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.
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.
Kind regards