Autogen Is Here, More Coming

58 comments on “Autogen Is Here, More Coming”

1. You guys are doing a FANTASTIC job. A couple of quick observations: Can you make the sim not draw trees within airport boundaries? A tree on a runway is good incentive not to hit V1…

   Also, the autogen engine should be sensitive to approach paths and start lowering building height as we get nearer to the airport, as in real life.

   Great job! I love this sim, and have not launched MSFSX since installing V10.

2. The new Autogen is a landslide improvement of X-Plane scenery. The city centers really pop out, sometimes almost life-like, see Tampa or Sarasota for example. Great work, this really pushes X-Plane to the next level. And the little details, like digital clocks and thermometers on buildings – nice. I have noticed some buildings lack night textures. Are they also coming later or is this intentional?

   1. I think they are coming. I basically had to pry this release out of Alex’s hands before he went on a quick trip to visit the family; he’s got more to complete. So besides night textures, there are also ground footprint textures that he needs to add that will help clean up the ground situation. (Other aspects of the ground need to be addressed in the terrain files themselves.)

      1. 64 bits and the new autogen are huge steps forward, thanks to the staff !

         (Other aspects of the ground need to be addressed in the terrain files themselves.)

         Something can be done for city textures, definitely. I’m working precisely on this at the moment:
         

         I think I’ve got a good grasp at terrain files’ parameters now. I’m also working on some better coastlines. 😉

         1. sorry I messed up the link, please read:

            Something can be done for city textures, definitely. I’m working precisely on this at the moment:
            urban textures

            I think I’ve got a good grasp at terrain files’ parameters now. I’m also working on some better coastlines. 😉

3. “Also, the autogen engine should be sensitive to approach paths and start lowering building height as we get nearer to the airport, as in real life.”

   + 1 (some approaches are now impossible)

4. For the first time I see different buildings, finally my dream started to become a reality.
   When I see more vertical autogen, I will be very happy with X-Plane.
   Keeping my fingers crossed.
   Great work , guys.

5. And how are you guys handing “special” structures (Say the Golden Gate?), do you have some “hardcoded” scenery for that or just expect autogen to generate a “road” there (like it is now).

   OFFTOPIC: Also, separate birds from deers in the options. I don’t want Deers (especially because you cannot collide with them, which would be interesting) because I have yet to see a Deer crossing KSFO runways… but, I like the possibility of having a birds around!

   1. Special roads are not yet hard coded – we’ve internally discussed techniques for future bridge systems that could specialize key landmarks, as well as making autogen bridges look better.

6. “Because we want to make the autogen fast, ”

   Ben your team have certainly accomplished that. My pc specs by today’s standards would be considered low end. After the b5 update not only you managed to add to realism , but did it with out affecting fps. Great job indeed!!!

7. nice work, vertical buildings rocks. what a nice improvement!!! wating for night textures!…. on the othr hand i post a question in the last blog any idea??

8. The new artwork and the resulting populated towns/cities are most welcome. What a difference these make to the XP10 experience!
   One small critique is that there seem to be far to many white-roofed, industrial type buildings which make small towns/villages look like industrial areas.
   Well done to Alex and Laminar.

   1. Types of autogen (industrial vs high urban vs low urban vs medium buildings, etc.) are baked into the DSF — my suspicion is that the ‘bake’ of industrial might be a little bit borked, and so Alex may have forced some of the definitions to compensate. When we look at recutting some DSFs I’ll be able to investigate more closely.

      1. There is a lot of industry also in city-parks now.
         That’s not good for the citizens and not plausible.:)

         (It’s seems, that ‘FlatDry 1.ags’ is assigned-to ‘natural.ags’, for some purpose .)

         The art-work is wonderful.
         I get an idea what is possible…

         1. Yeah – it’s that autogen mappng. Not good…but not plausible? Well, you must come to America and see the mess we have made. 😉

9. “Also, separate birds from deers in the options.”
   +1,
   I would like to use that option too (birds only).

10. Are we likely to see “heavy industry” autogen in the near future? Things like gas storage tanks, smoke stacks, various refinery distillation towers, power stations, girdered shipyard sheds, coal heaps, container yards and the like….

    1. I don’t know how soon – Alex has had some really wonderful dirty, filthy, disgusting heavy-industry art assets that he hasn’t dropped in yet.

       The problem with heavy industry is that it doesn’t fit well into city-style zoning – our theory is that we need to locate a larger industrial area and ‘clear out’ some of the small OSM features (E.g. small access roads, terminal railway lines) and then re-build the larger area out of art assets in an organized way.

       This would sacrifice some of the “accuracy” in the road grid, but it would also allow us to get the correct art into the correct place without having custom-cut autogen that exactly fits every single industrial site in the world.

       Such a scheme would perhaps go into recut DSFs…

       1. I think you should sacrifice a little roads yes. There is no link between buildings and roads. I think there should be. There are too many roads that don’t have buildings attached to it, or the other way around. There should be a basic check in the software that matches the road amounts to the building amounts that way we would not end up with entire neighborhoods of houses with no roads and roads with no houses.

          One more thing, is the new assets only available in the 64 bit beta or also in 32 bit

          thanks

          1. They are available in both 32 and 64 bits, but in 32 bits you’re always constrained as you crank the sim up. We may put a lower max on ren settings in the 32-bit build in the long term.

11. Very nice work indeed! Two thumbs up and thanks for the info. Just out of curiosity, ben, how does the autogen know where to start placing tall buildings? Is it defined by areas of suburban environment or does the autogen understand that where there is a LOT of roads covering every square kilometer, there should be high buildings?

    And, if I may so add to it, please update the autogen with more detailed and diverse trees. And make an option to draw even more trees (in the appropriate areas). Nice trees make so much for the final effect!

    1. The DSF contains “per block” info – each block contains the block extent and references an autogen art asset used to draw it, as well as height information and some other topological variation (e.g. which sides of the block have roads). The art asset namespace is categorized to define the type of autogen, e.g. industrial, low urban, high urban, etc.

       So the height is pre-baked into the DSF – the DSF generator uses some (limited) obstacle data and some algorithms to generate the heights. I have notes to try to take height info from both OSOM and swap data with FlightGear but didn’t have time to do so in the original files.

       1. I very much appreciate you taking the time to explain what’s going on in the background.

          Thanks again and once more, truly awesome work with the new autogen and 64 bit executables. I really am looking forward to seeing even more art assets and also alpilotx’s very interesting new autogen implementations that I saw on his site.

          X-plane team: You rock!!

12. Would be good to see at least the night textures for highrises in the next beta. It’s really dangerous to fly during night now. Had two almost-crashes due to unlit highrises and some spooky-skyline experiences.
    This aside: The new autogen is brilliant. Cities really start to be plausible now. Thanks.

    Flo

    1. Don’t get your hopes up .. the betas are being driven by sim bugs and plugin needs, but the autogen is being driven by when Alex can get it done. So the correlation between betas and autogen is going to be rather random!!

       1. Ahh darn. One hand wish it wasnt released without lit textures. Big bummer for no night flight for further unknown time

          1. You aren’t going to be happy until X-Plane comes with a real aircraft for you to fly in equipped with a stewardess…and then you’d probably complain your drink was warm. 🙂

             1. nah im very happy with it chris, but no Lits for x time was not expected,

             2. if 10.20 will go final or earlier with all lit textures , more art assets such as those ground textures and tall buildings then that will be key. once that is done and plugins are back for all the payware planes were going without for x time, then x-plane can really start a new chapter, were in the buffer zone now.

             3. HaHa. Brilliant!

             4. + 1000 😀

             5. Hey… can we get that added to the feature request list, pronto? For the record, I’d like my stewardess to be redheaded with an Irish lilt.

                ;oD

          2. You can have that!! Simply un-check the beta-box and re-update to go back to 10.11. For you it will be _exactly_ like having the autogen not be released without lit textures.

             1. Ditto what Ben said.

                Chris: Please put some value into Ben’s time like all other’s do and respect the fact that the man has a limited amount of time like all other’s do.

                I would not say it’s completely fair that one person occupies something like 15-20% of the total amount of published blog comments… I mean okay: if you were actually providing some GOOD feedback/improvements/criticism it would be something different. But at the moment I’m sorry to say I feel like all you want to do is to bash around and get irritated because feature X is not implemented yet. Please keep your hands off beta’s if you do not like to evaluate latest tech going in to XP.

                So pretty please, give the guys a break, would you? The XP team are doing INCREDIBLE work atm and the results are just jaw-dropping.

                If you really like to dream of future XP features, just like all of us do occationally, then fine. But please do not spam Ben’s blog because in the long run it is just going to take time from actual, magic XP development.

                I’m sorry for being so harsh here. I really do not mean to offend you. I just can not avoid to see the situation from the XP team’s perspective. For all of us reading the blog, please, would you be kind and not spam it as you are today.

    2. Hi flo,

       while I obviously agree and beg for LIT asap , as its a much needed how to not include feature .

       someone mentioned flying over Tampa and such, wow I took the Baron over Tampa at night HDR with lots of roads and buildings, traffic. ummmm AMAZING definently helps the wait and going back to 10.11 is not worth it

13. @XPlaneOfficial We made a 64-bit compliant #AW139 upon which Ben advised caution for issues that may come with future betas. We stay tuned.

14. Hey Ben

    really great!! Couldn’t believe my eyes and as it’s Autogen, it works worldwide 🙂

    I noticed that “auto generated extrem-large buildings” e.g. old train stations are still a bit buggy: the walls are drawn but from above there is no roof, looks like a castle from above with walls around some area

    As I noticed, the Autogen is created ca 5miles around my plane;
    1) Is it planned to make this distance changeable via settings?
    2) From a higher altitute the autogen effect disappears because behind the 5miles area there is no grey patch but green area only (plus some roads). Is is planned to “calculate to a certain extent” the greyness of an area (e.g. based on the underlying DSF) to simply put a grey patch on it? (…or something like that)

    Keep up the good work, 10.20 really rocks!!
    cheers
    Dominic

    1. 1. YES. I’ve blogged a little bit about our wanting to tune the ren settings for v10’s AG system, not v9’s. One of these items includes extruding out autogen farther when LOD is higher up.

       The issue when we shipped was…memory. With 32-bit, all of that ‘built up’ AG really costs. With 64 bit I think we can push to the original intended distance Alex wanted (about 30% further out).

       2. Some of the new AG doesn’t have ground tiles, which help keep the look consistent in mid-range views; with more RAM we’ll get tiles further, and with future AG drops we’ll have tiles on everything. We also need to recolor a LOT of the urban ground terrain, which will help in the far far view.

       1. cheers! appreciate your fast reply 🙂

          best
          Dominic

15. Any plans on when will the clouds move with the wind?

16. hi nelson

    no offense taken and thank you! will do

17. Just noticed this error when trying to load Glasgow Airport (EGPF) :-
    ‘lib/g10/autogen/urban_med_solid_25_v2.fac’ missing.
    Have any existing files been deleted in this beta5 autogen?
    Might this be a bug?

    1. It is a bug – bug reporter in the future please. The library.txt file is borked, as it says in the blog post – Alex and I looked into it today and it should be pretty straight forward to restore.

       1. Sorry Ben
          Wasn’t sure if it was a bug or something I had loaded incorrectly.
          Excellent support on this, as always!

18. LOL – Nice Easter Egg. Flying out of KFCM toward downtown Minneapolis and one of the new autogen buildings has a BIG rotating X-Plane weather vane on top….. Looking for an autogen billboard of the little brat boy peeing on FSX now…. 🙂

19. Ben,

    I have a common global scenery folder for all of my X-Plane 10 installs….will this affect X-Plane 10.10 adversely?

    Nice to see the candy is still in the pipeline…..thanks!

    1. We don’t support ‘clever file system tricks’ with the global scenery or resources folder, so you’re on your own. We don’t know what will happen because we’ve never tried it.

       1. That’s fine, Ben, and perfectly understandable. You already have more cleverness to support than most people would ask for.

          I guess the correct question to ask is if XP 10.10 would be able to run the autogen content that is currently coming with the betas? Is the scenery beta as well? Think of a substitute scenario where someone copied their beta Global Scenery folder to their Release Global Scenery folder.

          1. No, 10.10 cannot run the 10.20 autogen. There are a few small features we added to the facade engine that are 10.20 specific; so while 95% of the assets are 10.10 compatible, it’d be a rats nest to find and pull out the 5% that are “requires v1020” before chaos breaks out.

             Buuut — wait, I think you’re asking the wrong question (or I am answering the wrong one). The autogen (the art assets for autogen) is not in the global scenery folder – it lives with the sim in resources/default scenery – the global scenery DSFs are unchanged so far.

             Someday when we do recuts we will require the latest sim to handle the recuts, because the recuts will probably use more refined library definitions to get better autogen placement.

             1. Aha. Thanks Ben, we drilled down to the answer I was seeking. I honestly thought the assets that you were speaking of were in the Global Scenery folder. If not, then that’s a solid “all clear.” 🙂

20. Hey , X-plane is amazing, it is my number one game, hobby, sim- whatever someone calls it who cares. Anyway, x-plane has gotten and will get better and better over time, Been a user since v6. It will never be “finished” but always enhanced. time to jump on that train and not complain when something is delayed extendedly, but rather a simple checking up inquiry if much time passed. Unlike other games for console and computer, this always is getting worked on for the better. each delay paid off. So here on out simple “hey hows this coming” will suffice/ and enjoy the ride of continuos enhancement and support. “what may be new today, month, quarter, year” *hopefully the negative surprises of indefinite waits and usual delays for all things x-plane become less. enjoying the 64bit night time over a city now, and it hit me.

    just wanted to share, no need to worry for more bantering

    – Chris
    Reply

21. What a great upgrade this is! Love the new autogen.. as far as generic scenery is concerned XP10 leaves all the competition far behind. And i think it’s only gonna be better in time! Xplane is already quite a plausible world for the most part.

    There are a few things i’m wondering about though:

    -Roads look good as long as the surface is flat. Around mountains they ‘hug’ the mountain, slanting and tilting with the terrain. I think a ‘flatten’ switch for the roads would solve a lot of that, but not sure if that’s possible in Xplane.

    – I was flying around in Italy and elsewhere in Europe (netherlands), and noticed that the most prevalent type of building was warehouses. Little villages consist of nothing but warehouses now, which feels wrong to me. I guess the most prevalent building type should be houses/farms in those types of areas.

    – Another thing i was wondering about is this: Sometimes i land on a road in a city somewhere and kinda drive around like a car. Everything looks amazing on ground level: there are cars, traffic lights, trees, plants etc.. the one thing missing however is people! Would it be hard to have a few people walking on the sidewalk? lol.. i mean everything looks a lot like GTA already on that level, so why not? They’d only have to pop up on close proximity to keep polygon count in check. It may not be a high priority for a flight sim, but since it looks like it’s becoming more and more of a world sim including trains, (parked) cars, boats etc, i guess having people standing around or even walking around wouldn’t be too weird to have.. i know i’d enjoy it anyway!

    Thanks for all the amazing work you guys are doing for this sim.. going back to enjoy the scenery some more 🙂

    1. – We looked at a lot of ways to deal with mountains early on and decided early on that the ‘hugging’ was the least bad option among many bad options. The problem is that the v10 scenery engine can’t “cut” the mountain on a micro-level to reshape it for road grading, and the scenery files don’t have the res to capture the cutting. Flattening the roads (with their own sidewalls) proved to make more of a mess than do good.

       – Alpilotx noted to us by email that the industrial building mapping is probably borked in this drop; we’ll adjust the library file.

       – We have to draw the line somewhere to keep the task manageable, and with people the question then becomes: if we have people but they don’t move does that do more harm than good. And if they move, where do they go an when and how much CPU does it take?

       Perhaps someone will do a poeple-flow-like plugin for x-plane someday.

       1. Thanks for that reply Ben. I was afraid that the options were going to be limited with the kind of ‘matrix’ you’re using for the scenery.

          As for the people: i imagine them walking where you have sidewalks in city areas. They’d just need to go up and down the sidewalk along the axis of the road. Nothing too fancy. You could have them regionized though and make them represent whatever area they’re from. Make oriental peeps look oriental, europeans caucasian (for the most part anyway) etc. In my opinion it’d be another way to make XPlane even more immersive than it already is.

          These kinds of details make the difference between a dead and static world and a living and interesting world where you want to spend more time. Of course you’ve gone a long way already with the cars and trains, which look incredible, especially during twilight with all the little lights. It’s unlike anything i’ve ever seen in any other flightsim before and i love it 🙂

          Just some thoughts…

          1. Hi! As for roads and people, I think, from my point of view, that these features are far far away, as I’d make other ones a real priority.

             For example, it is a real pity that ATC doesn’t manage SIDs/STARs, weather isn’t perfect yet, and most airports are literally unusable (for a real-life-like flying experience).

             Eye candys are good when the flight sim experience is full, but I can say that it is definitely not yet (although it is the most perfect piece of software I’ve ever used – Thanks to Ben and all the LR group).

             Keep that perfect job, and don’t get distracted by all that “one day..” dreams!

22. Ben:

    Echoing the comments here – the new autogen variety looks great! I like the light-industrial buildings. Downtown Seattle looks great.

    But …

    I do see clusters of high-rise buildings in the wrong places. Especially around Seattle (a place I know well!). As suggested in this thread, this is likely to be poor land-use data quality in the DSFs. A bunch of the high-rise apartment areas around KSEA and KBFI in the default start-up location look goofy – especially those that prevent an approach to KBFI 13R/13L. How hard is it to impinge tall buildings on short finals? (Acknowledging that the real world has some scary tall buildings – such as the approach to KSJC from the south over downtown San Jose.)

    Seems especially relevant to type this whilst sitting in seat 5F of an American 737-800 that will be landing in KSEA in a few hours!

    Looking forward to seeing some heavy industry stuff – the sheer variety seems to be what makes all this very “plausible”.

    – Robin

    1. I’ll have to look at the raw data to see what happened, but there are two cases:

       – Real obstacle data saying “there is something tall here” – if the data’s wrong I need to find better data. But as you know from SJC, sometimes real life is like that.

       – The DSF creator has rules to add “tall-ish” buildings near tall buildings, and it may have gone haywire. Besides looking for bugs, we can institute some flight path rules – there used to be some code to do that a long time ago (think 8.0) but the code has been turned over a whole bunch since then.

23. Hi Ben, with the 64bit version on my imac I had better performance with the beta3 instead of beta5 (does not depends by autogen because I use OSM buildings) not only about FPS but with short freezes too. This not happens with 32 bit version where not with beta5 I have better performance of the 64 bit and no freezes at all. boh..?!?!??!?

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