Questions for scenery buffs!

[TheOptimist]

1. If you have images with different levels of detail (i.e. some parts 30cm, som 1m resolution), obviously you have to set the slider at 30cm to see the better textures. However, does FSX use any more resources to to 'try' to render the 1m areas in 30cm resolution? Essentially which one of the below is it?

- FSX tries to render everything in 30cm and thus takes up a lot of power (and you might as well have made it all 30cm)
- FSX renders 30cm bits in 30cm, then 1m bits in 1m, and uses the appropriate resources for each.

2. If I was to make a scenery object with potentially hundreds of angles and faces, what slider (if any) would determine how many of these angles are rendered? Or would it be shown in full regardless of slider settings (assuming you have scenery on the appropriate setting).

3. Does anyone have high resolution satellite tile servers/websites and/or high resolution meshes? I cannot use google earth, and Virtual earth/bing/yahoo is not good enough.

Thanks!

[jmig]

1. If you have images with different levels of detail (i.e. some parts 30cm, som 1m resolution), obviously you have to set the slider at 30cm to see the better textures. However, does FSX use any more resources to to 'try' to render the 1m areas in 30cm resolution? Essentially which one of the below is it?

- FSX tries to render everything in 30cm and thus takes up a lot of power (and you might as well have made it all 30cm)
- FSX renders 30cm bits in 30cm, then 1m bits in 1m, and uses the appropriate resources for each.

2. If I was to make a scenery object with potentially hundreds of angles and faces, what slider (if any) would determine how many of these angles are rendered? Or would it be shown in full regardless of slider settings (assuming you have scenery on the appropriate setting).

3. Does anyone have high resolution satellite tile servers/websites and/or high resolution meshes? I cannot use google earth, and Virtual earth/bing/yahoo is not good enough.

Thanks!

I can only "sorta" answer the first two questions. If I am wrong, I hope someone with more knowledge in this area will correct me.

I think that FSX will only render to the object's size. So, a 1m object will be rendered to 1m and a 30 cm to 30 cm.

The detail slider should determine the number of faces shown.

Again, don't quote me on these.

[TheOptimist]

I can only "sorta" answer the first two questions. If I am wrong, I hope someone with more knowledge in this area will correct me.

I think that FSX will only render to the object's size. So, a 1m object will be rendered to 1m and a 30 cm to 30 cm.

The detail slider should determine the number of faces shown.

Again, don't quote me on these.

Hi Jmig, thanks for your input.

I think you're probably right about the first point, but I'm not sure about the second. I suppose scenery objects are always the same regardless of detail settings - i.e. if you have scenery high but detail low, it doesn't turn all of the houses into solid cubes etc.

Really I'm just wondering whether creating one big 'object' for a forest would be better on frame rates than using autogen.

[falcon409]

. . . .3. Does anyone have high resolution satellite tile servers/websites and/or high resolution meshes? I cannot use google earth, and Virtual earth/bing/yahoo is not good enough.
Thanks!
That's the "Goose that laid the Golden Egg" for sure. If I had that info, or knew of another way to get crisp, hi-res tiles every time, I could make a mint. As far as I know, there's no such animal. . .not for free, anyway and that's the kicker I imagine. If I wanted to pay for imagery, then there probably is a site that I could go to and they'd be more than happy to take my money. Free sites though, nope. I was told that the USGS Seamless Server site was the place to go. . .it's no better than the three you mentioned.

So, you find a place to get those tiles, let the world know.:salute:

Really I'm just wondering whether creating one big 'object' for a forest would be better on frame rates than using autogen.
If you're doing it solely for your own system and don't plan on releasing it as freeware, then maybe, still would be a major undertaking though, but for releasing a scenery, even if you packed the forest with trees, it is still up to the individual using the scenery as to how much of that autogen is actually viewed, depending on how his/her sliders are set and thus how much of a frame rate hit the system takes.

[spotlope]

FSX won't attempt to use a higher resolution for low-res images, it'll just max out their current res and leave them alone. As near as I can tell, there's no fps hit for setting the base resolution higher to acommodate high-res terrain patches. At least I've never seen one.

For object creation, every polygon you create is shown on-screen, regardless of slider settings, unless you use levels of detail (LODs) in your modeling. As the user moves away from your object, it steps down through the range of LODs, drawing successively simpler versions. Be forewarned though that creating large numbers of LODs is very time-consuming.

The "one big forest" idea is fine in theory, until you realize that you'd have to calculate the ground elevations beneath it, which quickly becomes unmanageable. Plus, you'd need to supply your own mesh and stipulate terrain complexity setting for your users, or there's a chance that their ground won't be shaped like your ground, resulting in floating or buried trees.

Back in the FS9 days, some devs proved fairly conclusively that placing large numbers of small objects resulted in worse performance than one larger object that had the same poly count as the individual small ones. There have been a number of changes under the hood in FSX, and I'm not sure if that is still the case now.

If you find a better source of aerial imagery than GE, Bing, and the USGS, please let us know! So far, finding the best source images for a particular project is still hunt-and-peck.


1. If you have images with different levels of detail (i.e. some parts 30cm, som 1m resolution), obviously you have to set the slider at 30cm to see the better textures. However, does FSX use any more resources to to 'try' to render the 1m areas in 30cm resolution? Essentially which one of the below is it?

- FSX tries to render everything in 30cm and thus takes up a lot of power (and you might as well have made it all 30cm)
- FSX renders 30cm bits in 30cm, then 1m bits in 1m, and uses the appropriate resources for each.

2. If I was to make a scenery object with potentially hundreds of angles and faces, what slider (if any) would determine how many of these angles are rendered? Or would it be shown in full regardless of slider settings (assuming you have scenery on the appropriate setting).

3. Does anyone have high resolution satellite tile servers/websites and/or high resolution meshes? I cannot use google earth, and Virtual earth/bing/yahoo is not good enough.

Thanks!

[Bjoern]

1. If you have images with different levels of detail (i.e. some parts 30cm, som 1m resolution), obviously you have to set the slider at 30cm to see the better textures. However, does FSX use any more resources to to 'try' to render the 1m areas in 30cm resolution? Essentially which one of the below is it?

FSX renders 1m textures at 1m and 30cm textures at 30m if the slider is set to 30cm. If the slider is set to 1m, 30cm textures will be rendered at 1m.

Setting the slider higher has no performance impact. At least that's what Nick N always says.



2. If I was to make a scenery object with potentially hundreds of angles and faces, what slider (if any) would determine how many of these angles are rendered? Or would it be shown in full regardless of slider settings (assuming you have scenery on the appropriate setting).


Yep.

As soon as the object comes into view it is rendered with its full polygon count.

If you're talking about a lot of polies (in the thousands) and several instances it might be worth adding multiple levels of detail to your object. FSX will then render your low-poly models when you're far away and the high poly one when you're close up.


3. Does anyone have high resolution satellite tile servers/websites and/or high resolution meshes? I cannot use google earth, and Virtual earth/bing/yahoo is not good enough.

Try SBuilder. It can get its tiles from half a dozen different servers.

For a "blocky" forest, you'd have to model one after the shape of the forest on the ground texture tile and annotate it with FSX's Autogen annotator tool. Then you'd have your blocky forests around the globe.
But it would be a tremendous amount of work and, as Bill W. wouldn't play well with terrain elevation. Provided of course that FSX isn't capable of making larger objects "ground-hugging" (and I'm not sure about that. Did anyone ever try something like this?).

[falcon409]

. . . .Try SBuilder. It can get its tiles from half a dozen different servers.
Actually SBuilderX only uses three and they are the three he mentioned in his initial post:
Google Earth, Virtual Earth and Yahoo.

[Bjoern]

Actually SBuilderX only uses three and they are the three he mentioned in his initial post:
Google Earth, Virtual Earth and Yahoo.

Thought I've seen more, but then again it's been a few weeks...

[TheOptimist]

Thanks for all of your input so far.

It has definately been useful. I'm glad that FSX doesn't chew up resources when processing different levels of detail, as it means that I can do important bits in high resolution and your generic bland fields in a smaller one.

As for the 'single forest' idea, I would basically want to do something as per the paint image below. It just involves taking a high resolution birds eye view of the trees, then adding a texture to the surface, elevating it to canopy height, the lining the edges with images of trees face-on. I really don't like autogen trees. I don't think they look even close to the real thing. From flying over certain areas in google earth the images of trees (from above) look 90% 'real,' and I reckon I could get another 5% by applying a randomised texture.

Shame about the lack of good servers out there. USGS is useless for this project since it's in the UK (and USGS has essentially no coverage in my area). However, I now feel more happy about using screenies from google earth since I can vary the resolution up a bit.

[spotlope]

That tree approach is similar to the way forests are drawn in the IL2:Sturmovik series. When done right, it's very convincing.

[TheOptimist]

That tree approach is similar to the way forests are drawn in the IL2:Sturmovik series. When done right, it's very convincing.

Do you have any information on exactly how this is achieved/their methods? I've been googling for half an hour and so far only learnt that they use layered bitmps!

[anthony31]

Thanks for all of your input so far.

It has definately been useful. I'm glad that FSX doesn't chew up resources when processing different levels of detail, as it means that I can do important bits in high resolution and your generic bland fields in a smaller one.


Watch out for this. If you have a high res PR .bgl and a low res PR .bgl that overlap in the same scenery folder (for example
,an airport in high res 30cm and surrounding terrain in lo res 1m) I'm pretty sure you need to make the high res PR .bgl have a file name that puts it alphabetically before the low res one to make sure the high res gets drawn over the top of the low res and not the other way around.

I did have that situation once and as far as I can remember getting the names alphabetically correct was the solution.

[spotlope]

Do you have any information on exactly how this is achieved/their methods? I've been googling for half an hour and so far only learnt that they use layered bitmps!

Sorry, I have no insider info. I've just noticed that they seem to stack layers of textures to create the effect. It's fairly convincing from mid to high altitude, and only really breaks down when you're hugging the ground.

[Bjoern]

That tree approach is similar to the way forests are drawn in the IL2:Sturmovik series. When done right, it's very convincing.

It reminds me more of the late 1990s Apache vs Havoc.

http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/screenshots/3/196613/ahavoc_790screen002.jpg

Like in the screenshot, you'll get better results if you "fade out" the edges with regular trees.