Random objects in industrial area collide with shared buildi

[Johan G]

Split off from the topic Microsoft Flight Simulator, a small graphics study.

There is no wanted list for your list above and I suspect the wiki on the subjects, if it exists, is written in Flightgear jargon, easily enough to put off the newcomer.

For example, I have no idea what a procedural overlay definition is - that doesn't mean I couldn't create one, but someone somewhere has to explain in simpler terms.

I dunno - say you're interested in contributing. You see a bit of terrain where you live (or fly) and it looks wrong. You make a forum post 'This doesn't look good - how would I go about improving it?' So you get a pointer to the wiki pages and a few suggestions. Say you don't understand them, so you make a new post - 'I don't understand that procedural overlay thing - can you give me an example?' And you'll get an example and people will explain things to you.

What's so wrong about that kind of concept?

(From my perspective - writing Wiki about all things I know about FG is terribly inefficient - not only are there many things nobody wants to know, but also one person might need a rather condensed writeup and doesn't want to read a general introduction, another person needs an introduction, so I'd have to write the same thing several times on different levels - when answering questions however, I can target my explanation more precisely to whatever the person actually needs).

I'm confused .

Here https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/mailman/flightgear-devel/thread/98f69ee9c50c138d22db3ee126068160%40science-and-fiction.org/#msg36670475 you said that the underlying texture can't be changed.

Now, above, you are saying it can - which is it?

I did try a 'flood fill' of one area ( a group of 30+ Bonded warehouses in Cambus, Scotland) - but the problem is still there.



This is not really acceptable is it?

There should be no tanks - only the warehouses I have added.

Since I have discovered this 'feature', there seems little point in adding any models to any industrial area.

[Thorsten]

Here you said that the underlying texture can't be changed.

Now, above, you are saying it can - which is it?

Please don't put words into my mouth - I said

If it ends up being systematically wrong in an area (which I suspect may be the case for Iceland which has plenty of Industrial terrain but little heavy industry, so it'd largely be fishing I guess) then a regional definition can change the texture, but you can't mirco-manage things to the degree that you decide 'I usually want to map Industrial to this texture, but in that particular spot I do not'.

which tells you under what condition it can be changed and when not.

Technically, you can potentially change a material definition everywhere in a single scenery chunk (I guess that'd be 0.1 square deg), but you can't for a single triangle.

Since I have discovered this 'feature', there seems little point in adding any models to any industrial area.

I wonder if there's breakage of some sort in the terrain loader- it used to be that static models repel random ones... you shouldn't get a tank inside a warehouse.

Anyway, given that even a small-sized town has 20.000+ buildings, it'd indeed seem little point to fix the world scenery building by building outside of OSM2city - it should rather be quite possible to come up with a definition that fills the area with warehouses (rather than tanks) automatically.

[V12]

...There should be no tanks - only the warehouses I have added.

Possible, that tanks are random scenery objects. Try to turn off this option in View - Rendering options dialog.

[Alex H]

Anyway, given that even a small-sized town has 20.000+ buildings, it'd indeed seem little point to fix the world scenery building by building outside of OSM2city - it should rather be quite possible to come up with a definition that fills the area with warehouses (rather than tanks) automatically.

So, no point in putting any shared model inside a town / city - just static ones?

Sorry for the confusion, I'm just trying to understand where this is going and whether I should go with it.

[Thorsten]

So, no point in putting any shared model inside a town / city - just static ones?

OSM2City would be the future-proof method, yes. It can build everything that looks 'generic' automatically, just characteristic landmarks (churches, statues, bridges,...) it can not do accurately - for these we'd prefer static models.

For rendering thousands of buildings, this is vastly faster than shared models.

We still have the options to distribute random buildings and objects, I believe they're quite capable of populating industrial areas with credible buildings on a large scale - it might not look 100% accurate in every single case, but you can address all of Ireland (for example) at once.

[Alex H]

...There should be no tanks - only the warehouses I have added.

Possible, that tanks are random scenery objects. Try to turn off this option in View - Rendering options dialog.

That gets rid of the tanks, but it still looks bad IMHO.

[Thorsten]

That gets rid of the tanks, but it still looks bad IMHO.

How do you want it to look?

The idea that any auto-generated scenery will look 'exactly like the real thing' in every case won't work unfortunately. So you have to make a compromise somewhere - usually you'd take a whole region, make a regional definition and minimize the tension to reality.

Otherwise you'd have to hand-craft a small chunk of scenery by assigning custom landclasses and distribute that as custom scenery - but realistically you can work 'forever' for a square degree.

[Alex H]

I think it would look better without any random buildings on top of the industrial texture. Those in the shot above appear not to be 'random buildings' as they do not disappear when the option to remove them is ticked - only the tanks go. I think random buildings in the general countryside works well, because they have a background of moor, heathland, arable or whatever. Here it just does not work as buildings are being placed on top of buildings and then interfering if we wish to try and placed shared models on those areas. It may look fine from 30,000ft, but I'm one of those people who like flying small, slow aircraft close to the ground.

In my original post https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=35845 you can see that although the road is always 'above' the texture, the water treatment tanks are actually hidden by some of it. Any idea why that is?

[legoboyvdlp]

I wonder are you meaning the geometry shader? Turn the urban shader to minimum and see if that

Sorry, I was never quite clear what exactly was there that should not be there and what should be there that isn't or vice versa... Is it the brown and white tanks or...?

[Alex H]

I wonder are you meaning the geometry shader? Turn the urban shader to minimum and see if that

Sorry, I was never quite clear what exactly was there that should not be there and what should be there that isn't or vice versa... Is it the brown and white tanks or...?

What I would like to see in the shot above is just the large warehouses which are equal sized and laid out in a neat pattern and nothing else, no storage tanks, no random buildings in the middle of other buildings. This area is a group of 30+ bonded warehouses to store whisky. There is nothing else there.

[Thorsten]

Industrial stuff are likely random objects (individually loaded 3d models) not random buildings (instanced procedurally generated models).

So you can't disable them by disabling random buildings.

There's probably something weird with their placement if they can intersect with other objects (?) - I can't recall having seen that before except for a bug a while ago.

If something does not go away if you disable random objects and buildings, it is actually placed into the scenery and you have to remove it from TS.


I can't see any hiding of objects by the texture in your shot - sorry - theoretically the urban shader effect can displace the texture towards the viewer as it is supposed to create a 3d appearance of buildings (that's yet a different technology stack FG has played with to generate build-up areas) - try disabling it.