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Scenery coastlines

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Scenery coastlines

Postby Zequinha » Sun Mar 13, 2016 10:04 pm

Hi all,

I was wondering if there is any work going on improving the seashores/coastlines of flightgear? I find the general scenery very good but when it comes to coastlines... they seem to be made of just straight lines and do not appear realistic in any way.

Example: http://wiki.flightgear.org/File:KSFO-001.png
http://wiki.flightgear.org/images/3/3e/KHAF-003.png

I saw a post by Thorsten R. (http://www.flightgear.org/info/a-previe ... tgear-3-0/) where there is an image of an island with a seemingly improved coastline featuring beaches: http://www.flightgear.org/wp-content/up ... ures01.jpg

Any one knows where this island is?

Thanks
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby dg-505 » Sun Mar 13, 2016 10:30 pm

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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby abassign » Sun Mar 13, 2016 11:11 pm

Zequinha wrote in Sun Mar 13, 2016 10:04 pm:Hi all,
I saw a post by Thorsten R. (http://www.flightgear.org/info/a-previe ... tgear-3-0/) where there is an image of an island with a seemingly improved coastline featuring beaches: http://www.flightgear.org/wp-content/up ... ures01.jpg
Any one knows where this island is?


It is the question I ask myself me, not just for this case, but also for other similar situations. I have the impression that there is a bit of confusion.
I did a check on the coast of Tuscany, whom I know personally. I started a flight from the island of Elba and I arrived in Massa Carrara, along the Tuscan coast.

Image

The island of Elba has no beaches, but only rocks on the sea, and so there are no beaches. In this case FGFS has played well, although he did not see the rocks (Look OpenStreetMap)

Image

In northern Tuscany between Livorno-Pisa-Viareggio-Massa instead the coast is mainly sandy, it seems to me that has been well reproduced:

Image

Even on OpenStreetMap it has been faithfully reproduced this characteristic:

Image

Unfortunately there is no realistic coast line for the sea, or of the waves crashing against the shore, I do not know the reason, X-Plane has this feature for years. It certainly would be interesting to put it, we hope that someone, sooner or later do it.
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby ludomotico » Mon Mar 14, 2016 12:40 am

Zequinha wrote in Sun Mar 13, 2016 10:04 pm:I find the general scenery very good but when it comes to coastlines... they seem to be made of just straight lines and do not appear realistic in any way.


The main problem is the data source FlightGear uses. In Europe, FlightGear uses CORINE and it is very accurate except in port areas, where I believe the version of the scenery tools used for ws2.0 have a bug. In the rest of the world including USA, FlightGear uses VMAP0, much less detailed. In very specific cases like custom sceneries, you can find detailed coastlines but you must download and use these custom sceneries, not terrasync.

Try any airport in Europe and you'll find much more detailed coastlines. Any Mediterranean island is a good place to test this.

abassign wrote in Sun Mar 13, 2016 11:11 pm:Unfortunately there is no realistic coast line for the sea, or of the waves crashing against the shore, I do not know the reason, X-Plane has this feature for years. It certainly would be interesting to put it, we hope that someone, sooner or later do it.


Actually, we have waves! They depend on the slope of the coast. To see the effect, check you are using ALS, set the water shader to max and look for a coastline with sharp cliffs.

This effect is probably configurable, but I'm not sure where. You might like to configure the effect to see waves everywhere and not only along cliffs.

Edit: Mmmm. I'm not so sure about these waves in cliffs, I can't find a reference in the forum. Maybe I just imagined them?
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby Thorsten » Mon Mar 14, 2016 7:20 am

You might like to configure the effect to see waves everywhere and not only along cliffs.


The problem is *knowing* where a coastline is (and what the direction towards the shore is). Inside the shader, you only have the pixel coordinates, but you can't query anything on nearby pixels.

From that perspective, unless you can exploit trickery, a pixel a meter from the shore is not different from a pixel 100 km from the shore. (The cliff waves are exploiting trickery in case you're wondering, having to do with the normal leaking out into a flat area.)
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby Johan G » Mon Mar 14, 2016 2:20 pm

So in other words, unless there would be a special "shallow beach" landclass (that might have to be added by hand), it would not be technically possible? Would the only other way be the ocean depth map (which would be way to coarse I guess)?
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby psadro_gm » Mon Mar 14, 2016 2:25 pm

A second set of texture coordinates could also help. Currently, texture coordinates are computed by their lon/lat only. - unless you make your own scenery with textured roads. I've done some work done on including a second set of texture coordinates to some points, but there is no scenery generated with this, yet.
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby Thorsten » Mon Mar 14, 2016 2:40 pm

Yes, ideally you'd like a 'coastal water' landclass which is uv-mapped such as to provide the direction to the beach.
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby ludomotico » Mon Mar 14, 2016 2:59 pm

Do you think the coastline in OpenStreetMap may work? It is a line that could be uv-mapped as roads are (--texture-line, http://wiki.flightgear.org/TerraGear_te ... _line_data). Then, the direction of the beach is perpendicular to the coast line.
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby Thorsten » Mon Mar 14, 2016 4:16 pm

Ideally we'd like which direction the beach is and which direction open water is so that we can fade in all changes smoothly.
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby Zequinha » Tue Mar 15, 2016 2:10 pm

In conclusion: is it possible to have realistic coastlines in the foreseeable future?
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby wkitty42 » Tue Mar 15, 2016 3:40 pm

i would hazard a guess of "yes" but then there is no length defined for "foreseeable"... it could take a few months after the next time the world scenery is rebuilt or it could take several years beyond that... the rebuilding of the world scenery is going to be a huge factor...
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby Zequinha » Thu May 24, 2018 10:29 pm

Just an idea... Take a look at this example from FlightSimulator X (screenshot from a youtube video) from Madeira:

Image

It seems likely they have an intricate 'height map' of the seabed next to the coast line and map the corresponding tone of blue. No direction of the beach is required to produce this result.

Simply associate the water 'depth' of each sea surface pixel to a single number that represents how bright blue the corresponding pixel 'Bl' in the ocean is. The shades of blue of the sea surface next to a shore would be computed by Bl(lat,lon) = depth(lat,lon). In addition to the blue color manipulation, I think it would possibly need a pixel manipulation of the values of reflectance, since in the screenshot the light blue areas don't reflect much sun light.

ps: Just read the above post by thorsten and realized this is preciselly what is being done in WS 3.0 . Any news of when the WS3.0 will be ready? Will the depth maps be deployed globally to all coastlines in the world?
Last edited by Zequinha on Thu May 24, 2018 10:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Scenery coastlines

Postby wlbragg » Thu May 24, 2018 10:36 pm

We have something similar that we can use to achieve water color differences. It is the ocean_depth_1.png map in \fgdata\Textures\Globe
I'm not sure it is the exact same your referring to, but I think it severs the same purpose.
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