SceneryDesign.org I am going to spend some time on the scenProc tool again the coming weeks. It’s time to finish some of the features of that tool and make it even easier to make autogen. But of course there are some challenges left.
One of the main challenges is that most FSX autogen must be rectangular. So for a group of houses as shown above that will work. It is not so hard to define a rectangle for each of them. Some have a small extension, but even if you ignore those the result will look quite good. For the buildings shown below it becomes a little harder already, but you could represent their shape with 3 rectangles that partly overlap. An algorithm can be defined to derive those rectangles.
So, so far it seems quite possible. But now look at the buildings below.These are all very irregular shaped. If you would try to represent these with rectangles you would always get parts sticking out or parts missing. Not really a good approach thus.
You might be thinking, right, that’s why we have polygonal autogen buildings in FSX as well. But unfortunately the polygonal autogen buildings must have an internal courtyard. This makes them very hard to use for this kind of shapes. I really wish Microsoft would have made them without the courtyards as well. But it seems that is not possible.
So my challenge is to find out how to classify the building footprints from the vector data. Which footprints can be represented by normal autogen buildings, which ones can be represented by row houses or by polygonal autogen. And which footprints can better not be represented by autogen at all.
For that last category it might be an option to create them as normal MDL scenery object. From the footprint it is possible to create a building directly. And by using drawcall batching it might not even be that hard on the performance. That’s something I would like to test as well.
And finally I think I will try to analyze the autogen format of the polygonal buildings a bit more. Maybe, maybe, there is some undocumented bit to remove those courtyards? Let’s keep dreaming….
All map images are from OpenStreetMap.
Hi Arno,
Great job you have done. A suggestion for your thoughts :
We are able now to dl directly areas from Corine Landcover 2006 SHP files a lot of datas with a very interesting tag: “code_06” which is relative to the “type of trees” attached to the vegetation polygone.
This web site is : http://sd1878-2.sivit.org/
Using scenproc, the only tag autorized is type = forest or park relative to OSM datas i supppose. Others tags produce (without any warning) only an empty an.agn file
What about a larger filter part of command CREATEAGNPOLYVEG that allows all “code_06″ of the 300 serie in FROMFILE=name;tag=”xxx” in order to have “real trees” in “real forests”?
For exemple a command line with filter like that would be appreciate :
CREATEAGNPOLYVEG|FTYPE=POLYGON;FROMFILE=urban_area.shp;code_06=141|{8EF6A032-8AA8-48F0-80EA-90A16B3696DD}
Many other codes are present in CLC06 : 311, 312, 313 etc..that are not present in OSM.
Hi,
scenProc is not limited to OSM attributes. It reads all the attributes from the shapefile and you can use any of them in the filter. So also the Corine attributes should work fine already. Just be aware scenProc is case sensitive when it comes to attribute names.
Arno thank you, I will examine the case more closely