Satellite/Photo Scenery?

[hans05]

This almost went into a constructive discussion even involving core team members, positive surprise.

Nevertheless I do not understand why it is now again drifting into the direction of discouragement. A user brings forward a task that can be tackled by someone....or not. That's how I understand it goes in community projects. Somebody might see the task interesting enough to through a lot of time and effort into it. Her decision. Why is it discussed up front how difficult this is and that people do injustice to developers?

I am more of a user of FG and I see this:

Ministry for the Economy and Finance in Paris:


Notre Dame in Paris:


Bellevue Square in Zurich:


I see great clouds (this ONE I will give you, Thorsten), great trees and gras, great buildings (at least in Paris) but.....
What I do not see is, how would flat cars or planes on the ground be a problem? In the current scenery...it's all flat like in Flatland. The water in the Seine has problems and the streets have problems.

Of course it will be extremely hard to improve this. But clouds are hard to do and aircraft are hard to do and flight-modeling is hard to do and....all of it has been done.
So how about just letting this idea for improvement sit there in all its glory (like obviously it is already doing in some dev-mails) and wait what happens instead of this negative undertone (that at least I get from many posts here).

Richard, I think you have done great by constructively analyzing and checking, thanks! Don't you think that all important airports have to be hand crafted anyway, so that the designer of an airport creates a layer on top of the ugly flatland mistakes? Airport-devs, any comment? And could the roads be an overlay as well? The coordinates of the roads are in the data and the satellite pictures go underneath?

[Mihajlo]

I know this is off topic but I see in the picture that you are using basic weather. If you switch to advanced weather clouds and lighting will be much better than this.

[hans05]

Because my settings got lost during my last Xubuntu update and I overlooked this one.
Thanks for the hint

[icecode]

Why is it discussed up front how difficult this is and that people do injustice to developers?

Because it is difficult and people do injustice to developers?

Of course it will be extremely hard to improve this. But clouds are hard to do and aircraft are hard to do and flight-modeling is hard to do and....all of it has been done.

Yeah, by people who were interested in clouds, aircrafts and flight-modeling. If no developer is interested in photorealistic scenery, then no one will implement this feature. It's useless to write 5 pages on ways to do something that no one is willing to do. Just write it once and paste it on the wiki so someone who might be interested in the future can see if anything there is useful.

[Thorsten]

A user brings forward a task that can be tackled by someone....or not. (...) Why is it discussed up front how difficult this is and that people do injustice to developers?

History in this forum tells us that if the 'or not' branch is taken, we get to see angry posts why developers ignore all the great ideas that are paraded through the forum. And, well, to add to the enjoyment, having worked with graphics, I am somehow personally blamed for every graphics development that does not happen in FG (examples can be amply found in this thread).

So I find it the most useful thing to do to explain why a task is difficult. At least some people will be able to derive the answer why not everything materializes in FG even if they suggested it two years ago. The rest can't be helped. I think it's better to talk to the people that are ready to listen than to remain silent to everyone (though most other active developers have chosen the second option and don't interact in the forum at all).

[wlbragg]

>Why is it discussed up front how difficult this is and that people do injustice to developers?

Why not, if I was considering tackling this issue I would want to know the pitfalls upfront. I don't want to find out after the fact that negative X happens or I wish I would have been aware of negative Y.

Why do you take this as, "discouragement"? If I was intent on making photo scenery a reality with all the negative issues resolved, i for one would appreciate know as many of those issues before I get started.

Maybe it is a matter of perspective. Once you have experienced these potential setbacks or show stoppers midstream of a project, you can really appreciate the forewarning. It's not a negative.

[f-ojac]

Thanks Richard for the nice sum-up of satellite and aerial limitations in sim.
Reminds me of this a few years ago...

[hans05]

@Thorsten:
Sorry to be so direct, but: Please let someone else do the messaging. You do great clouds but your communication style is....devastating.
And how is it better to have users annoyed because they feel attacked by you than to have users be annoyed by devs not implementing something?

@wlbragg:
Richard made a neutral analysis of potential problems and showed them with pictures. After reading his post I thought "Ok, makes me think how to solve the problems.".
Posts from others more or less implicitly write that it's not going to happen.
BIG difference between those two approaches!! One is motivating, the other is....discouraging!
And if your 25 years experience perspective is that it can not be done, then where is the problem to still just let the proposal be. Doesn't hurt you! It is less effort for you. Just do not take the hassle to write something. Relax, drink a beer, code what ever YOU find realistic and let others fail at stuff that you always knew they would fail. Might be fun. It is called being tolerant I believe.

[wlbragg]

I'd be willing to bet that a vast majority of the same people that are pointing out the issues here would actually appreciate the ability to have a perfect satellite rendering at altitude. I know I would. I don't think there is any other way to generate the entire world ground scenery "accurately" any time soon with our current level of technology. My only preferred alternative to that would be accurate 3d graphics of the entire world (osm-city, models db, land cover, etc). That too has many issues and really is even farther from ever becoming a reality (I'm talking accurately of the entire world). So in my "vision" it should be a combination of the two, transitioning by altitude. But that doesn't change many of the facts pertaining to both concepts.

We don't get to control satellite imagery, when it is taken, what cloud cover exists at the time, what movable ground objects are where.
We can work around some of it, I suppose we might be able to make it more seasonal by applying pixel tricks. shader manipulation, whatever techniques you can throw at it.
If the satellite imagery is updated constantly at least we get a fairly accurate picture of the world. But is the imagery we would have access to GPL?

My alternative of 3d modeling has even more issues in relation to accuracy. Imagine trying to keep 3d modeling up to date with the day to day changes of the entire world. What kind of manpower would it take to do the entire world?

I used to think about scenery in games like GTA. Wow, why can't we have that? There are flying machines in that game and they can handle the overhead. As cool as that might be, there is never going to be enough manpower and talent to pull something like that off world wide and again, your back to a dynamic world that isn't standing still.

So really, if you want a dynamic and accurate world scenery, satellite imagery issues maybe aren't as insurmountable as other ideas and may be the only way to get a consistently accurate ground picture.
But that doesn't negate the issues involved.

However, if I have a choice of what I saw of my local area when using OSG-Earth VS the scenery I built using the Terragear tool set. I would take the Terragear version, if for no other reason as I have control over what that looks like and it looked as good close to the ground as it did in the air.
Even that scenery in reality has changed in the couple years since I made it, but I have the ability to regenerate it to whatever accuracy I want. The tools are already in place. I just have to be willing to put in the time it takes to put it all together. In theory I could make it match a satellite image and still get all the benefits of 3 dimension with none of the negative issues of a static picture taken who knows when.

And if your 25 years experience perspective is that it can not be done, then where is the problem to still just let the proposal be.

No one took a proposal of the table. There was no proposal, it was a grip about lack of documentation that started all of this. The answer was appropriate for the level of effort displayed by the original poster to educate themselves of how this all works, in my opinion. Then another party chimes in with personal insult and profanity. Where is your affront to that?

If someone ever had the audacity to say to my face, "I'm really frustrated, you don't ever seem to be able to document your work here", I'm not going to react very well. That answer came from someone that does document their work extremely well. I think it was more of a defense reply for those of us that contribute but don't take the additional time to document it. Be thankful the work is there at all.

[Thorsten]

Sorry to be so direct, but: Please let someone else do the messaging. You do great clouds but your communication style is....devastating.

As someone else has said in this thread - truth hurts.

And how is it better to have users annoyed because they feel attacked by you than to have users be annoyed by devs not implementing something?

The fact of the matter is that I'm not in the habit of unprovokedly attacking people or calling them names (unlike others in this forum),

People can certainly be offended by a neutral presentation of facts that are inconvenient to them - but in that case they actually don't have a reason for it (different people feel offended by all kinds of things - some by kissing in public, some by children playing, some by forum administrators upholding copyright,... the mere fact that someone feels offended is no reason to act - and in fact it'd be plain illegal to allow copyright violations so that someone can feel more welcome for instance ) . Being ignored in a forum on the other hand is a reason to be offended as far as I am concerned.

You do this judgement as you think best, and I do as I think best and we both stick to the forum rules.

BIG difference between those two approaches!! One is motivating, the other is....discouraging!

Hint: Try a forum post like 'I'd very much like to see XY implemented, how would I go about doing it?' rather than 'FG needs XY and the developers must absolutely implement it now or FG will die.' - see the difference this makes in the responses.

I actually want to discourage people from making claims on my time - I want to encourage them to invest their own for what they would like to see - and then I'm ready to help out when needed.

I know - subtle distinction. But important if it's your time that's expected.

[portreekid]

BIG difference between those two approaches!! One is motivating, the other is....discouraging!

Hint: Try a forum post like 'I'd very much like to see XY implemented, how would I go about doing it?' rather than 'FG needs XY and the developers must absolutely implement it now or FG will die.' - see the difference this makes in the responses.

I actually want to discourage people from making claims on my time - I want to encourage them to invest their own for what they would like to see - and then I'm ready to help out when needed.

I know - subtle distinction. But important if it's your time that's expected.

That for me is the important destinction. I only lurk here and am one of the guys that ONLY does stuff I am interested in. It's wonderful FG gives me the opportunity to do this. I can't help very often when seeing these. "Do what I want" posts. I've been coding for years and my brain will silently *plonk* stuff. I'm impressed how many helpful hints Thorsten gives. You can be offended by the guy saying "If you climb Everest you will die." But maybe you should start with a Munro.

[hans05]

If Thorsten would manage to write more in the style of his above post, there would be no problem!
Like THAT you can make your point without attacking people.

And Thorsten, I never said that everybody else except you communicates correctly or that calling names would be ok. It's not ok. But if YOU get attacked then it's always possible to defend yourself without counterattack. This is called de-escalation.
Very important: NOT calling somebody names does NOT mean that you do not attack somebody. Actually I think you can attack somebody much more effectively by subtle means, without shouting or calling names. I do believe that you mean the best, but I also believe that you are much better in programming than in detecting or forecasting what will upset another person or not.

@portreekid:
Before Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler ascended Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen, ALL of the climbers and physicians predicted that they will die since the prevailing understanding was that human beings can not survive with that little oxygen. So you had thousands of 25+ years experienced climbers and doctors proven wrong.
I believe a community project should always strive to try to find new people trying new things. I repeat: If they fail it was their own decision. It is always possible to communicate doubts but still leave an open minded tolerant impression (see Richards post).
And IF in the current core-dev-team there is nobody who is interested in doing XY, that is NO reason to communicate in a "will-never-happen" style. You should radiate the message "If you are interested please join our team and give it a go. If you fail you learned a lot, if you succeed, well THANKS!".

[wlbragg]

if you succeed, well THANKS!

No, if you "succeed" why can't you ever document what you did so I can easily use it. That's the point.

[Thorsten]

Very important: NOT calling somebody names does NOT mean that you do not attack somebody.

Hans - you may be surprised - but I'm not a saint, I'm merely trying to be fair.

You will see me stay civilized when I am confronted with unreasonable demands, rude words etc. You will not get me to smile and do appeasement and help those people as far as possible - I will express my displeasure in a civilized way - and that's all such people will ever get from me till they change their tune.

Sorry to disappoint you here.

I believe a community project should always strive to try to find new people trying new things.

Yes. So that brings us to full circle to the beginning of this thread - why is 'if you want it, you'll have to code it yourself, nobody opposes this but none of the active developers is interested' considered so offensive then? It explicitly encourages someone new to try new things. There's no 'won't happen' at all involved here.

(There's also few things that will genuinely 'never happen' on the FG repository - like using material with the wrong license or scenery contributions to FGData rather than terrasync - and in these cases, it's better to tell people up-front and not after they have spent half a year of work - it's grossly unfair to make someone invest a few months and then tell it will never happen).

[portreekid]

@portreekid:
Before Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler ascended Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen, ALL of the climbers and physicians predicted that they will die since the prevailing understanding was that human beings can not survive with that little oxygen. So you had thousands of 25+ years experienced climbers and doctors proven wrong.
I believe a community project should always strive to try to find new people trying new things. I repeat: If they fail it was their own decision. It is always possible to communicate doubts but still leave an open minded tolerant impression (see Richards post).
And IF in the current core-dev-team there is nobody who is interested in doing XY, that is NO reason to communicate in a "will-never-happen" style. You should radiate the message "If you are interested please join our team and give it a go. If you fail you learned a lot, if you succeed, well THANKS!".

That is right. But if doctors and climbers wouldn't have voiced their concern? Then it wouldn't have been an informed descision. I believe it is more beneficial new contributers are guided towards quick wins that will motivate them to do more in the future. Not all are into learning by hitting walls. Regarding "core-dev-team" they seem to be pretty elusive. Haven't met them yet. Just lots of people using glue and shoe string to build a wonderful awe inspiring Flightsim.