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I want to link to two scenery add-ons that are now available for X-Plane 10:

Canada_Baron_58_16_hd3

Alpilotx’s HD Scenery Mesh version 3 is out now.  There’s a bunch of good stuff going on here:

  • The mesh quality is cranked way up.  If your machine can handle this, it makes the DSFs look a lot better.
  • This is a recut from the latest OSM data, so the scenery tends to be more accurate.  If there’s a tile that’s funky in the default sim, an HD tile replacement can be a nice fix.
  • Alpilotx includes details that don’t go into the global scenery for space reasons – better water definitions, more exact forests, etc.

(The blue-ish atmospheric coloring is a third party add-on that Alpilotx installed that cranks up the atmospheric scattering strength.Edit: Alpilotx tweaked the atmospheric scattering himself using a Lua script – see here for more info.  But there are third party add-ons that do this if you don’t want to roll your own.)

XFlyer’s Winter Package 1.1 – I’ve been meaning to post this, and it’s a great add-on to combine with the HD meshes.

monthly_12_2014-08754d90c5a4b4ee3f57ecde19358a8a-wi_1

This add-on replaces the terrain textures with winterized versions.  The picture links to some forum posts showing the pack in a number of conditions.

Unfortunately installation of seasonal add-ons is still trickier than add-on meshes, something I hope to fix relatively soon.  You’ll find installation instructions on the .org link.

 

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

30 comments on “Scenery Enhancement From AlpilotX and XFlyer”

  1. Mmmm nice! Very good job (and atmospheric effect play a big role). Looking at Fabian’s screens it seems we have to rebuild cropfields artwork without roads, otherwise they conflict with the vector real ones (giving me a punch in the eye each time I see one)…..
    -Max-

    1. Cropfields are an extra topic for some extra sleepless nights …. there is already a consensus, that current tech, namely “simply” pasting in textures doesn’t cut it (and not even if you remove roads). So, in the long therm, there has to be something entirely differen … a different approach … who knows what, but more than just simple textures 🙂

    2. Yep – in fact, one major change from v9 to v10: in v10, the urban textures are “cut” at the city block level, ensuring that they change at the street vector boundaries. I have often thought we could reuse this technology to ‘cut’ crop fields at vector boundaries.

      One problem: in areas where we don’t have vectors separating the fields, we’d have one giant crop field. 🙂

      1. Yes. Basically all what is “human being” should be “vector”. Because all what is “human being” should come from some database (like roads and tree lines) and assumes the placement of 3d objects from this database (like buildings and tree lines). From cropfield bloks data these obj could be farm object etc. But missing data will cause biiiiiiiig giant unique crop field (too large to cultivate even for a modern farm machine 😛 ). I remember this issue was already for the first Global. I remember we hypothesized some pre-made-vector-bloks-subdivisions to use where no data was available…. who know…. Perhaps repaint cropfields artwork, without roads on them, will be the esasiest step to try?

        1. Hi Max,

          Hmmm – I -have- that code. X-Plane 9’s DSF generator would -generate- fake but plausible road grids in Europe where we didn’t (at the time) have good data), filling in vector detail where we needed it to properly build cities.

          So we could in theory “auto-generate” farm vectors for areas where the land class data says “this is a farm” but OSM says “I have no idea”.

  2. Must be imbarrasing at the most to see others do what you guys have pushponed for so many years. My intent is not to pick on you Ben or Laminar for that sake, but rather to point out the cute irony. Seasonal textures are now being implmented for free. Ok, so seasons also include snow, hale, frost and sky colors which again need to be implemented in the weather system and added to texture/effects. But lets face it, must be a little torn in the developer side when others start a project you should have?

    Let’s just hope Austin make a dedicated cell in next years budget to finally have seasons, hell let’s hope there be money to get some ocean colors too he he..

    PS.
    Huge thanks to Alpilotx for his wonderful HD mesh update, love that package.
    Second, thank you to XFlyer for his long lasting winter package..

    1. Hi Tom,

      Nope. I do not feel embarrassed when third parties take X-Plane and make it look better by creating new content for it. If we didn’t want X-Plane to look better with third party add-ons than it did out of the box, we shouldn’t have invented scenery packs.

      1. Then we think alike Ben and in the spirit of the third party vendor, I got to ask you this: Are you personally not missing seasons in X-Plane? A fare but importan question if you dare to answer this last question 🙂

        1. Tom, just a tiny hint: this is not even real third party stuff … its more like 2 1/2 party stuff 🙂 🙂 . As both me (alpilotx) and Albert (XFlyer –> he did all the original ground textures) have contributed to the base sim a lot directly … and our work here is kind of an extension / continuation of that work.

          But as Ben told: openness is one of the big strengths of a good flight sim and we all should be happy, when others can improve the overall immersion.

        2. Back when I used to fly X-Plane as a user, I was not missing seasons. It was not in the list of things I hoped Austin would code. Of course, that’s moot, because we’re talking about X-Plane 6 and 7.

          Let me say this: there is a huge mismatch between former FSX users and non-former-FSX users (X-Plane users and users new to flights simulation, particularly including real pilots) about whether seasons are an important feature.

          FSX users consider seasons to be a mandatory part of flight simulation and consider X-Plane to be missing a major feature because seasons are not supported out of the box.

          Non-FSX users mostly don’t put seasons in their top list of requested features. Some may have decided that they want them from having heard FSX users bang on about them in the forums, but we really never had a lot of users asking for seasons until FSX users started migrating over to X-Plane.

          I think the overall consensus within LR is that _weather_ is more important than _seasons_ – that is, given a choice between correct leaf and vegetation colors and a runway that correctly shows rain, snow and ice, we’d pick the later.

          Anyway, my hope is to support seasonal add-ons more directly in the short term so that when third parties do want to customize seasonal textures, the user experience can be cleaner.

  3. Andras’s terrain mesh is nothing short of spectacular when compared against the default shipping stuff. I wish his updated data could somehow make it to the masses via regular X-Plane updates because the default state of affairs for North American water is, how do you say, uninviting to the initial user. That said, I know the bandwidth costs would probably bring Laminar to its knees due to the “everything baked into one file” limitations of the DSF world. Fired up my torrent client for the first time in years for these mesh files, and it’s happily downloading and seeding away.

    Now we wait for the autogen world to get some love and attention!

    Thanks, Andras9

    1. Andras’s data is always going back to Laminar, as I never stopped cooperating with them (its like an “open” family). Its an entirely different question, how Laminar can re-cut, re-distribute default mesh tiles with this data (they already ship a small set of fixed DSFs in one of the last updates – which used newer data). It not a simple decision … (neither can they push the level of detail to HD Mesh quality, because that would limit more users … and would also need much more storage space/bandwidth).

  4. Hi, just congz to XFlyer and Alpilotx for your awesome work!

    Ben, you posted old time ago, about the posibility of season textures implementation via dataref for sceneries designers. how will working and when we have this new function? Thank you so much!

    1. Right – this was my idea – dataref driven textures. At this point I have realized authors really need dataref driven -library- entries – as this allows them to customize not just the textures but .ter and other shader files when doing winter.

        1. Maybe – it’s generally harder to get generic scenery/shader features into OBJ8 than the rest of the scenery system.

          But again, I’m looking to do seasons with dataref driven -library entries-, not dataref driven tetxures.

          1. I can live with maybe! The planned improvements to the long distance views at altitude are more important anyway. 🙂 That will *really* make Andras’ terrain look awesome!

      2. Thank you Ben i will looking forward fot this futures, so any time estimation i will apreciate it.

        Best wishes and happy winter holidays!!!!

  5. Looking at this beauty I’ll not be able to do any scenery which located out of HDv3 area. Waste of time and efforts. So, need a canvas for painting. How to get it? We have an instrument called MeshTool and the desire to make something like mountain river and rocky breakage. Is it possible to do? Or better way is waiting, while Andras will fill a blank spaces on his map?

    Cheers
    Youri

  6. I have loved the immersion of these winter textures, if the default simulator can be improved with Albert’s work then it would certainly be a great feature as it keeps everything in one house, two things would have to be part of the prosess in the transition from the heavy snow to the more default textures instead of the hard line would be a nice advancement, and you don’t really need heavy White snow at the southern areas of the world because jo’berg and Melbourne rarely get that sort of blanket stuff you get in the north.

  7. Nice work! But I want to know if there is a way to update HD Mesh Scenery v2 from v3 version easily, I mean I have downloaded the whole files of v2 version, so I don’t want to download it again just for updating to v3 version. Is there a program (like X-Plane updating program) that can analyze those files of v2 version I have downloaded and then downloading files which have been replaced or is a new file in v3 version from the Internet.

    Thanks!

    1. I think I can answer this for alpilotx: There’s going to be 0% savings by going from v2 to v3.

      Basically when you recut a DSF with even slightly changed data, the entire DSF changes, because the triangulation of the mesh will completely rebuild itself around the new input data. The DSF is then heavily bit-packed; the end result is going to be a completely different DSF even for minor input data. So there’s no shortcut here.

      1. Ben has already correctly analyzed the situation … so no, sorry, there is no “easy” way to “cheaply” update thins, as too much has changed inside all the DSFs.

  8. I am extremely happy with the new version of the HD scenery – especially seeing the “airport boundaries” getting honoured for the airports I uploaded to the gateway – now these runways are usable and the whole airports look better! Thanks again.

    On another note, Ben, when will you guys pour the next big slosh of airports from the scenery gateway into the X-Plane world? It´s been MONTHS since the initial 750 were included, and many hundreds of airports are waiting – from my understanding there is very little to “do” except include them into an updated “global airports” folder, and the total upload size should be very small.

    I have done almost 100 airports since 10.25, all in good quality and 3D for my fellow X-Plane pilots to enjoy , so I am a bit disappointed that they are just rotting away on the gateway…

    Jan

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