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The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Tuxklok » Sat Nov 05, 2011 5:01 am

edit: There is now a git repo with the work in progress scenery available on gitorious. Or, if you don't do git, you can also just download an archive from here. Either way add the resulting directory after your git pull or after unpacking the archive to your fg-scenery path...probably at front...and enjoy.

Hello again folks. With my Innsbruck scenery project going long past its intended purpose and lifetime it is finally time to take the experience, tools, enthusiasm, etc, from that project and move forward to the next evolution. I shall now be focused, as the title suggests, generating custom scenery for all of Austria. Innsbruck and its airport will still remain the major focus city for the time being, but no longer shall we be constrained to its borders. As before the land cover will be derived from the Corine data set, and with its new and more open license hopefully my efforts in that regard can be incorporated into the map server for inclusion into future default scenery. Just because my models and methods (and madness?) may not be suitable for the default scenery db, doesn't mean we can't all benefit right? ;)

Don't expect major or exciting updates to happen too quickly, as initial stages of such things (ie processing and cleaning large data sets) isn't particularly exciting nor does it usually make for spectacular screen shots...and holidays are a coming quickly too. But to prove I'm serious and have actually started I'll add a few anyway... :P

(as usual can click for the larger image..)

Image
Initial work done on getting the Corine land cover sorted out into some usable form. I've trimmed the data to those 1x1 degree chunks that overlap the Austria border by some amount...some 25 chunks altogether.

Image
Oliver (aka ot-666) was kind enough to send me some documents and images describing the 'moving of the Inn' that has taken place to facilitate improvements to the runway 08. Thankfully qgis makes it fairly painless to get that imagery projected such that we can use it as reference for reflecting those changes to the land cover.

Image
And here doing some initial editing and tweaking to make the Inn start to flow down her new path...

cheers!
Last edited by Tuxklok on Sat Mar 31, 2012 9:07 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby mfranz » Sat Nov 05, 2011 10:47 am

Yay! I've started working on LOXL (the southern, military part of LOWL = LINZ/HÖRSCHING) quite a while ago. Not much to see yet, but just recently I've got some more data, also thanks to this geo source http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=12709.
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Tuxklok » Sat Nov 05, 2011 4:34 pm

Hey thanks for reminding me about that stuff, I had bookmarked it previously but since lost and forgotten about it. No doubt it will prove extremely useful going forward.

cheers!
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Sealbhach » Sat Nov 05, 2011 7:41 pm

Great news! I'm sure there's more to Austria than just LOWI. I think the area around Salzburg will look really nice.

So we have the France Corine scenery, Statto's Switzerland scenery and now all of Austria being done - so in time, a nice flight from Grenoble all the way to Salzburg over detailed landcover will be possible.

I like the little detail there, the island in the Inn river. It's all the little details like this that add up to a great impression.

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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby ot-666 » Mon Nov 07, 2011 12:57 am

Nice work :D
Really looking forward to fly over the Austrian alps.

I already started to update (and get rid of errors that cause parts of the apron and taxiways to not get rendered) the LOWI 8.50 layout to reflect the changes the made to the airport since some made the original 8.50 lowi layout (not sure if that will ever be included by the x-plane guys).

Found a couple of other airports in the Austrian area are that are off position and not that nice developed and I am planning to get to those over time.

Now we only need Italian corine scenery
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Tuxklok » Mon Nov 07, 2011 2:21 am

Are you generating the scenery with an 8.5 layout, if so have any screen shots of that?

Terragear is one of the last applications I haven't gotten around to setting up again yet since hd failure. Hopefully I can do that soon and see how well this new stuff works and figure out a plan to make use (or not) of it.

cheers
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby ot-666 » Mon Nov 07, 2011 10:23 am

Sadly i am to stupid to set up my own Terragear... :oops:

Chris produced some v8.50 scenery for Innsbruck area that is on his repo: https://gitorious.org/papillon81/flightgear-custom-scenery
That repo also contains the curent state of my scenery models. A little out of place for the new design, but i will change that after i get scenery with the new airport layout. I can send you pictures, but you can try it yourself...

The LOWI airport has 8.50 layout but parts of the apron / rwy shoulders are grass since the original layout of -plane works with a lot of transparent approns. That is probaly the reason they never even noticed that other parts of the layout has errors (intersecting bezier lines), since they switched it to transparent anyway. Some of the taxilines are out of place compared to the 2011 look of the airport. I send you the new layout as soon it is finished.

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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby psadro_gm » Mon Nov 07, 2011 3:20 pm

Remember that the 850 parser is still incomplete. We hope to get it finished up soon, but we are still fixing issues. I have a couple merge requests in for simgear and fgdata that will allow polygon offset linear features. This will change the material of the linear features to include an alpha channel. If you use the current parser, the linear featrues are cut in. end result is that in the future, there may be alpha channels showing sky through the terrain if this gets mixed up.

Just asking for understanding that the parser isn't 100% done yet, so there's a possibility, that you'll have to run genapts again on any scenery you create with the parser in its current state.
8.50 airport parser, textured roads and streams...
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Tuxklok » Mon Nov 07, 2011 4:28 pm

Thanks Oliver I'll have a look at that scenery.

And no worries psadro I understand 8.5 stuff is fully under development and not to expect anything to be perfect or stable and unchanging for the time being. However since this is a long term project for me as well it makes sense to try and work the new stuff in there, or at least experiment with and plan for it in the future.

cheers
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby ot-666 » Mon Nov 07, 2011 8:41 pm

Tuxklok wrote in Mon Nov 07, 2011 4:28 pm:And no worries psadro I understand 8.5 stuff is fully under development and not to expect anything to be perfect or stable and unchanging for the time being. However since this is a long term project for me as well it makes sense to try and work the new stuff in there, or at least experiment with and plan for it in the future.


The same goes for me too :D

I just mentioned the update of the lowi layout because there are small design errors present in the 8.50 layout (newest data available) that would even come out without some parts missing if they would not have a ortophoto background. They probably never even noticed it.
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby statto » Mon Nov 07, 2011 10:12 pm

Sealbhach wrote in Sat Nov 05, 2011 7:41 pm:Statto's Switzerland scenery


That scenery is actually still incomplete at the moment, and sitting on an old dead computer - it will have to be re-compiled to be of any use.
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Tuxklok » Wed Nov 09, 2011 11:05 pm

Nothing major to report, but keeping the thread going helps keep me motivated and moving so...

After having spent a considerable number of hours playing with the land cover data...processing, clipping, cleaning up anything obvious, etc...I'm tentatively calling it done. I'm sure it isn't perfect in all senses but rather than spend endless hours playing with it unnecessarily when I could be working on other important things I'm calling it 'good enough' for now.

TODO list is a mile long, time to get on with the next piece...

cheers
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby ot-666 » Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:51 am

If you still into playing with details… there are some things on my wish list for the scenery around Innsbruck.

Would it be possible if you add roads and highways to clip the parts where they are actually tunnels and bridges?
Another thing, I was always hoping for was some more roads around the airport and in the city to make it look more real.
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Hooray » Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:58 am

Would it be possible if you add roads and highways to clip the parts where they are actually tunnels and bridges?
Another thing, I was always hoping for was some more roads around the airport and in the city to make it look more real.


Using the AI traffic system and its support for ground networks, it should even be possible to populate such roads with realistic traffic, i.e. if you can come up with a bunch of 3D models for cars, vans, trucks and buses it would be possible to create realistically moving traffic.

That should even be possible without using ground networks, i.e. you could create your own "paths" by flying/driving them first with the ufo, so that you get a list of "waypoints" - these could in turn be used by a Nasal script to move cars along pre-defined routes.

Ideally, the 3D models for this ground traffic would feature support for LOD animations, so that the models could still be used while flying at high altitudes, without rendering the fully animated and textured 3D model.

A while back, we had an interesting discussion on simulating urban traffic here: viewtopic.php?f=23&t=9553

So, the real issue is coming up with a road network first - either by manually driving/flying the roads first using the ufo and dumping all waypoints to a file (i.e. using redneck's flight plan creator) or by importing some other source.
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Re: The Austria Scenery Project

Postby Tuxklok » Thu Nov 10, 2011 1:18 am

ot-666 wrote in Thu Nov 10, 2011 12:51 am:Would it be possible if you add roads and highways to clip the parts where they are actually tunnels and bridges?

Yes. Depending on what data is used for the roads they may already have attributes telling which sections are bridges and tunnels and so on, then it is just a simple db query to select only the geometry that isn't marked as such and use that. I didn't know this before and deleted many areas by hand one by one...but of course never got them all. I'll do my best in to get rid of them next time around where I use such data.

Another thing, I was always hoping for was some more roads around the airport and in the city to make it look more real.

The way flightgear does roads in the scenery does not work well or at all with denser networks. The topology falls apart or becomes unusable rather quickly the more you try to push in there, and terragear is likely to choke and die in the process. I experimented with adding extra roads with the Innsbruck scenery before but it caused problems and did not look great, so I never released it.

I do plan on having a detailed transportation networks though. I'll just be using actual models like I was working on with the Innsbruck scenery, hopefully with some traffic on them as well. The current thought is to have this detailed stuff in and around the airport(s), along approach/departure paths, cities, major landmarks, etc...and then taper off into lesser detail and flightgear default roads (probably OSM based) as you get away from those areas.

Gonna take a while to get to that point though of course... :)

cheers
The Austria Scenery Project - more info
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fgcomgui - Open source, cross platform, gui front end for fgcom. more info

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