Comments on: Road Overlays and Draping

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:48:00 +0000

road and in extension all network elements is the weakest part of X-Plane (with low-alt texture) :

- very bad positionning
- no spline (curve)
- no tunnel (for the road)

anyhow, perhaps the future is only to have a good photo-realistic database.

but I agree with other, a good scenery editor will be a good start (why not using Sketchup !!)

Regards,
Christopher

By: krz

krz — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:07:00 +0000

mmmh thats a nice thing..but i guess you already find those steep steps in an automated way (angle-delta-lenght-ratio?). if such a step occurs you could add some transformation to the next/previous few road-edges to lift them up gradually to "bridge" the steep step.

a shrink-wrap approach would be very userfriendly since peoples could just paint over their g2xpl scenery from top/down view without having to worry about elevation.

i see this as a future proof method since its easy to handle and can be applied without lots of special cases. personally i dont find steep steps in roads annoying. they usually occur because the roads dont follow their real directions.

i would love to see a easy way to edit roads (in worldbuilder?) and a way to integrate community changes to the official global scenery. maybe road-data could be downloaded from a official server (with a smart versioning system to reduce server heat)?

with good tools a good global scenery can be created with the indirect help of the big geo-players like google. i think this cant be avoided - but it could be better supported ;)

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:59:00 +0000

The problem with shrink-wrapping is that some roads (like major highways) are likely to have a bridge over very small but steep changes in terrain, to keep the slope of the road constant.

To do this with a shrink-wrap approach we'd have to have some parameters to control the shrink-wrap and some idea of how to change road types when we bridge.

The change-to-bridge operation would further be tricky because right now roads only change type at junctions, so we'd have to allocate new junctions.

By: krz

krz — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:17:00 +0000

why not shrink-wrap the roads to the unknown surface in the direction of planet center? could be done after loading the terrain. this way could lead to maximum terrain dependance while nothing is hardcoded

By: Dan31

Dan31 — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:04:00 +0000

+1
I want to be able to change the position of the river. Specialy now than I use PhotoSceneryX. The same for the road. Plane simulator meen that we fly on a plane over a country. With photoscenery we could fly over our home. Help us to make good custom scenery and forget about shader. Please.

By: Photos

Photos — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:52:00 +0000

Hi Ben,

Actually, I sincerely think that the only thing we need is tools for modifiing base scenery. We lack of custom scenery and that's maybe because of the tool that doesn't come. We need (in my opinion) WED to be fully operationnal (road, mesh, texture editing) before to have nice shadows or reflects that kill CPU nad GPU. We have nice rivers now, but still ugly position for them...