Will the building heights still be random? There are some high rise apartment buildings on short final to KSMO.

One of the problems with the autogen is that there is a lot of empty space behind the buildings. You should add some bigger front yards and backyards. Add a guest house, maybe some junk cars, etc… The commercial buildings need some parking lots, etc… Pick a neighborhood in XPX and then go look at that same neighborhood in Google maps and that will give you an idia how to make fit better.

Hi,

Let me try to define the scope of the project here:

– The autogen set we have is what we call the “US” set, but it’s probably appropriate for the US, Canada, and perhaps a few other parts of the English speaking world; it is clearly not meant to look like Europe, Southeast Asia, India, China, etc. So we call it “US” (hey, I’m an American, you’re lucky I even know where Europe _is_ on a map!! 🙂 but really it’s an autogen pack that has certain architectural styles, road styles, color schemes, etc.

– Within the US set we do _not_ attempt regional differences (and we do not plan to do so) but we _do_ attempt to differentiate between cold and warm climates within the set.

– The US set also has to cover a range of urban densities, land classes, and building height ranges.

So I think the US set will be “done” (and I use quotes because even if a set is done, there’s no reason why we can’t add more variety or detail to it) when we have complete coverage of the land classes, building heights, and climate split within the US. It is not supposed to cover region-specific architecture within the US and it clearly isn’t meant to be a good representation of Europe.

The main work Alex is doing now is on land class coverage and building height, and I believe that these two things are the biggest current problems in how the autogen looks. The current library simply doesn’t have the enough variety (and more importantly the _right_ variety) to cover all of the land classes and building heights we have.

The set is meant to be climate differentiated, and my guess is that in most cases this isn’t working due to lack of variety of art assets; I think this situation will be better in future updates. In particular, we try to pay attention to rainfall levels – the look of the ground that is covered in autogen changes a lot depending on whether we have high rain fall or low rain fall.

Regionalization within the US is too specialized for us to put in the base sim – that has to be third party add-on territory.

Finally, the trees are a tale of two kingdoms – the natural terrain tree set and autogen trees are different libraries – the natural trees are highly varied and there’s a good chance that they put the right trees in the right places even within the US, as well as all over the world. The auotgen tree set has very little variety and isn’t tied to real world data.

We may someday be able to unify these sets and get the natural-terrain trees level of variety into the autogen, but that’s going to have to come later – for now we’re focused on more buildings to get those land classes covered properly.

Cheers
Ben

Newcomers to X-Plane 10 can buy both, while existing v10 users only need the map updates.

Cheers
Youri

Thanks for that, I can confirm that it is working with my HD 7990. The first working driver since 13.9.

So…this is sort of massively off-topic, but…no. I have not considered a “kickstarter” campaign as a way to get more features into X-Plane.

I have considered providing a reasonable interface for third parties to do seasons – in particular, I would like to do a seasonal interface for third parties sooner, so that third parties can do seasonal add-ons. (If there is a real community desire, then doing a payware add-on would be a reasonable business venture.) In the past we’ve deferred the interface because we didn’t have our own art assets, but I think doing the interface sooner would be a good thing for everyone.

Investing in our hobby + new features = more fun