cyclone Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 Hi Recently installed the Gold Coast City Scenery and being someone who spent many weekends there enjoying the surf and the leisurely lifestyle it had to offer, I can really identify with this scenery package. From altitude it is very impressive and in great detail but after taking a low scenic flight in part it looks very different. The disappointment, the wave and surf action appear to be missing which were present in previous Orbx scenery. Could this be something I have overlooked in my setup. Also, the beach and waters edge from Currunbin and south to the Tweed seems to be all over the place. (photos attached) Is there something wrong in my setup or is it a problem in the photoreal scenery itself. Will I need to reinstall? Installed Global Base Global Vector FTX Australia Prepar3D cheers Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
petfy Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 Are you running any mesh such as holgamesh, and what order is its placement in the scenery library. The first screen capture is correct. There is a steep slope from the road to the creek at this point. The last is Kirra point, although not quite accurate (the road runs at the base of the escarpment) it will do as the landform is recognisable and a much greater improvement on what was available before. Currently doing a massive HDD optimisation, so can't look up the other captures. As a pun, yes it does look this way after cyclonic wave battering Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Dow Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 If you get down too low and too slow you will see many imperfections in the scenery. Unfortunately that's the way it is. it's a flight simullator package, which is designed to replicate what a normal pilot will see on a normal flight, and this means it is optimised for viewing at the normal minimum altitude of 1000' for fixed wing and 500' for chopper flights. Getting right down on the ground and checking it out is not recommended and is not what the scenery is designed to be used for. The other point about surf is a sim coding problem I think. Depending on location, surrounding scenery and mesh requirements, different water bodies have different properties. Some have surf effects built in some don't. I'm not a dev but I don't think you can put surf effects into water classes that don't have them hard coded in. I'll defer to the devs here to comment if they see this post. Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
akriesman Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 Just to echo what John said, large scenery areas like this are optimized to look as good as possible from the air. Airport scenery packages are detailed on the ground, because the aircraft is in fact on the ground and the detail is needed. That catch is that you can't have that kind of detail everywhere, even if it were possible to hand model every building, because the simulator would be unflyable due to the large numbers of draw calls. This scenery has been optimized to give great performance and good looks while flying. A couple other comments... "The disappointment, the wave and surf action appear to be missing which were present in previous Orbx scenery. Could this be something I have overlooked in my setup." Yes, this is due to the photoscenery water, which does have water effects, but not wave effects. "Also, the beach and waters edge from Currunbin and south to the Tweed seems to be all over the place. (photos attached)" This is due to high resolution mesh and the fact that simulator stretches the textures in sharp dropoff areas. I recommended making sure you "Mesh resolution" setting is 10m or greater, not 5m or less. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aussie123 Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 I'd like to thank the developers of Gold Coast for all their hard work. I am enjoying overflying many well known areas on the coast but I was disappointed how sterile the long length of beach was depicted. A 1000 ft AGL run along the entire length, on a stormy day looks very quiet It sounds like being photoscenery water we are never going to get wave effects for the world famous Surfers Paradise. Some people don't like the surf effects and I thought the may have been an option in a Control Panel but - they are not. Anyhow, thanks for trying, and the scenery is a terrific addition for VFR. Aussie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Triplane Posted March 11, 2018 Share Posted March 11, 2018 +1...sometimes we have to remember that we're using a flight simulator...not a walk-around-and-look-at-the-eyecandy simulator.............Doug Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aussie123 Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 Hi Guys, I have just been doing some more coastal flying (from Sydney to Newcastle) and I noticed that the Orbx Aeropelican (YPEC) scenery seems to have the photo style coastal water and beaches but also has the wave action I was talking about? How is that achieved? That effect is what I was hoping to see at Surfers. Aussie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
petfy Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 Probably left over from the default FSX. As a pure guess, if default FSX did not put the wave effect on a particular shoreline you will not see it. In another direction, I redid Pudong and now have wave action next to the runway, about a kilometer inland. Have tried everything to get rid of it (exclusion polygons, etc but can't). As said above, if its there - its there, if its not - its not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cyclone Posted March 12, 2018 Author Share Posted March 12, 2018 Hi I think it's time I updated my mesh. FS Global Ultimate looks a bit heavy for what SSD space I have, may have to settle for the Global 1018 version. Could someone tell me where in the scenery I should best position it. The Currumbin photo, look close, the traffic is travelling under the bridge and at the approach are jumping over. Hopefully the new mesh will sort these things out. cheers Noel Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
akriesman Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 8 hours ago, cyclone said: Hi I think it's time I updated my mesh. FS Global Ultimate looks a bit heavy for what SSD space I have, may have to settle for the Global 1018 version. Could someone tell me where in the scenery I should best position it. The Currumbin photo, look close, the traffic is travelling under the bridge and at the approach are jumping over. Hopefully the new mesh will sort these things out. cheers Noel Getting another mesh will not make a difference within the Gold Coast scenery boundaries. The Gold Coast mesh will always take priority. And, it needs to do this because the buildings are wrapped around the local mesh in groups (that is one reason the frame rates are so good from the reduced draw calls). If another mesh were to take over, you would have lots of buildings in the ground or floating unless that mesh was based on the same DEM source data. This is why the GC mesh is 5m and takes priority over other meshes that may be installed. But, I still recommend setting the mesh slider to 10m or > to smooth things out. During beta testing, the testers normally make sure that the traffic is not appearing on the water under the bridges. This can happen if either is misaligned. In this particular bridge case it looks like the traffic crossing the bridge is aligned correctly. The traffic that is hopping over the bridge ends is a common issue with extrusion bridges. Moving traffic will cross over any objects that cross their paths. What is the solution ? We would just have to remove a segment of the crossing traffic in a patch. However. there will be a gap in the traffic flow. This could potentially be very large depending on the exact traffic segment length. In some cases, a developer has little control over the way the traffic flows in the sim. Gold Coast was a very tricky scenery to deal with because of all the intricate waterways. This is especially true because any inaccurate underlying water features, from other scenery packages (or the base scenery), will flatten out even photoscenery at higher scenery layers (like GC). So, this scenery area contains a lot of exclusions and recreation of vector features, even though this is typically unnecessary with photoscenery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
akriesman Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 12 hours ago, Aussie123 said: Hi Guys, I have just been doing some more coastal flying (from Sydney to Newcastle) and I noticed that the Orbx Aeropelican (YPEC) scenery seems to have the photo style coastal water and beaches but also has the wave action I was talking about? How is that achieved? That effect is what I was hoping to see at Surfers. Aussie It is strange that the wave effects appear to stop where the water mask effects take over. Or, is that just the lighting angle in the screenshot ? During development and testing, the water implementation was changed several times from vector water only, to water mask, and finally to a combination of both. There are always trade-offs. Cutting out holes in the photoscenery and letting the vector water show through provides the best blending of water in a scenery area, with the surrounding water outside. When using photoscenery water, with water masks, you get the underlying details like sand bars and other features coming through. But, the latter requires the water along the scenery boundaries to have to be feathered in with the surrounding vector water. The problem is that the vector water color is not going to match the satellite imagery water, because the vector water varies from product-to-product and 3rd party products can change the color even further. In Gold Coast we went with a hybrid. All inland water is photoscenery with water masks to bring out the underlying sand bars. On the ocean side the water is vector so that the ocean blends in better outside the scenery boundaries. At one point, we did blend in the ocean further out into the sea. But, especially in FSX, the blending of water colors in the ocean between the default scenery and GC stood out like a sore thumb. This is a subject that can be heavily debated. We could look at going back to using the photoscenery further out into the ocean in a future patch. But, some users are not going to like the way it looks (especially in FSX). I hope this helps somewhat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aussie123 Posted March 12, 2018 Share Posted March 12, 2018 Thank you for taking the time to prepare your two detailed replies above regarding the mesh and wave effects. As a user, it makes more sense to me now. (but I still do like the Aeropelican coast and the waves up the beach. Have a look - see what you think) It's good to have such explanations recorded in the forum (from the actual developer) as in later years, the subject can be searched on, or referred to. Also, thank you for tackling such a complex area of Queensland with all the fiddley bits. (maybe you have an affinity with Slartibartfast from the original 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy') I hope you got to visit the Gold Coast during your research or - are considering it as a reward, for your partner, for having put up with losing you to flight sim for long periods of time. Aussie Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
akriesman Posted March 13, 2018 Share Posted March 13, 2018 "maybe you have an affinity with Slartibartfast from the original 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" I do in fact Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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