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Australian scenery project updates

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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby agathosdaimon » Sat Feb 13, 2021 1:20 am

thanks for this guide , though i dont understand fully - are you saying i just need to change the word autumn to summer? or do i need to do somethign with an overlay texture? sorry i am not familiar with how any of xml works so forgive my obtuseness. is the overlay texture vanishing a good thing or bad thing? what even is the "overlay" texture?
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Sat Feb 13, 2021 9:50 am

Yes I am saying just change autumn to summer. Just edit the file in a text editor to change the file names (ending in ".png") so that "autumn" -> "summer", and the file name just below those that has "overlay" in the name change completely to the name I suggested. Copy the old xml file to a backup before you make any changes just in case. The "overlay" in this case is meant to give a grassy look to the texture. I think if it is missing the texture will just be a bit less "grassy" so the main change is the autumn -> summer one.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby vnts » Mon Feb 15, 2021 10:25 am

agathosdaimon, you can try copying the entire definition block containing airport keep from data\Materials\regions\global-summer.xml into the Australia materials XML file's keep definition.

This is the definition for a standard green grass airport keep. There are several other examples of keeps in other XML files that could be a starting point for parts of the country that are less wet/warm e.g. the AirportKepp block in california.xml might be a good starting point for drier airports in the interior.

There should be several names of landclasses besides AirportKeep in the block in the Australia XML file (e.g. greenspace/grassland/grass/) . You should keep those names instead of replacing them with ones from global-summer.xml (they may turn out to be the same).

The block in global-summer.xml to copy:
<material>
<name>Grass</name>
<name>Airport</name>
<name>AirportKeep</name>
[content to copy into the Australia XML file ...]
</material>

The reason it's worthwhile copying the whole definition is that there was a rework of airport keep done for 2020.3 LTS [1], and the textures were renamed and replaced, including the grass structure textures. There was a tweaked effect put in place with grass overlays active.

Kind regards
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby pb321 » Sun Apr 18, 2021 4:12 am

One thorny problem is the occasional appearance of white areas or flickering areas in the terrain. I suspect two areas are overlaid and sometimes none, sometimes one and sometimes the other are rendered. This is going to be tough to track down, I'm guessing that during extraction and overlay in Grass shapefiles are produced that contain multiple features with the same landclass at the same spot, and Terragear preserves this.


What was the approach to fix this problem, as I have encountered the same problem with scenery I've worked on?

Thank you!

Your Australian scenery is fantastic!
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby merspieler » Sun Apr 18, 2021 12:08 pm

You've quoted the solution already....

during extraction and overlay in Grass shapefiles are produced that contain multiple features with the same landclass at the same spot, and Terragear preserves this.


You need to check the shapefiles...
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby pb321 » Wed Apr 21, 2021 4:43 am

Thank you for your reply, @merspieler!

I turned off trees to view only landclass shapefiles and ALS to get maximum contrast between landclasses, As I am working on four different material.xml files, there was a lot to look at and compare to see what worked and what didn't. I found the following reasons for the white (blank) landclass shapefiles:
  1. Missing material definition for a landclass within the material.xml file.
  2. Missing .png extension in one of the textures identified in a materials definition within the material.xml file.
  3. Various remnants of comment markdown (like "<!--" or "-->").
  4. Misspelling of textures or incorrect (no longer included) textures.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:04 pm

So I'm preparing to finally submit some of the Australian scenery work to FG for incorporation in the distribution. Those interested in testing it out ahead of time and picking up issues are welcome to download the materials and texturing pack from here (gitlab login may be required, not sure) and install as per the instructions found in that repository. This includes a new division of Australia into climactic regions: mediterranean summer/winter, temperate inland/coastal, monsoonal, New England tablelands, and "the rest": summer all year round basically. This update also fixes those problems people were encountering with black areas around runways.

I've tested it by taking the UFO straight up in 2020.3.8 and looking around at the following airports using last year's detailed Australian scenery: Augusta (YAUG), Armidale, Wollongong, Orange, Cairns, Launceston and Alice Springs. Anywhere else could be a mess for all I know so feel free to check out your favourite Australian places in the detailed scenery.

Known issues:
  • Tiling for large areas of bush/scrub/grassland. This is because the tiles are 1kmx1km and the noise parameters in the shader are optimised for 2kmx2km. A size-agnostic shader is the next project.
  • Not all landclasses are improved - irrigated farmland is still stock FG

And because no scenery post is complete without a picture, here is a view looking north over the Shoalhaven (100km or so south of Sydney). 7 mile beach is on the right, which Charles Kingsford Smith used as a runway for the first commercial flight to New Zealand (which is a bit further to the right). Cliffs in the distance are using procedural texturing.

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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby merspieler » Thu Jul 22, 2021 8:12 am

I've generated updated groundnets for all Australien airports so startup positions should match the scenery.

You can download it here

NOTE: These files currently break the AI...
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby vnts » Thu Jul 22, 2021 9:48 am

The combined terrain and regional definitions looks awesome as always :mrgreen:

(And if someone from Australia tries and sees the improved scenery (when they likely start with their home region), they are probably a lot more likely to stick around long enough to figure out how to configure/use FG at least somewhat. I suspect /one/ of the contributing factors to a lack of contributors from the USA (relatively considering a 350M population somewhat comparable to EU) might be people starting at a few undeveloped areas without trying EU and getting a bad first impression.)

frtps wrote in Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:04 pm:Those interested in testing it out ahead of time and picking up issues are welcome to download the materials and texturing pack from here (gitlab login may be required, not sure) and install as per the instructions found in that repository

It didn't need a github login. I downloaded region_pack.tgz, but it seems to only contain the Textures and Trees folders. I don't see the updated Materials folder(?), so nothing will show up if someone installed it.

With scenery packs people sometimes just create a repo containing Materials/Textures folders, with only the changed/new files, and update the repo with commits as they work. It's slightly harder for end users to find the link to download, but might be easier to work with and for people testing to see updates and what changed.
frtps wrote in Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:04 pm:[*] Not all landclasses are improved - irrigated farmland is still stock FG[/list]

What do the required type(s) of agriculture pattern look like (e.g. instantstreetview links) ?

There was one or two high-res 2048x2048 textures found in the DDS texture set recently and reprocessed/integrated - irrcrop.png, drycrop.png (and maybe orchard.png). Maybe these can be recoloured or resynthesised

Kind regards
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby frtps » Thu Jul 22, 2021 10:37 am

It didn't need a github login. I downloaded region_pack.tgz, but it seems to only contain the Textures and Trees folders. I don't see the updated Materials folder(?), so nothing will show up if someone installed it.


Thanks for taking the time to have a look at it. The updated materials are in the "regions" directory. Perhaps the instructions don't mention what to do with these, I'll check.
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby portreekid » Thu Jul 22, 2021 11:45 am

merspieler wrote in Thu Jul 22, 2021 8:12 am:NOTE: These files currently break the AI...


I'm curious what that means? Just the positions or actual bugs in the AI code. I'm currently trying to fix any quirks in the AI code.

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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby BecOzIcan » Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:06 pm

Only looked at YSSY

Definitely not functional and a good candidate for console errors. 2/3 of the Parking stands are missing and the file is mostly made of unconnected nodes. The issue is not with the AI code

This looks autogenerated from the WED Layout. Would not pass validation by FGAirport/Groundweb or even myself :-)

The groundnet in Terrasync is up to date and functional. Parking positions and taxiways location match published INS data as well. Same for Melbourne and Brisbane so alignment of parkpos, taxiways and thresholds between Terrasync distributed AI and this new scenery should be smooth if the airport layouts are also from real data.

Cheers
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby merspieler » Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:25 pm

All planes start at a singe point, and taxi in a stright line to the runway, ignoring all taxiways...

I can not rule out, that there's an issue in my conversion script from apt.dat to groundnet.xml format.

If you want, you can check my files, if I made any mistakes...
Note that I haven't found a way to match parking positions to taxi paths so I always set isPushBackRoute= all to 1 or 0, both with the same issue.

BecOzIcan wrote in Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:06 pm:This looks autogenerated from the WED Layout. Would not pass validation by FGAirport/Groundweb or even myself


Cause it is... I can't edit >2000 airports my self.
Also I belive, that I should fix my tool rathern than the output as I think the best way forward is to use the WED gateway layout. (using apt.dat files directly would be even better).

There are some airports which this has already brought an improvement (at least parking pos wise), ie. YBCS and YPDN (which had the same ID for all positions and you've always started on grass)
So I need to identify the issues and fix the script.

... Thanks for the report, I'll have a look at YSSY...
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby BecOzIcan » Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:05 pm

merspieler wrote in Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:25 pm:If you want, you can check my files, if I made any mistakes...


The screenshot above is in fact the visualization of your YSSY file onto taxidraw. I have not detailed the issues as this simple screenshot would by itself make a lot of sense to anyone dealing with groundnets.

At this point, it is very clear no attempt at auto generating groundnets from either APT or WED data has ever resulted at anything useful.

It is not a reflection on the quality of your code, they are simply too many rules in AI and airport configurations so that each groundnet must be manually tailored to the local conditions. In fact, we are still going through the cleanup of the massive global import (to Terrasync) from 3/4 years ago which totally ruined the networks we had.

On the bright side we now have the right tools (FG Airport), extensive wiki documentation and a handful of amazing contributors working on groundnets. Work is already underway and coordinated with the central development team to prioritize our effort onto the files triggering the most errors.

All of the above does not change the fact that this scenery looks amazing and you should not be worried about the AI part of it.

Take care
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Re: Australian scenery project updates

Postby portreekid » Thu Jul 22, 2021 2:40 pm

merspieler wrote in Thu Jul 22, 2021 1:25 pm:All planes start at a singe point, and taxi in a stright line to the runway, ignoring all taxiways...

I can not rule out, that there's an issue in my conversion script from apt.dat to groundnet.xml format.


Unlike X Plane, flightgear has no "find next waypoint" whatsoever. The groundnet has no gaps and is a complete net, that can be traversed from parking to runway. What you are seeing is that for Flightgear there are no taxiways as they are not connected to anything (createPushback.cxx). I had some code fixing that in your script a few years back, but gave up because the edge cases were too many. Maybe you could build some machine learning code for that.

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