simbabeat wrote:The flightgear scenery is seriously underpopulated. In my humble opinion I think everyone who develops for Flightgear feels like like every building in the FlightGear scenery has to be placed with a .stg and a .xml. We have a bit of an auto-generation feature than automatically puts random buildings in places and random this and that in places. Maybe we need a btter or more complete autogen feature that does more than just puts a random model here and there.
Stuff like this is stuff that could be generated. We could use Scighera's model in that topic as a generic model that could be automatically generated in places where antennas would be if he sees fit. A better autogen feature would not take away the need for continued development of scenery however. So anyway....stuart wrote:Improving the random object generation is on my to-do list, and CVS already has improved urban areas, using shaders to generate buildings. In the mean time, adding objects for their local area is something that everyone should be doing. If you are not prepared to add buildings to your local area, don't expect anyone else to.
I just recently found out that there is already an open source project called "PixelCity" which creates cities completely procedurally.
Check out this video:
The developer's main goal was to develop all this in under 50 hours, he has written about the whole project in his blog: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale
The blog is really extremely interesting, I can truly recommend reading the whole column!
The developer is looking for a project to put his work to good use, and explicitly asks his blog readers to spread the word:
Please do consider spreading the word on this project on your blogs or wherever you tell people about cool stuff.
This is because at the moment PixelCity is just released as a fancy screen saver demo: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=3237
It uses pure OpenGL and originally built only on Windows, but has now also been ported to Mac OSX: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JVzhsznDms
It is licensed under the GNU GPL and the code is available here: http://code.google.com/p/pixelcity/
The Mac OSX port is hosted at github: http://github.com/skeeto/pixelcity
So if anybody is really interested in improving FlightGear's autogen support, it would surely be a good idea to look into that code, because it satisfies all important FlightGear requirements (GPL licensing, portable OpenGL, tiny footprint, C++ code).
Also, someone else posted already a suggestion to add this to FlightGear a while ago: http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php? ... pic=3223.0