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Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby abassign » Fri Mar 11, 2016 8:22 pm

@Thorsten

Sorry, your blog does not allow you to store pictures, so I'm forced to use an external storage system. In your experience what it is the most appropriate for FGFS ?

:)
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby elgaton » Fri Mar 11, 2016 9:05 pm

Imgur works well in this regard.
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby gsagostinho » Fri Mar 11, 2016 9:18 pm

I think so does Postimage, which has the advantage of not requiring any sort of login.
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby PINTO » Sat Mar 12, 2016 12:21 am

Imgur does not require a login either.
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby Catalanoic » Sat Mar 12, 2016 8:32 am

The airport grass texture from the X-plane pic seems more unrealistic than FlightGear.
The weather is better in FlightGear too.
We have of course shadows with Rembrandt.
FlightGear only lacks of some of these HD aircraft liveries, better 3D models and the concrete dirt effect, all of them doable in short term. So, i think you can do it yourself better.
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby erik » Sat Mar 12, 2016 9:31 am

for Thorsten: http://adalin.com/ehtw.info/2dryp3s.jpg

The only thing which makes this more lively is texture quality. Especially by realizing not everything is picture perfect in real live. The combination of the rooftop of the building, dirt on the platform and added shadows goes a long way. Anything else in the picture is not that spectacular.

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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby Catalanoic » Sat Mar 12, 2016 9:38 am

The world is large, IMMENSE! So we can't texturize all the buildings as you can look on this pic, the main buildings is made from 3-4 tiled textures (not so difficult), of course in X-plane you'll find spectaular works but i think FightGear provide a lot of gems!
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby abassign » Sat Mar 12, 2016 11:33 am

Image

As many know, I like to do more general analysis on why FGFs is not at the same level of X-Plane to the visual presentation layer. I hope that my notes can serve as the basis for a development more focused on quality and not only to the efficiency. I must also say that the wonderful work done by ALS can eventually be a good starting point as it allows you to have good visual effects with a relatively low cost CPU.

(1) Accessories are important and it would be desirable to insert automatically depending of the planned spaces, perhaps even with the possibility of independent movement, the airport organization provides specific routes known as the tracks of a train, it would be great to be working on such effects . In X-Plane it has been played a very good and especially to get an animation of the world outside work, especially in the case of roads and the car and truck traffic, including night lights. Something was attempted in FGFS few years ago, but the project did not go forward.

(2) The airport grounds are too clean, and this makes them far from reality, I thought it was possible to automatically generate the dirt through the same method used in ALS to the ground, what do you think, is it possible? I think that would be a very easy way to get an even more real world.

(3) The quality of road markings is not at the same level of X-Plane, a reason is immediately apparent, there are too few polygons and then, in the curves, the effect is very fragmented. Then you move the quality suffers rather quickly, seems an interpolation problem. In tests I entered the interpolation (Anti Aliasing = 4) at the highest level.

(4) The shadows in X-Plane give a greater depth of the scene, and allow to increase the 3D effect. In the case of FGFs in ALS mode, the shadows are provided for the aircraft in use. I was thinking, it is only a working hypothesis mine, if it was possible auto-generate the box of automatic shadows (on the fly) redoing the same work is done manually. At this point it might be possible to generate shadows for all objects in the scene (with a separate task so it does not slow down the rest of the execution). You could then put these boxes in a cache file, not always having to be recalculated.

(5) Increase the planes, perhaps using those found in fgfs-Aircraft, in this case it would be necessary to define a criterion (a special folder or an appropriate?) Algorithm in order to extract the aircraft present in the folder only those essential elements in order to reduce the complexity of scene.

(6) The land in the airport does not follow the same rules used by ALS to the external ground, this makes the airport very detached from the ground that covers the whole scene. I reflected on whether it was possible to unify the two rendering modes? This would make it much more natural the whole scene.

(7) The sky would say that, in ALS mode is considerably higher than that of X-Plane :)

(8) The reflexes, always in ALS mode, are very interesting, but lack dynamic as it is well managed with Rembrandt, do not understand why ALS does not allow to achieve this result. Surely the scene in X-Plane has been made in HDR mode, but I wonder if it is possible, in ALS, get a similar gloss or better if you can be able to change according to your own tastes and characteristics of the monitor and the type of scene.

(9) Currently, the ALS mode, the quality of the soil is high, although there is still some effects, like the shattering of the waves on the rocks and beaches and the effect of water on the rivers is very low, but these are arguments to be treated later.
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby geed » Sat Mar 12, 2016 12:05 pm

Concerning shadows: Rendering in FG is done using OpenGL. Wouldn't it be possible to use the kind of shadow rendering like shown here? http://www.opengl-tutorial.org/intermed ... w-mapping/

I am not a render coder at all so I am sorry if there was something obvious I have missed here ;)
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby abassign » Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:50 pm

@Geed

The shadows in FGFs are handled in two ways, one is by Rembrandt (very nice rendering engine, but rather heavy) shadows are automatically generated, but this generates the need for a big job for the CPU. In ALS instead the workload is mainly dependent on the GPU, this means that on average, the performance is higher because the CPU can work on other things. Obviously in ALS it is important to the quality of the GPU and consequently of the graphics card.

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Shadows

ALS:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Atmospheric_light_scattering

ALS and shadows:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/ALS_technical_notes#ALS_fuselage_shadow_effect

My proposal is to have a generation of shadows by ALS using a special effect that uses the shadow-cubemap:

http://chateau-logic.com/content/flightgear-interior-shadow-cubemap-kit

As explained in this article for Interior shading:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/ALS_technica ... or_shading

The results are very good for the interior, do not know if it makes sense to use them for the exterior and how the cost of CPU-GPU. Of course this method could give a very good quality, better than that achieved with Rembrandt. Not only that, but ALS handles very well the problem of the reduction of the shadows in case of diffused light.
I'd like to know if this makes sense, in fact it is the same solution of the shadows of the trees and clouds.
I only fear that while the trees always have the same shape, such as clouds, in the case of objects, it might be more complicated. For this I was thinking of a self-generation system. In fact it means doing some of the work that Rembrandt does for each frame, only once, because the shadows are generated depending on the object's shape and the shape remains virtually the same.
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby Thorsten » Sat Mar 12, 2016 2:12 pm

In general: Pick a selected screenshot from an X-plane addon pack for 100$ - compared with a randomly selected FG airport - watch FG being beaten.

Pick one of the best airports FG has (Gatwick comes to mind), pick a random X-plane airport for the comparison without any addons installed - anyone wants to bet who is going to lose that one?

Concerning shadows: Rendering in FG is done using OpenGL. Wouldn't it be possible to use the kind of shadow rendering like shown here?


Sure, switch on Rembrandt and you get a shadow map technique in action (along with it's pitfalls and limitations - doesn't work for semi-transparent objects for instance).

I doubt the X-plane things are shadow maps, they look like simple quads. Neither the volumetric shadow technique nor the flat shadow technique in ALS are limited to your own aircraft - they can be added to any object you like (and will in fact work much more reliable on the ground). I think Hamza added them to part of his airport work. Like many things, someone just has to do it.

Same with baggage carts, vehicles,... some of our airports have all of that, most do not.

If you want a nice airport, go an add objects. Shadows. Customize textures. Assign effects. The existing effects in many cases take arguments which allow you to change what you see - just hardly anyone bothers to change them for each airport individually.

We have this astonishing variety of procedurally generated runway textures which beat the crap out of the F$X texture pack I've seen posted here in the forum. It's all available and documented, I've just not seen anyone use it.

People actually sit for months modeling these X-plane addon packs and then sell them for quite a bit of money. There's real work involved in hand-crafting a detailed scene, don't expect that autogen techniques can do it all for free. Maybe you could just use the existing technology and customize it - that's what it's for :-)
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby abassign » Sat Mar 12, 2016 4:38 pm

@Thorsten

Image

I tried to edit dirt-runway.eff but it seems not change nothing, moreover, always in the spirit of this post, I think that being able to stingy a more realistic visualization is possible with the tools you have described, for example here:

http://wiki.flightgear.org/Procedural_Texturing#The_dirt_runway_effect

But at this point I come to ask two questions:

1) Because what is described in the link "... Procedural Texturing # The_dirt_runway_effect" is not visible?
2) Can be make public, at least for the development version of FGFs (16.2.0) the good things that have been published during past few months?
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby Thorsten » Sat Mar 12, 2016 4:55 pm

1) Because what is described in the link "... Procedural Texturing # The_dirt_runway_effect" is not visible?


I can only guess that you didn't follow the instructions. At least editing dirt-runway.eff (as you describe) is definitely *not* what you should be doing, you should add parameters to a regional landclass definition.

2) Can be make public, at least for the development version of FGFs (16.2.0) the good things that have been published during past few months?


It's on

* Newsletter October 2015
* the Procedural texturing wiki
* the official Feature preview for 2016.1
* the original forum post

I can only announce things on so many channels, sorry. Out of curiosity - where do you think you would read these things if the official portals don't do it for you?
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby geed » Sat Mar 12, 2016 5:48 pm

Thorsten wrote in Sat Mar 12, 2016 2:12 pm:Sure, switch on Rembrandt and you get a shadow map technique in action (along with it's pitfalls and limitations - doesn't work for semi-transparent objects for instance).


Yep, wouldn't actually matter in the first run I think. Getting shadows back with ALS would be a big win. But I guess there is simply no developer with enough time at hand to implement the map generation and rendering, right?
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Re: Could this be the a new goal of FGFS ?

Postby Thorsten » Sat Mar 12, 2016 6:33 pm

ALs has intentionally no shadow mapping because I consider the pain (framerate cost) to gain (shadows mostly) not worth doing it - I prefer burning the GPU performance for other things.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I spend 95-99% of my flights in the air looking at things from the cockpit view, and shadows of buildings or other aircraft are so rarely prominently visible from there that I don't consider losing 20 fps a good tradeoff. On the other hand, haze you see all the time during a flight. So ALS implements expensive effects only if you get to see them so often that it matters.
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