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Wildfire Addon

FlightGear has support for add-ons, to further extend the simulator's core functionality.

Re: Wildfire Addon

Postby merspieler » Fri Sep 24, 2021 11:28 am

you mean AI generating from ortho images...

A thought I've played with in the past but not really feasible... unless you get us a datacenter.

Also getting an ortho source, you may use for that. The GPL2 compatible sources I've got could be used and since they are not global, we've may get a change of generating a couple tiles with it. But even then, I would keep the ortho and add the accurate place ment of other stuff on top.
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Re: Wildfire Addon

Postby vnts » Mon Sep 27, 2021 10:38 am

wlbragg wrote in Thu Sep 23, 2021 6:13 pm: I imagine it is a little bi different in the areas of the world where much effort and time has gone into the custom scenery, such as Europe. But the North American continent is so bad overall, no water bodies or poorly shaped ones, completely inaccurate shorelines, vast stretches of inaccurate ground cover types and city boundaries that were poorly defined from data obtained 15 years ago.

Europe had high quality terrain elevationa and landclass data back when the WS2 scenery on Terrasync was built, and the USA had really low quality data. That probably reduced the number of newcomers sticking with FG who didn't also look at other regions, and reduced the number of those who flew locally who might have contributed to the regional definitions (and other areas of FG). The few areas in the USA with some modern regional definitions/textures in FGData were mainly done by people who lived elsewhere like Gilberto and Thorsten - and not so much FG people who lived in the USA - even these don't show well as there are few landclasses or the resolution is really low, and some of the work Gilberto did just doesn't show in the current USA terrain. So other areas of the world got better with regional definitions/textures, as the elevation and landclass data wasn't replaced for a long time - there wasn't another world-build done as access to the database wasn't available for a while but that has been fixed.
wlbragg wrote in Thu Sep 23, 2021 7:46 am:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQaquUlge8c

The problem with most photoscenery is that the colours are wrong - the structure can have some useful information. If season and environment is not dry lush summer it can breaks FG's seasonal variation. A lot of photoscenery was created for a different purpose / intent - usually to clearly show different things and properties for mapping purposes - and not to look realistic in the way the eye would see it. Often there has been some brute force colour changes so photos that were taken in different lighting conditions and seasons by different sensors don't clash as much. Probably there's a lot of desaturation done and the colours are leeched out. Often the colours look grey/dark in wetter climates - like mud instead of soil - so forests can sometimes look like mangroves with a grey sky overhead - or the terrain looks like grey volcanic rock. In drier climates, exposed soil and rock can look like clay or the surface of the moon (e.g. the grand canyon in most photo scenery).
wlbragg wrote in Thu Sep 23, 2021 6:13 pm:But in the meantime custom scenery generation has all but stopped. Mainly because there never was a good method to incorporate custom efforts by individuals. There was always some hurdle to cross.

Actually in recent times it's picked up massively, despite that - Montagdude is working on landclasses and terrain in the USA, frtps has created seriously nice landclasses and terrain for Australia, ProfessorS rebuilt newzealand, a bunch of Islands got rebuilt by various people, xDraconian rebuild the landmases for the default airports - Iceland an Hawaii, lomar is rebuilding parts of South America, pb321 is working on parts of the USA , D-ECHO rebuilt various areas including Scandinavia IIRC ..and so on.

xDraconian did a high resolution prototype of the Tennessee area with WS2 technology to a new standard a while ago - this was before it was deemed more efficient to work on WS3 given a lot of progress with VPB. Torsten set up a small server that was slowly creating WS2 terrain, after access was restored to the database - the UK was reconstructed to a higher standard and available via the hybris terrasync server (FGUK created a video IIRC).
wlbragg wrote in Thu Sep 23, 2021 6:13 pm:It just isn't moving. I really am not convinced that the new effort is going to fix this.

WS3 incorporates the latest high resolution elevation data. The VPB and the raster format means building terrain is extremely fast. The terrain elevation for the majority of the world has already been built by xDraconian: https://wiki.flightgear.org/World_Scene ... map#Status . WS3 is able to use OSM waterbodies and coastlines as was tested with the latest uk-scenery.

WS3 uses raster elevation and landclass data - it's basically a greyscale image. That means it's really easy to update and edit, so new contributions can just be added unlike WS2. It's also very fast to convert things like shapefiles to the landclass 'image' - see this file for the landlcass values in the image : https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fg ... apping.xml .

WS3 is really fast to build. xDraconian was able to create the entire UK with a couple of hours tweaking/cleaning - he mentioned getting several scenery creators up-to speed with QGIS to build the entire world (possibly there will be some mentorship in this area at this years Hackathon if he is available). See his post: https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/ma ... /37259618/

Photoscenery is a quick fix, that can add some structure (often with wrong colours), and improve some landclass resolution for areas with low resolution landclasses, but it doesn't fix colours, add object masks, improve landclasses for object placement (e.g. forests), fix coastlines/water-bodies, or fix low res terrain elevation. Those need WS3. The best way to use photoscenery in some way to improve things in WS3 without the downsides, might be to manually segment the image over a limited area extracting landclasses, and add that to the landclass raster - this is sort of how landclass data sources FG uses are generated but it's a more automated classfication - not sure how much manual classification will improve things.

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Re: Wildfire Addon

Postby wlbragg » Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:09 pm

When you list all the efforts of late for new WS2 higher resolution scenery it sounds better than I imply. But, where is it? How do you get it? I think much of it is not getting into terrasync. That is the same issue as always. You could potentially include my custom Kansas and Ohio scenery in that list. But it is only available through a random public repo or link.

As far as WS3, I have yet to get a working example and mess with it, that's something I want to do. I am ready to do as much of the US as I can once I know it is at a point I wont have to come back to it and do it a second time. Maybe that time is already here?
My impression is it is not clearly defined yet, both procedure to produce it and possibly the evolution of the process to create it, all the methods that will be available to it. It seems still a bit of a mystery to me. But maybe that is because I haven't dove in yet.

Could we have an admin possibly move this topic out of wildfire addon and to it's own thread, thanks.
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Re: Wildfire Addon

Postby vnts » Mon Sep 27, 2021 2:14 pm

wlbragg wrote in Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:09 pm:When you list all the efforts of late for new WS2 higher resolution scenery it sounds better than I imply. But, where is it? How do you get it? I think much of it is not getting into terrasync. That is the same issue as always. You could potentially include my custom Kansas and Ohio scenery in that list. But it is only available through a random public repo or link.


The issues with WS2 exist - including needing to build an entire landmass. I was more making the point that there was interest in scenery generation even in the USA, so FG scenery isn't stuck.

WS3 doesn't use terragear - it uses a completely different tool chain. There was an attempt towards generating a new world build of WS2 (a server and xDraconian even worked on a tool to seamlessly update parts of landmasses without building the entire thing), but xDraconian had huge progress in using VPB so it became more efficient to just work towards WS3.

wlbragg wrote in Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:09 pm:As far as WS3, I have yet to get a working example and mess with it, that's something I want to do.

Since you are on Linux, building the latest next branch is probably the easiest way - there's a new rendering UI.

The latest iteration of the prototype scenery is available here (I think this is the latest): link

It's an area around EGPH. It should have roads and waterbodies directly from OSM. To use it extract it and add it as a new scenery folder - whatever data is in the /vpb is recognised as WS3 Virtual Planet Builder data. In menu -> view -> rendering,

For some additional info on WS3 see past newsletters:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_ ... ease_plans

https://wiki.flightgear.org/FlightGear_ ... nery_3.0_2
wlbragg wrote in Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:09 pm:I am ready to do as much of the US as I can once I know it is at a point I wont have to come back to it and do it a second time. Maybe that time is already here?

There should have ideally been a discussion on the mailing list about this - it's unfortunate that a lot of the people generating scenery aren't on the mailing list (I know you are, but you've been busy with the C172 etc and find it harder to keep up on the mailing list from previous discussion so you might have missed this). I think a general discussion should probably be started before the Hackathon which is being organised right now - a lot of the people generating scenery have expressed interest in the forum.

One of the topics is getting a point of contribution - a point of contribution instead of just handing parts of the world over (e.g. a shapefile server or whatever) so people can enhance and build on work, as well as create new worldbuilds.
wlbragg wrote in Mon Sep 27, 2021 12:09 pm:My impression is it is not clearly defined yet, both procedure to produce it and possibly the evolution of the process to create it, all the methods that will be available to it. It seems still a bit of a mystery to me. But maybe that is because I haven't dove in yet.

The current plan is to get feature parity with WS2, so there's nothing lost by switching over, and then enable to WS3 in a development preview release (not an LTS) The idea was to have the entire world built, but an example area will also work fine. WS3 terrain will then exist alongside WS2 terrain in Terrasync when the development preview releases. This version of WS3 and the data format doesn't have to be the final form.

There are 2 aspects to terrain - the actual elevation and landclass data - and rendering it. The elevation and landclass data creation aspect is pretty advanced. Some of the landclass data like OSM water is stored in a vector format. The rendering aspect is less advanced, and it doesn't work on Windows nightlies yet so I haven't seen it, but it will become active sometime before the next development preview. It works fine on Mac I think.

The exact WS3 data format might change, but the basics of generating scenery with QGIS from multiple data sources can be learned and refined - and I think(?) people can start looking at integrating their existing work on landclass shapefiles in AU or USA into the new toolchain (probably involves importing it into QGIS). Scott (xDraconian) or StuartB are the people to talk to.

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Re: Wildfire Addon

Postby JJB » Wed Jul 13, 2022 1:41 am

Hello wlbragg, I note that back in 2021 you stated that the bushfires quickly bring the sim to its knees. I'm experimenting with this addon now and am finding the same issue (also there seems to be slow or zero growth and then suddenly the fire is massive which seems to be coupled with stalling out the sim). Do you know if the issue of bringing the sim to its knees is currently in work for resolution? If not do you have any pointers for me on where I would start to look to address this?
Thanks very much in advance!


wlbragg wrote in Thu Sep 02, 2021 9:40 pm:Yeah, wildfire could use some work. I'm not sure if I didn't originally understand the concept of the fire propagation or if it was by design. It quickly brings the sim to its knees when it starts to spread. But it takes some time for it to start that spread. I think it originally was designed for a simulation of an airport incident where a aircraft caught on fire and you had so much time to go put it out with a fire tender.
Although the Catalina was designed for extinguishing fire also, don't know what came first?

The areas I want to improve first are the LOD so it can grow to extreme sizes without crashing the sim. I also want to improve the effects. Shaders instead of particles and the burned areas and ammonium phosphate residual graphics. Fun fact, did know borate was only used for a couple years.
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Re: Wildfire Addon

Postby wlbragg » Wed Jul 13, 2022 4:23 pm

Unfortunately, it's been quite a while since I looked at the code and it was complex enough I can't really give any pointers without getting back into the code and having it fresh in my mind. It wasn't the easiest to thing to follow, the propagation part, once it got going. I never fully understood exactly how it worked.
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