AnkH Posted July 1, 2019 Share Posted July 1, 2019 Hi all, with the release of Buildings HD, ORBX now offers a replacement for both trees and buildings and both addons look phenomenal. However, both do not address an "issue" present in the ESP engines since the very beginning: both buildings and trees are actually to big. If I am not wrong, the initial purpose of making buildings and trees bigger than they really are was to compensate for the relatively low density of the autogen in earlier versions of the sim. But now with 64bit and current hardware, would it not be nice to finally overcome this small limitation? I would love to see once the ORBX TreesHD and BuildingsHD offering "true sized" autogen. This would be the next game changer for P3D. Or what do you guys think about this? Bad idea? Regards Chris Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Lars Posted July 1, 2019 Share Posted July 1, 2019 Wow, I wasn't aware of this. Is this true? Trees can grow pretty large... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick Cooper Posted July 1, 2019 Share Posted July 1, 2019 Hello, I'm not sure that this is still current. I don't see much out of scale here, unless it all is? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnkH Posted July 1, 2019 Author Share Posted July 1, 2019 Wonderful picture that perfectly illustrates the scale problem: a DC-3 is about 5.5m in height, now this would mean that all trees are at least 11m or higher. All of them. And the two story building in front of the DC-3 has a door of 5m and a ground floor of 6m. Way to big in most parts of the world... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rongor Posted July 1, 2019 Share Posted July 1, 2019 To be fair, yes, the trees are (way) too big. This never really changed since we have autogen trees and also Trees HD couldn't help with this. As far as I remember there was some technical explanation why it is basically impossible (read "impracticable") to correct this. but I also never really could get used to the huge trees. In the sim, everything looks somewhat closer than in real life. I am used to conduct flights between 500 and 2500 ft in real life and flying at the same altitudes in the sim always causes me to perceive my altitude to be much lower than indicated. The reason why there are different views on that topic seems to be the regional diversity in vegetation. For some people huge trees are normal because they simply are living in areas where trees grow considerably bigger than in other people's area. The sim's tree model library doesn't provide a solution for that. I guess they were invented that way because back in the day computer performance wasn't that available like today. Bigger trees allow for less trees as long as you focus on getting forested areas covered. Obvious downside is the unrealistic appearance when compared to other objects... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 1, 2019 Share Posted July 1, 2019 25 minutes ago, Rongor said: I am used to conduct flights between 500 and 2500 ft in real life and flying at the same altitudes in the sim always causes me to perceive my altitude to be much lower than indicated. Interesting light on this issue. I never thought of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike707 Posted July 1, 2019 Share Posted July 1, 2019 The other thing large trees and houses cause is a distortion of speed and height. When one is on approach and sees houses that look to be 200 below you, but are actually 500 feet below, that distortion of height and speed is noticeable. Also, when you look at a house along a highway and compare it to the size of cars and trucks on that highway, the cars look like miniature clown cars or the houses look utterly out of place due to their HUGE size in comparison to the cars. I would love to see True Size autogen. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ols500 Posted July 1, 2019 Share Posted July 1, 2019 Yes please decrease tree size... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 This thread makes some good points about resizing the autogen. I was aware of the issue but not of the consequences for the pilot. I would add that aligning the autogen on urban textures streets would also be nice. I was pleasantly surprised to see some real progress into this direction in OpenLC SA but there are still places in the OrbX world where it is not so good. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnkH Posted July 2, 2019 Author Share Posted July 2, 2019 Honestly, I do not really understand, why this topic does not get more attention. I mean, each and every developer of a scenery should already have noticed that both autogen trees and buildings are way to big. Come on, some of the autogen buildings seemingly representing a two story house with two flats are bigger than a hangar in some of the ORBX sceneries... This picture for example perfectly illustrates it. While the trees from the scenery itself matches the real world picture pretty well, the autogen trees are just monstrous and the same size as the tower... https://www.mutleyshangar.com/reviews/ag/bs-edbj/img/05%20-%20Jena%20Schoengleina.jpg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick Cooper Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 Hello, do you know if it can even be done? I wonder if that might be why it has never been? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Dow Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 23 minutes ago, AnkH said: Honestly, I do not really understand, why this topic does not get more attention. I mean, each and every developer of a scenery should already have noticed that both autogen trees and buildings are way to big. Come on, some of the autogen buildings seemingly representing a two story house with two flats are bigger than a hangar in some of the ORBX sceneries... This picture for example perfectly illustrates it. While the trees from the scenery itself matches the real world picture pretty well, the autogen trees are just monstrous and the same size as the tower... https://www.mutleyshangar.com/reviews/ag/bs-edbj/img/05%20-%20Jena%20Schoengleina.jpg I dunno... the tower in that screenshot would be between 60 and 80 feet tall, according to the nearby vehicle for scale and the number of floors, and the tree is similar height. Oak trees can reach 70 feet in height and many other large trees of that shape also get well over 60 feet. Sure, the autogen trees are on the large size but not impossibly so. Here in Australia I reckon the gum trees that are depicted are mostly spot on, as a medium height eucalyptus tree will range from around 50 to 100 feet in height. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 41 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said: Hello, do you know if it can even be done? I wonder if that might be why it has never been? The flight simming story is full of things which were deemed impossibe. Then came clever people like Rob Young (spin in FDE) or John Venema (textures switching) etc. etc. I may be wrong but I suspect it is more a commercial issue than a technical one. I don't know how many autogen buildings the sim has (several thousands ?), scaling them down might be an expensive proposition for a mediocre return. As far as I understand there are two issues with building autogen : size and batch processing . Hopefully LM which has already done some good work with the trees (batch processing) in v3 is busy on these two matters for v5. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick Cooper Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 To be honest, I don't know if the autogen can be resized and I have occasionally wondered at the size. In my image, some of the buildings look better scaled than others, I think. Also the size of default scenery objects, like the two chimneys at Dublin or York Minster which are both gigantic. These can easily be resized but autogen, I don't know? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 52 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said: To be honest, I don't know if the autogen can be resized and I have occasionally wondered at the size. In my image, some of the buildings look better scaled than others, I think. Also the size of default scenery objects, like the two chimneys at Dublin or York Minster which are both gigantic. These can easily be resized but autogen, I don't know? Call Master Holger, Nick ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F737MAX Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 Just to use the example of Jena-Schöngleina, here's the real world version.https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SEbKpQuwgwE/WvKLpH-5NVI/AAAAAAAAZAs/HjaYTiZlZFQiwNVWXjjpEpfW922bDGKtgCLcBGAs/s1600/P1080023.JPGhttps://scontent-ams4-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/10417800_875968572423976_2890115454516831861_n.jpg?_nc_cat=110&_nc_oc=AQnCFoYIG0G4N9qwtOR4vQO-D4_qryhWRZCj0X8urDNU_X-7s1MFnb626hWw17iw5DY&_nc_ht=scontent-ams4-1.xx&oh=66b0add817c6d89132f79152184f9205&oe=5D85C505 Nothing to suggest that the trees are anywhere near the height of the tower, let alone taller. While noting that you can get Redwoods and Giant Sequoias reaching 107m (350 ft), they are tall and thin (relative in dimension to their height). Certainly not the oversized bushes as we see in AnkH's earlier linked shot. It appears that trees all over the World are often far too wide and 'bushy' in appearance. As an example, the maximum permitted height of a two-storey residential building in NSW is 8.5m, which is 28ft per this U.S. 'mean roof elevation' shown in the image immediately above. Unscientifically, I measured some two storey buildings around the world and got an average of 12.2m (40 ft) which is a substantial 43% taller than 8.5m. Single storey bungalows measured 10m (33 ft). As pointed out earlier, oversized autogen gives the wrong impression of altitude and speed. If there was any way to modify them, I would jump at it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris.D Posted July 2, 2019 Share Posted July 2, 2019 Of course the autogen buildings and trees can be resized. After all, it is just a digital world, all just ones and zeros. They were created that size so they can be re created to another size, or converted to another size. God didn't make it and it is not set in stone. All one needs is the time, the know-how and the willingness to do it. Chris. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 I will come now to unknown territories and, maybe, make a fool of mysef ! Look at AI aircraft. Dificult to see them at a distance. A pixel of two. Could it be the same with autogen ? Would scaling it down by half make it disappear at a distance ? Is it related to the simulator resolution ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick Cooper Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 Hello, this is from 2008: Quote Hi Christian,sorry, there's no magic setting to globally reduce autogen size. There is a MinScale/MaxScale setting in the autogendescriptions.xml but it's non-functional in the sim, according to the SDK, and it would be per object model, as far as I can tell, not all encompassing.The good news is that FSX is much more open to changing autogen and offers a lot more variety than FS9. Thus, as Jon mentioned above, one "just" has to pick different sizes of trees etc. for annotations. Obviously, it would be quite a bit of work to create new agn files for the 100+ texture sets with their 1 to 16 variants each.Unfortunately, the scale of buildings cannot be influenced unless one creates a new set of models. However, annotator allows to set the number of stories, so there's an indirect influence on height. https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/64977-why-does-fsx-have-giant-autogen/?do=findComment&comment=460251 Also, from personal experience with it, there is a utility that reduces the autogen tree size and it works very well. The problem then though is that there are then not enough trees to create the intended wood and forests. It occurs to me that the possibility of reducing the size of the autogen has been explored but that the result is less satisfactory than the existing scale. I would think also that it would be possible to define the use of only the smaller autogen models but that is well beyond the scope of Buildings HD, the intention of which is to improve the appearance of autogen buildings, something that it does indeed do very well indeed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnkH Posted July 3, 2019 Author Share Posted July 3, 2019 Yupp, that is what I wrote above, the reason for the trees being so big lies in the fact that only with this size you get a "dense" feeling in forrests etc. But for a forest, the size is not really an issue, for a forest, the size actually matches pretty well. It is the trees around the oversized buildings that are out of scale, maybe some day, this will be adjusted (as I guess more than a single tree size is possible). Regarding buildings: well, this post you quote is about FSX and more than 10y old. I guess developers advanced since then, nowadays, things are possible that probably in 2008 were considered impossible as well (just take GSX as an example...). But I think you are correct, this then would be way beyond the scope of Buildings HD, but nevertheless, I continue dreaming of properly sized autogen ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick Cooper Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 Just so, though reducing the tree size around buildings would then make the forest trees look sparse, as indeed I think buildings would look even more sparse than they do in default scenery already. I doubt that the task is impossible but I also doubt that the results would be acceptable for the reasons already given without a complete revision of the default scenery to include many more autogen objects to fill in the resultant gaps. Even if that were to be done, I could forsee that there would be a similar clamour about how hard it is for the PC, just like the demand for lower definition autogen textures that some, often who don't have the product, are already making. In this respect, the quote about FSX is exactly relevant, age does not necessarily invalidate something that has not changed. Virtually the entire catalogue of default scenery in the latest P3D version is unchanged since the release date of FSX. I don't have the answers, only the same questions as everyone else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CLA1836 Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 Perhaps it is all due to perspective and Trigonometree Sorry guys - could not resist ! Bill. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 36 minutes ago, CLA1836 said: Perhaps it is all due to perspective and Trigonometree Sorry guys - could not resist ! Bill. You leave me stumped here, Bill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AnkH Posted July 3, 2019 Author Share Posted July 3, 2019 1 hour ago, Nick Cooper said: In this respect, the quote about FSX is exactly relevant, age does not necessarily invalidate something that has not changed. I partially disagree due to the fact that the maximum autogen draw distance you could select in the FSX menue nowadays in P3D equals "medium". And for example in my case, I do not have any issues besides the autogen popping effect if I use "very high" or even the maximal setting. And surprise, the amount of displayed autogen is increased quiet dramatically when using the highest setting in P3D vs. the highest setting in FSX. Means: we already have much more autogen objects in P3D compared to FSX when using high settings... Now, if I could trade this maximal draw distance for more dense autogen with draw distance compared to FSX and smaller buildings and trees, I would instantly go for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
COBS Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 What a load of rubbish ! Have any of you made any attempt to measure the height of the trees ? Well I have , and they are as accurate as you could ever wish for . I would suggest that you get reputable gardening books that list various heights of trees. Although there is no fixed heights , generally trees will be from about 40' to 140' with very tall being 200' and the tallest at 300' Then go in the Sim and measure the height of the trees , both the smaller ones and the taller ones . How do you measure the height ? Easy , aircraft have a Radar Altimeter that is stunningly accurate . Fly your aircraft till the lower fuselage is just resting on the top of any tree , and hit Pause , note the RA readout to determine height . I have done this often and can confirm their height accuracy . Cheers Karol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 3, 2019 Share Posted July 3, 2019 31 minutes ago, COBS said: What a load of rubbish ! Such a strong argument, no need to read what followed in your post so I didn’t Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rongor Posted July 6, 2019 Share Posted July 6, 2019 I don't want to hide this screenshot any longer, leaving it open for discussion... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
patful Posted July 6, 2019 Share Posted July 6, 2019 7 minutes ago, Rongor said: I don't want to hide this screenshot any longer, leaving it open for discussion... I think that toddler in front of the house needs a shave. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dominique Posted July 6, 2019 Share Posted July 6, 2019 The final proof that LM has modeled a dwarf avatar. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Juanvito Posted July 7, 2019 Share Posted July 7, 2019 Something I mentioned a couple of years ago, that I would want to see, is using the HD textures to add more generic skyscrapers to some skylines that miss them: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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