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Why has progress been paused?

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Why has progress been paused?

Postby Doorknob747 » Sun May 29, 2022 5:20 am

Why has the progress for WS3.0 been paused? https://wiki.flightgear.org/World_Scenery_3.0_roadmap

The page has not shown any updates on the WS3.0 project.
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby Isaak » Sun May 29, 2022 6:24 am

Yesterday there was an update by Stuart on the coast line generation on the mailing list. Development is still ongoing.
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby Doorknob747 » Sun May 29, 2022 6:52 am

Can we find a maintainer for the Wikipage? The page makes it look as if the project has been abandoned when it is currently active.
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby stuart » Sun May 29, 2022 12:32 pm

Hi Doorknob747,

At the moment I'm the only person working on WS3.0 development, though there are some others using the toolchain (in particular merspieler). Due to a combination of RL issues and getting distracted by other projects I had paused it for a couple of months, but I've been working on it recently.

It would be great to have someone maintain the wiki page, as it would be one less thing for me to do :). So if you are keen on seeing WS3.0 progress, but don't feel you can contribute to the coding, that would be a good way to contribute.

In particular, it would be great to have someone write a full set of instructions for how to generate WS3.0 scenery, pulling together the various tools.

Do let me know if you are interested.

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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby merspieler » Sun May 29, 2022 11:17 pm

Another area of recent progress are airports.

The mentioned approach
Airport layouts will be generated in real-time. Apt.dat will continue to be the primary source for airport layouts. Airports will be draped over the terrain. This eliminates the need to cut airport layouts into the underlying terrain.

Has been abandoned, for now ws2 airports will be used.

In the easy process of generating updated airports I've recently got everything working to a point where I could run weekly automatic updates, pulling the latest changes from the X-Plane gateway.

This and potential ortho scenery aren't mentioned at all on the wiki page, I'll add/update those two things.
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby Hooray » Mon May 30, 2022 8:24 pm

It would make sense to review Stuart's recent postings to the devel list, originally I would add relevant contents/excerpts to the wiki, but I am basically inactive these days.
So if in doubt, simply copy/paste relevant stuff and get it peer-reviewed. Stuart is usually fine with "helping" that way (I usually added a portion of such announcements to the newsletter too) :wink:

For instance:
https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... /37614566/
Stuart wrote:Hi Folks,

I thought it would be a good idea to give a general update on where we are
regarding WS3.0, and what I think is left to do before we have something we
can release more widely.

The good news is that I think we're close to having something suitable for
a "preview" release in the autumn, if not before.

WS3.0 conveniently splits into three areas:
1) Generating the scenery files
2) Distributing the scenery files
3) Rendering the scenery within FG.

_Scenery Generation_
The scenery generation toolchain is complete and I don't expect the scenery
format to change.

The docker image provides a very easy access to the toolchain and I would
encourage people to try it out. Generating "standard" scenery using a
CORINE raster and the NASA_DEM is very straightforward, and pretty fast.

It would be good to have people try generating scenery elsewhere, though
this may require a little work to convert landclass information to the
CORINE mappings (or extending those supported in FG).

Line features (roads, railways, rivers, canals) are generated independently
from OpenStreetmap, so updating the road network won't require rebuilding
the mesh.

Airports are generated independently using the existing tools (genapt), so
it should be straightforward to create updated airport layouts as
required. No change to the surrounding scenery mesh required.

The existing osm2city distribution works OK, though there will be some
elevation differences. A new release of osm2city using WS30 mesh would be
better.

_Scenery Distribution_
Obviously we want to use Terrasync to distribute scenery.

A 1x1 degree directories in WS2.0 vary in size significantly with the
complexity of the mesh. Looking at w010n50, they are up to 40MB in size.
Terrasync distributes individual tiles (IIRC).

In WS3.0, a 1x1 degree block is ~230MB, but compresses down to 15MB thanks
to the regular mesh. So I think it makes sense to distribute compressed
1x1 degree tiles. I.e. the client will make a request for the entire 1x1
degree block and then uncompress it. This will minimize HTTP requests, at
the cost of client disk space. I think that is a reasonable compromise.

There is some work required on the terrasync client to support ws30 as a
new DNS prefix, similarly to osm2city

_Scenery Rendering_
We now have the full set of standard ALS land shaders ported, including the
various overlay, dot and snow functions. We've also got some work and
proof of concepts of doing more complex shading of landclass boundaries
where appropriate.
I've recently also added the water shader to the main WS30 shader
(previously it was a separate Effect and therefore mesh). This will allow
better transitions on coastlines.

Photoscenery is fully supported, and provides much better performance than
in WS2.0.

There is definitely more opportunity to develop interesting terrain shaders
and transitions, as well as things like street lighting, but IMO it's
already comparable to WS2.0.

Please let me know if you have any questions, or if you are interested in
developing in any of these areas. The more hands the better :)

Please don't send support requests by PM, instead post your questions on the forum so that all users can contribute and benefit
Thanks & all the best,
Hooray
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby dom_vc10 » Fri Jun 03, 2022 1:14 pm

merspieler wrote in Sun May 29, 2022 11:17 pm:Another area of recent progress are airports.


In the easy process of generating updated airports I've recently got everything working to a point where I could run weekly automatic updates, pulling the latest changes from the X-Plane gateway.


This would be amazing!!
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby merspieler » Fri Jun 03, 2022 4:58 pm

It is... works quite well... only thing I need to do (and might need help with) is getting everything into a container... main help here is needed for getting a current terragear podman/docker container as the currently available ones on dockerhub are years old.
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby wkitty42 » Sat Jun 04, 2022 11:28 am

merspieler wrote in Fri Jun 03, 2022 4:58 pm:main help here is needed for getting a current terragear podman/docker container as the currently available ones on dockerhub are years old.

is it broken? if not, i don't see what its age has to do with anything... i have tools and apps here that i use all the time and some of them are 20+ years old... they work great and don't need to be updated since nothing has changed... i just don't understand this mentality of "oh, it is old code so it must be broken and unusable"... i mean, imagine if we did that with people...
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"Why not?" said Gurder.
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby merspieler » Sat Jun 04, 2022 12:27 pm

There have been patches for supporting the new line codes... so I must have at least commit 45effdba7890ef575fe584594b58b82fea7c664d from March 5th "Support new line features"
Else the build with the latest apt.dat will fail.
For the old, apt850 format, it should still work but I'm targeting the latest apt.dat version so I need the newer version.
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby wkitty42 » Sat Jun 04, 2022 1:10 pm

ahhhh... that makes more sense... so it isn't that it is just old but that at least one of the libraries it relies on has been updated but the container hasn't been rebuilt with the updated library code... i gotcha... who was maintaining that container? perhaps a friendly poke might be helpful?
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby merspieler » Sat Jun 04, 2022 11:37 pm

idk who maintains that
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby wkitty42 » Sun Jun 05, 2022 7:42 am

merspieler wrote in Sat Jun 04, 2022 11:37 pm:idk who maintains that

i guess it depends on which one you are talking about, too... a quick search of my mail spool showed two of them... the most recent and up to date would be maintained by torsten dreyer if i'm reading the original post from 2018 Jan 27 on the mailing list correctly... i even see a few posts from you in those thunderbird search results... the last being where you offered to maybe host it... that was march of 2020 ;)

anyway, IIUC, the code for the docker image should be in sourceforge with the rest of the FG project... in 2019 the image was reworked against ubuntu bionic... i guess it needs to be reworked again? either against 2020.4 or maybe 2022.4 if it is stable enough yet... i don't know anything more about it, though, and my gaming system, running on 2020.4, is sorely lacking drive space or i might give it a try...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby merspieler » Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:43 am

I'm talking about the one on docker hub
The hosting posts are completely unrelated to that...
Found the Dockerfile... I'll take a look at that
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Re: Why has progress been paused?

Postby TheEagle » Sun Jun 05, 2022 11:49 am

@wkitty: Uh, I guess you were talking about Ubuntu versions 20.04 and 22.04 ? They use a different versioning scheme than we do ! ;)
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