Scenery Rendering Lessons for BoB2 from X-Plane?

Battle of Britain "Wings of Victory"
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brianjgregory
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Scenery Rendering Lessons for BoB2 from X-Plane?

Post by brianjgregory »

All,
Not an expert on the topic of scenmery rendering; so, please don't shoot me down for trying to teach Granny to suck eggs!

Having got fed up with FSX refusing to work consistently under Windows 8.1 64-bit before CTD-ing (honestly), I recently bought the STEAM version of X-Plane. Amongst the scenery options is an outstanding W2XP addon GB Pro v2; video here:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/fi ... t-britain/

Are there any lessons we can learn for BoB2 scenery rendering from the X-Plane scenario?

Rgds., Brian Gregory. :roll: :roll:

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PV
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Re: Scenery Rendering Lessons for BoB2 from X-Plane?

Post by PV »

I have no idea how that is done - "Every building and road for all of England,
Scotland and Wales in the correct place", but I can't see how it could be
done by hand, someone has worked out a means of extracting information
and constructing 3D objects from satellite images. They have the immense
advantage of being able to work from satellite images of the present time,
which is very different from constructing a 75 year old world. Also, how
big is the download? It also has the advantage of 16 years of progress
over the BoB terrain engine, including much more memory space. The
entire BoBworld terrain including objects takes up about 750MB.

If we were to build a flightsim now, it would have a much stronger graphics
engine, but making a 75 year old world would still take much more human
input than generating a contemporary world from satellite imagery, so I
doubt we could ever do something that good, though we could make good
use of data for unpopulated areas.

Pat_Pattle
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Re: Scenery Rendering Lessons for BoB2 from X-Plane?

Post by Pat_Pattle »

Hells bells that's incredible! Thanks for that link Brian, Is that available now? I shall be trading FSX for X-Plane!

Cheers,

Clive

brianjgregory
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Re: Scenery Rendering Lessons for BoB2 from X-Plane?

Post by brianjgregory »

Sorry for delay replying, Clive,
XP10 10.5 64-bit available both on STEAM (where I got it) and direct from the X-Plane website; as indeed now is the beta version of the improved X-Plane 11.0 (http://www.x-plane.com/2016/11/x-plane- ... available/). Am waiting to see if STEAM offers the upgrade to 11.0 in due course. 10.5 is great for scenery & some of the professional payware addon aircraft; but some of the freeware content for it is mediocre at best. Rgds., Brian :) :)

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ShadowShooter
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Re: Scenery Rendering Lessons for BoB2 from X-Plane?

Post by ShadowShooter »

Speaking of FSX, here is something similar offered by a company that makes add-ons for it that simply replaces the existing terrain modelling with something much more detailed, but without adding extra buildings: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Scenery-Eng ... 7909631011

" VFR Real Scenery England & Wales 10M Mesh compared to the default FSX mesh

The 'ups and downs' you see in the Flight Simulator X terrain as you fly around are drawn using a grid of elevation points, calculated from the actual elevations in the real world. This gives a good representation of the world. Where there are hills and mountains in the real world you will see similar changes in the ground elevation in FSX.

The data FSX uses to create the terrain is, by necessity, fairly low in detail. FSX covers the whole world and it is simply not practical to provide high resolution data for every part of it. Prominent landmarks like Mount Rushmore or the Grand Canyon are modelled using a much higher level of detail in the data than other parts of the world, but the majority of locations use data with a much coarser grid.

The UK and most of Europe is modelled in FSX using a grid where all the elevation points are 76m apart. This allows for reasonable representation of the terrain, but hills, valleys and mountains will appear much softer and smoother than they do in real life. Small hills may get missed entirely and peaks will often be lower than they should be simply because these fall between two elevation points.

VFR Real Scenery England & Wales 10m mesh provides FSX with a much more detailed data grid for England and Wales. This results in FSX terrain data where the elevation points are 10m (actually 9.6m but FSX refers to it as 10m) apart. This means 64 times the detail for the default FSX terrain. Mountains will now show all their craggy grandeur and fine details such as railway cuttings, elevated roadways and riverbanks that were invisible before will spring into view.
"

Image

Clearly no textures changed here:

Image

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