FG Worldwide scenery 2.0 - Return of experience

[f-ojac]

I suggest we follow here the known bugs and limitations, and pending feature requests for the worldwide terrain 2.0. I'll keep this first message up to date to make it easier to follow.

Main reference is on the wiki: http://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_World_Scenery_2.0
Discussion to be followed hereunder

[Bjoern]

[*] descent airports priority below roads, so roads and railroads can be shown over airports;

This could turn out badly for airports with (rail)road tunnels running underneath.

[f-ojac]

This was also in papillon81's mind, but the tools should be able to handle that particular case.

[Gijs]

Tunnels are filtered out (if they are properly tagged in OSM).

[psadro_gm]

I think I'd like to move this thread to a wiki page, where we can keep a list, and agree on priorities for bug fixes and new features. Although the bug fixes will take higher priority, I'll add some feature requests as well

1) .SPT file support - push Mathais' LOD ideas forward
2) landclass border blurring - Several ideas on this - It would be really nice to be able to do it.
3) osm motorway_link (and the other _link) roads should probably have their own width. Perhaps grouped into a separate shapefile, or handled in ogr-decode - single lane is most likely.
4) osm line data simplification / preprocessing. - We've done some experimenting, and the results are promising. This should reduce the number of triangles generated. It could create longer continuous roads, which allows better control of the generated texture coordinates - so we could, theoretically, populate the roads with traffic in the future.

[adrian]

@Oliver: 6 should be solved pretty quickly right? Just add the landclass definition to the list and regenerate the areas, there aren't so many glacier zones in the world.
@Pete: LOD should be almost mandatory now, at least if you want to be able to run on computers with less than 3 GB of RAM.

[f-ojac]

@adrian: true, that's probably the easiest to fix
@pete: agreed. Probably both is good: the data in the Wiki and the discussion on the forum

[dbelcham]

Not sure if this is related to the following point in the wiki but I've seen it in 3/3 cities (CYVR, CYYC, CYXD) I've flown over thus far. The image is from the city of Edmonton near CYXD
- some troubles on very dense cities (such as Paris) leading to grey-white triangles on cities - see also yellow lines @LFPG;



I've got other images if more examples are needed. It appears that the black areas have a higher z-order than anything else. They appear to be part of the city but will over lap the cockpit interior or the aircraft itself (as seen in this image). They're also visible through cloud cover and from quite a long distance.

[D-EKEW]

1) On many airports where the taxiway signs are now taken from the apt.dat and put in the Terrain folder, the old signs still remain in the Object folder. See EDDF, ELLX and I am guessing many others.
2) on ELLX there are some problems with "holes" in the pavement that flicker between grass and tarmac. I saw this (if I remember correctly) with an older development version of terragear, but this was fixed some time ago. Any ideas?

By the way I would like to submit our EDDF-ELLX custom scenery (I will check of the current buildings have the correct elevation with the 2.0 scenery first of course) These are many buildings and textures. I would appreciate if someone who can put it in give me a ping on how to do this?

Cheers,

Eric

[f-ojac]

Hi Eric,
Added your reports in the wiki.
For the object part of your custom scenery, please use the massive import submission form for shared objects and the 3D model import webform for new static/shared models.
Also have a look at the best practices before submitting as the webform is looking after them.

[Philosopher]

I don't think many of you have seen this: https://code.google.com/p/flightgear-bu ... il?id=1261

[Johan G]

First off, lets see how this works out.

I am having some split feelings about having a forum topic discussing the contents of a wiki page and a wiki page being edited based on a forum topic. It is not that i think they should be separated per see, but rather that if something happened to the wiki page, the forum topic might be harder to follow and vice verse.

However, lets continue for now.

[Soitanen]

Sorry for little offtop question. Did you use some custom version of TerraGear for scenery generation? Asking because I looked into Terrasync new ULLI airport (which lays on 2 tiles) and it's good rendered, but with my Terragear generation I have bad rendering of this airport with the same apt.dat and heights.

[adrian]

Olivier, or Martin, there seems to be a problem with the mapserver interface: I get a blank page with no map and only controls displayed for http://mapserver.flightgear.org/map/?lo ... FTFFFFFFFF
Btw, the error seems to be originating from my Javascript download code. Does anybody else see this?

Timestamp: 11/12/2013 01:20:26 PM
Error: TypeError: lonlat is null
Source File: http://mapserver.flightgear.org/map/downloadbox.js
Line: 52

[psadro_gm]

Did you use some custom version of TerraGear for scenery generation?

No, but the flickering airport issue is very sensitive to the surrounding data as well. I am almost certain it is a problem with our clipping library, but I need to get a good bug report to the author (using visual c++ on Windows, which I've been trying to get set up).

As an example, here is a couple screenshots of the issue with just one road segment (near the southern border) removed - with the road complete, the airport hole is seen as a boundary, and the flickering occurs. Without the road - the airport hole is a hole, and everything looks great.

With the road = error


Without the road = good


I've been able to fix this airport with a hack that extends the airport hole slightly past the tile boundary when clipping. This is my backup plan if we can't fix in clipper, but I am unsure it will work in all cases.

EDIT: Perhaps I should also try the newest clipper release - this looks interesting in the release notes:

* Update: Major improvement in the merging of
shared/collinear edges in clip solutions (see Execute).

as the issue above may be that the 'hole' really isn't a hole, but a concave contour - the clip rectangle is colinear with the airport hole edge on the tile boundary - I'll try this week.

Pete