My previous post went on a massive ramble about “wicked problems” and “knapsack” problems – the short version is that I’m working on DSF generation. Here are a few more pics from DSFs in drydock.
Not everything is unsovled problems; these pics show an algorithm that “removes noise” from digital land class data – the idea is a riff on this paper. I’m still not sure where it’s going to fit into the flow of data in scenery generation, but we’re looking for it to consolidate forest types.
What does autogen look like while it’s being born? It looks like this. For X-Plane 8 and 9, the autogen is built using bitmap technology – the DSF generator literally builds a bitmap image of a city block and tries to “fit” buildings by drawing them and checking for per-pixel overlaps. Version 10 changes this completely – autogen is built polygonally. In this pixture, the blue polygons are strings of houess built around roads; where the terrain is too steep, the polygons are clipped.
Getting polygonal autogen setup to be fast enough for production use has been a battle, but we’re getting there.
It’s nice to compare the pictures with the real location.