and random trees don't line up.

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby erik » Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:36 pm

vnts wrote in Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:14 pm:
merspieler wrote in Mon Mar 22, 2021 12:15 pm:In your screenshots, there's actually one thing, that still looks out of place... the ground texture. Add photoscenery to it and you're right.

It's a tradeoff, that loses the crisp definition of the textures elsewhere like the surrounding agriculture, even if reasonable photoscenery exists for that area. If photoscenery had a mode where it was only active for city/urban textures then it might have a use, but that's likely not worth implementing as people are more likely to set up photosensory when they want to use it everywhere.

The question is does it distract from anything an to my opinion it doesn't since the street plan and number of buildings is dense enough to make it plausible. But there has been a short discussion about replacing the town and city textures with something like grass at runtime when OSM2City is enabled. Which should largely fix that.

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby vnts » Wed Mar 24, 2021 3:04 pm

erik wrote in Wed Mar 24, 2021 2:36 pm:The question is does it distract from anything an to my opinion it doesn't since the street plan and number of buildings is dense enough to make it plausible.

Yep it doesn't distract. The main times it catches the eye is if the town/city texture doesn't have any green in cities which it normally would, and there's a lack of vegetation masks so no trees are present. And maybe when there's no roads and the roads on the texture don't match up - OSM2City does have roads and houses in proper places so the texture doesn't catch they eye. The city details in the textures mostly comes across as urban grey and other colours which does occur in urban areas (parked cars, drive ways, small buildings like sheds etc).

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby vnts » Fri Aug 27, 2021 12:30 am

erik wrote in Sat Mar 13, 2021 2:23 pm:It's almost unbelievable how far FligthGear has come lately. Everybody has done a great job!

I found just this video from a newcomer to FG I think, while taking a look at flightgear youtube results over last month for any development vids for the newsletter (the create next newsletter link seems bugged on wiki right now).

Unlike a lot of newcomers the person making this video seems to have found at least the advanced weather engine option, and also had a very quick look at the rendering settings dialog. He doesn't seem to have found all the advanced settings for AW, or the environment settings dialog. But he might have turned convective slider, maybe terrain effects, or turbulence slider, maybe even adjusted atmosphere scales? (IIRC at least atmosphere stability and turbulence is set to lowest interpretation to make it easier to fly) - unless these are what's default for AW settings.

A lot of things aren't turned up or enabled e.g. tree density, no project3000, no LOWS custom scenery. It also looks like MSAA antialising is off or something, as trees look blocky without the detailed transparent bits and there's a lot of jaggies. But OSM is turned on, and the vid shows some of the great improvements in 2020.3 :mrgreen: .

Clouds over alps. DHC-6. Flying through wisps of clouds is always really nice in FG :) (link - see 5:17 onwards):


OSM and regional definition improvements in the last few point releases look awesome.

----

Clouds in FG

For some reason, it seems most screenshots or videos posted over mountain regions like the alps have no clouds anywhere in sight (haze can be present but without clouds). Maybe fair weather being default or easier to fly is responsible. But for me even with fair weather/core high pressure preset, it's rarely completely cloudless (and often there are high altitude cirrus clouds visible - probably having convection turned up helps, and maybe having lower visibility/cloud visibility stops them showing). It could be cloud / cloud visibility settings, but clouds don't slow down rendering that much (or maybe it's less on more recent GPUs). Maybe it's terrain effects being off or being heavy on older systems. Maybe people fly at night using live METARs and never see midday cloud development - live weather services are railroaded into whatever weather or seasonal weather is around. Maybe it's an aesthetic thing and this is just what's posted, or maybe it's a multiplayer thing.

Mountains are usually pretty great for interesting weather and interesting clouds :mrgreen: . Cumulus clouds are created when there's moist air that rises for some reason, and cools as it rises condensing moisture. Mountains have all sorts of reasons for air to rise - contrast in heating between rock and ground/trees as sun heats the terrain, air flowing over mountains experiences rapid lift up slopes/ridges (and the air warms as it flows down the other side after losing moisture as rain, and heating up even more due to release of latent heat), sometimes there's interesting formations like lee waves, and things like lakes or rivers visible in scenes are a often a source of moisture.

It's always possible to get completely cloudless skies over mountains - e.g. high pressure, or warmer air layers above that inhibit cloud growth - but lots of interesting cloud formation is pretty common in mountains.

From google [1]: Afternoon cloud development map averaged over a couple of years. Bluer areas are less cloudy. Note flying at night and using live METARs will mean midday cloud development is missed.
Image

Site with lots of maps of cloud stats from google - see sidebar and click categories until maps show up: link.

Map showing percentages of having completely clear sky at daytime. Higher values mean more days with clear skies. (link):
Image

It's fairly rare to get days with a clear sky - or whatever cutoff they used for a completely blue sky. Those high pressure ridges at 30N and 30S markings with frequently clear skies (the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer) are the result of a large scale downward flow of air due to a Hadley circulation (e.g. [wiki) that inhibit cloud growth - there are a lot of dry or desert regions in these ridges, and areas like the Atacama desert in Andes mountains have been deserts for millions of years (helped by having two mountain ranges on either side so it's always in a rain shadow, and being high altitude).

Alps live cloud cover: link. It's often fairly cloudy. Quick/first google result for weather scenarios in alps - with photos & examples of clouds / haze AW could create: link

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby V12 » Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:03 am

First look on that video - perfect and very good looking FG presentation. Second look on the details - for me 3 annoying things :
1. I see big problem in the combination of the OSM scenery, the synthetic textures and the default landclasses. In the result there are many trees in the buildings, many buildings do not correspond with ground texture, OSM roads pass over the ground building textures, trees over the OSM roads etc. If someone want use OSM, OK, no rpoblem, but only with photoscenery, otherwise results are not good. Textures with predefined autogen buildings positions shows much better visuals. It is clearly visible on many photosceneries, where imaginery is much older than OSM data and (or) landclasses are much older than imaginery.
2. strange bright textures on the slopes - if this synthetic texture (IMHO very bad looking) is for rocks, why the trees are on this rock texture ?
3. cloud generator has problem with performance, sometime user can see, how clouds fields are generated cloud after cloud, it is very ugly. In this case at 4:52. This is visible almost in the all FG videos when LIVE weather was used. It is immersion killer for me.

Still not solved abrupt pressure and wind speed / direction changes leading to overspeed and A/P disconnect, some of my flights was ruined with this phenomena, discontinual atmospheric pressure change was transformed into abnormal vertical speed and my C172 lost wing :)
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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby erik » Fri Aug 27, 2021 9:29 am

I've also wondered weather it would be possible to only use OSM buildings on certain terrain, like cities.

V12 wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:03 am:2. strange bright textures on the slopes - if this synthetic texture (IMHO very bad looking) is for rocks, why the trees are on this rock texture ?

because they can:
Image

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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby V12 » Fri Aug 27, 2021 4:02 pm

I wrote on the slopes :

Image

not on almost horizontal plateaus as Your photo shows.
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Re: FlightGear Scenery 2020/2021

Postby vnts » Fri Aug 27, 2021 11:26 pm

V12 wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:03 am: In the result there are many trees in the buildings, many buildings do not correspond with ground texture, OSM roads pass over the ground building textures, trees over the OSM roads etc.

The ground texture issue can be resolved by changing ground textures to garden textures once OSM has loaded, as mentioned before.

Some of those buildings are probably there because he has enabled random scenery objects. There is also no autogen in the current world build on TerraSync, and some areas have limited OSM coverage e.g. the odd house or building, or areas with no roads. Small clusters of buildings and roads in farming communities might only get one building, and might not be classified as city/town in landclasses either. In this case FG still looks closer to reality than without those buildings I guess?. With WS3 it might even be possible to add small clusters of buildings as town landclasses based on OSM data - I think the current landclass raster in the WS3 prototype has 25m resolution.

Another possible issue might be lack of regional building textures which is being looked at by Volador's project - some of those buildings in country areas will stand out less with more regional texturing. Something that would probably help is if there was some clue in the data as to whether a building or road was in some country town or isolated farm property - as opposed to to residential areas in a big city center. That way a better texture that has more wear and tear can be assigned so it doesn't clash with the environment.
erik wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 9:29 am:I've also wondered weather it would be possible to only use OSM buildings on certain terrain, like cities.

Probably it's also that too many different types of objects are bundled under random scenery objects right now. There should probably be more categories so objects like buildings can be switched off.

People would want to always have objects like agricultural objects/buildings, bird flocks, boats and things like icebergs. The generic buildings that are placed under random scenery objects are a bit old and clash with scenery (e.g. that pinkish building texture in particular).
V12 wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:03 am:2. strange bright textures on the slopes - if this synthetic texture (IMHO very bad looking) is for rocks, why the trees are on this rock texture ?

There are lots of different controls that can be enabled in regional definitions for different land-classes - the regional definitions with a different texture mixed in as the slope increases are usually trying to show rock emerging, or terrain becoming more bare - e.g. img. How fast trees thin out with increasing slope is also configurable. If something looks different to real life it's a case of there being no local regional definition - Alps falls under the generic Europe definitions. CTrl+Alt+click in the UFO shows the xml file and landclass.
V12 wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:03 am:3. cloud generator has problem with performance, sometime user can see, how clouds fields are generated cloud after cloud, it is very ugly. In this case at 4:52. This is visible almost in the all FG videos when LIVE weather was used. It is immersion killer for me.

The distance at which clouds are generated is controlled by LoD ranges I think?, and maybe some other AW properties. Increasing whatever those are should let clouds spawn further out. Probably the defaults can be turned up for newer CPUs.

Clouds are physics objects with flows of air that evolve depending on conditions including what terrain they pass over. They aren't there for art reasons like in other 'sims' - so there will be some delay. At 4:52 it seems either this persons computer was a bit slow, or increasing whatever controls cloud population would help.
V12 wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:03 am:Still not solved abrupt pressure and wind speed / direction changes leading to overspeed and A/P disconnect, some of my flights was ruined with this phenomena, discontinual atmospheric pressure change was transformed into abnormal vertical speed and my C172 lost wing :)

'Live' weather services have problems. The more arcade 'sims' just plug into a weather service, and maybe offer a few token weather presets, then give up on simulation.

METARs are horribly incomplete (it could just say CAVOK..), METAR observations are for some time in the past at one location, and METAR are suddenly updated at long intervals - when there are sudden requests for a different weather with no warning it's hard to do anything about it?. The best a craft can do is to smooth input, or protect against it if possible. How many METAR stations are around depends on the area, so METAR is a very inconsistent thing to use.

Simulated weather changes as the plane moves as well as evolving with time, and how fast it changes with distance is controlled by the scale sliders - if the weather doesn't change with shorter flights people may have the scale sliders set too high.
V12 wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 6:03 am:3. cloud generator has problem with performance, sometime user can see, how clouds fields are generated cloud after cloud, it is very ugly. In this case at 4:52. This is visible almost in the all FG videos when LIVE weather was used. It is immersion killer for me.

This could be Live weather thing where the METAR for one or more of the stations surrounding a person suddenly changes - it could even be when a plane moves into the range of new stations.

The distance at which clouds are generated is controlled by LoD ranges I think?, and maybe a bunch of other AW proerties. Increasing whatever those are should let clouds spawn further out. There's probably room to turn up some default limits on newer CPUs.

Clouds in FG are often physics objects with flows of air that evolve depending on conditions including what terrain they pass over. These are simulated individually. They aren't there for art reasons like in other 'sims' - so there will be some delay in populating, that could be visible even on fast CPUs at start up.
At 4:52 it seems either it was a METAR change thing, or this persons computer was a bit slow, or increasing whatever controls cloud population would help.

V12 wrote in Fri Aug 27, 2021 4:02 pm:https://i.imgur.com/Ude5yR9.png

Was this taken on your computer? What is wrong with the trees?? Normally trees look like this img1. With AA disabled trees use a different codepath and become blocky img2.

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