Water Masks - A possibility in the future?

[andrew22222]

Hi,

Like everyone else, I'm totally amazed at the FTX series of scenery for Australia and have spent hours looking around. I couldn't quite figure out what was missing in regards to totally breaking the visual gap between standard FSX scenery and the FTX scenery. Eventally realised it was the rivers and coastline with the abrupt change from water to land.

Obviously I'm starting to get a little fussy here but then I also own the set of Horizon photo scenery for the UK and enjoy their watermasks. I know Australia is an enormous place (been across it twice in a train then truck) but when the textures are added during the creation of each region, is there not some kind of texture that can be added automatically to show atleast a short 'blend' between water and land.

I'm no scenery designer so if you are please don't be offended if just the thought of creating textured river/coast lines brings on images of near insanity and perhaps alcoholism 

I just find flight simulator graphics really intersting and wondered what the possibilities are.

Andrew

[Holger Sandmann]

Hello Andrew,

thanks for the feedback.

One of the main drawbacks of creating landscapes via polygons and vectors (as opposed to full photoreal textures a la Horizon UK) is that there are no soft edges. Actually, vectors, like roads and shorelines, can have (narrow) soft edges or be semi-transparent but polygons can't. We try to avoid polygons as much as possible but the 1-sq km "precision" of land class placed ground textures makes it necessary to do some fine-tuning. And for water bodies we have no choice at all other than using polygons.

On the other hand, in the absence of high-res imagery to cover all of Australia, never mind the terrabytes of HD space that would require, and the years of placing autogen, it's the best possible approach and much improves on the default landscape.

Personally, what I really like about FS landscape development is the fascinating interaction (and sometimes "struggle") between the raw data we have available and the artistic interpretation and tweaks required to bring these together in a believable manner. It's always a compromise but there's also almost always room to push beyond the straightforward implementation as suggested by the docs.

Cheers, Holger

[andrew22222]

Thanks for the info Holger. Interesting read. I did imagine that the river/coastline would be a little on the challenging side and that you'd probably thought of it at some point. I'm sure you've been told many times that the FTX textures are a fantastic improvement over the default and it certainly makes a more interesting flight over Australia.

Am I right in thinking you were behind the Vancouver scenery also? I have just moved to Vancouver, and love it. Currently using my own photo scenery made with FS earth tiles but obviously no additional autogen apart from trees I added around the several airports to make landing a little more realistic. Just the Vancouver area bgls and texture files are 28GB and then a further 38GB of files covering Washington and Oregon.

Will be looking forward to the realease of FTX US BLUE in the future as that will certainly save me some hard drive space 

All good fun.

Andrew