If there are two take-away points from this post, they might be this: there are a lot of new scenery system features in X-Plane 10, and I spend most of my day looking at surreal stuff.
Exhibit one: this is a next generation facade. Facades have been in X-Plane since 8.0 – they provide a way to construct a building from a polygonal outline.
In X-Plane 10, the facade engine is greatly enhanced, for the purpose of creating airport terminals. The facade on the left is a partly completed major airport terminal, with some random stuff put in by me for testing. Some of the new facade features:
- Facade walls are 3-d, containing real architectural features.
- Facade walls can support some level of translucency. You can see inside those windows.
- Facade walls can have objects attached – that’s where the jetways come from.
- Facade roof texturing is enhanced, for repeating, tiled roofs.
- Facade roofs can have objects placed at periodic intervals – that’s what all of those cars are. (I just grabbed the first object I found in the library.)
- In version 10 facades can go around bezier curves.
This is the same shot at night. The headlights from the cars illuminate the roof. No special trickery is needed for this – the cars have named lights, the cars sit on the roof, the light hits the roof. That’s the nice thing about global illumination: you attach lights and it just works; you don’t have to worry about what spill has to be baked into what texture.
This is a wider shot of the airport terminal with cars on the roof – as you can see, there’s a lot of cars. Since X-Plane 8, the sim has been able to cope wieth large numbers of objects visible for small distances. This is why we can build 10,000 3-d light fixtures at KORD and it doesn’t affect framerate. X-Plane 10 has some enhancements to the OBJ engine, including instancing, that should let us see more objects from farther away.
This is the matched night picture for the one above; you can see that having a large number of small lights casting global illumination doesn’t fps. With global illumination, the area of the screen the light covers affects fps but the total number isn’t so important.
Here are the cars with shadows turned on; like global illumination, shadowing affects everything, so you don’t have to worry about what scenery element is shadowing what other elements. The cars are on the roofs, ergo the cars shadow the roofs.
(You can see the shadow running out of resolution in the far ground – I still need to do a lot of shadow tuning; they’re really picky.)
Finally, one not totally ridiculous picture. (Poor Tom – I just post his art assets to the web regardless of what state they’re in; this’ll be the last time he sends me an updated library!) The building casts a shadow on the jetway, which shadows itself and the tarmac. It’s not until you take the shadowing away that you realize how much they sell the image.
We’ve received a number of reports over the last month of X-Plane hanging on startup with NVidia graphics cards on Windows. Most users don’t see this, but some do. We fixed one use of off-screen rendering in X-Plane 9.67 and this fixed some of the users with hung video cards but not all.
I am working with the remaining users now; my hope is that we’ll find something we can change in X-Plane to work around the problem. I don’t believe that the code in X-Plane 9.62 was actually incorrect, but it was simple enough to change.
I have also read some posts regarding poor performance on the GeForce 400 series (Fermi cards) vs. the older 200 series. I have no hard data on this, and frankly, a lot of the discussion on the net strikes me as completely speculative.
Fortunately alpilotx has a GeForce 500 series card on order, and he is working with me on next-generation DSF renders for X-Plane 10. From my perspective, the big question about the GeForce 400-500 series (Fermi and beyond) is: how well do they implement the DirectX 11/OpenGL 4.0 feature set? In particular, X-Plane 10 is going to make heavy use of full hardware instancing, and while this has been available on ATI cards since their HD2000 series, the implementation has been partly in software on NVidia DirectX 10 cards.
The question our users want to know is: if I have a preference for NVidia, can I get a DX11-class NV card for X-Plane, or should I move to ATI. By looking at instancing performance, perhaps we can determine if these cards are contenders.
(I am not worried about overall “how many fps” do you get because y’all can measure that now with X-Plane 9.)
Edit: since a number of you have jumped in with performance reports: please post the following performance info in your replies:
- Precise graphics card
- CPU with clock speed
- Results of –fps_test=3 (3 phases) with X-Plane 9.67.
I spend most of my day looking at X-Plane looking bad. If X-Plane looked good, there’d be no reason for me to look at what it was doing. (Poor Tom – I seem to alway
s have one of his planes loaded when I take a goofy screenshot. The Baron looks a lot better when it hasn’t been melted.
Besides pictures looking goofy due to bugs (that intersection was not supposed to have the sidewalks rotated) I often do my testing on old or random art assets I find lying around my hard drive. Those cross-walks aren’t even what we’re supposed to be using; they’re just something Alex sent me months ago to tinker with. Typically most of the scenery isn’t even in the picture to save time loading the sim.
A lot of the time the art assets that I use have been painted over to make debugging easier. The red, cyan, green and yellow intersections have been painted bright primary colors so I can see exactly where the 13 pieces of an intersection end up positioned. The real art assets are carefully drawn to blend together perfectly to create the illusion of a continuous world. Such a world is nearly impossible to debug!
A lot of what I see includes debug markings that don’t even show up in the final sim. The yellow and pink dots show various road grid mesh vertices; the color coding shows the level of mesh vertex duplication. (In this shot, there’s a lot of duplication – yellow – this was taken while I was measuring an inefficiency in the rendering engine.)
So I heed your calls for more screen-shots, but most of the screenshots on my hard drive are like the ones above, not the ones I am about to post; rather the ones that look like you might want to fly the sim are few and far between.
There are still a bunch of bugs in these pictures, but after staring at yellow dots, Dada-esque airplanes, and rainbow intersections all day, I was surprise to see something that looked vaguely like my home planet.
My Mac Pro (2.4 ghz Core 2, 8 cores, Radeon 4870) gets just about 20 fps exactly with those shots; that’s with global illumination and a shadow setting that will be medium; forests and autogen are maxed out. I’m hoping to get a bit more performance out of the sim when I have time to tune shaders, but that’s also an aggressive set of rendering settings on a no-longer-new computer.
We have not been adding features into X-Plane specifically to aid conversion of scenery from MSFS (and I don’t think we will), but sometimes features we want outright help solve conversion issues too. Here are two new features I expect us to ship in version 10 that should help the conversion of overlay scenery packs.
Draped Geometry: I’ve mentioned this feature before; basically in X-Plane 10, the horizontal geometry that sits “on the ground” can be marked for real 3-d draping, rather than just polygon offset. Draping is the process of actually cutting and shaping that geometry to perfectly ‘hug’ the ground – it’s how we can put a runway or taxiway on top of non-flat ground without Z thrash.
In X-Plane 9 you can create draped geometry, but you have to use .pol files; this can be awkward if you want to put an element in many times, share an element with other authors, or have an element on the ground match a 3-d object.
In most of the cases where I have seen serious Z thrash in scenery conversions, simply changing ATTR_poly_os to the new proposed ATTR_draped will fix the problem.
OBJ Elevation Control: X-Plane 10 will allow you to position an object vertically as well as horizontally, probably with something like this RFC.
For scenery conversions, this means that a scenery pack authored to a specific height elevation can be duplicated precisely.
For authors creating new work, this makes certain kinds of scenery possible that would have been very difficult before. For example, we get asked fairly often about LPMA. which features a runway on pillars. You can model as this as an OBJ with a hard surface, but in X-Plane 9 it’s very hard to predict what height that OBJ will be placed at. (Hack/work-around: place the OBJ in the water and model the geometry offset from the runway location. Most scenery packs should have the water at MSL 0.) With elevation control, the runway can be built at the real runway surface height and will be placed their explicitly.
I spend most of the time working on global scenery, shaders, v10, the big ticket items. But there are always little things going on too. A few random things:
I have a JavaScript taxiway-sign editor I’ve been working on – it lets you type taxiway signs with the keyboard, see them using the real sign artwork, and then get the sign code out (you know, that cryptic {^ul,@r}27-9{@@,no-entry} gak) automatically. I was inspired by WordPress’s insanely nice back-end web UI to see if I could make a web-based sign editor that was reasonably usable. The answer is: with jQuery – yes. Once it’s further along, I’ll post it; maybe someone can help make the CSS prettier.
We put another download server up this week; as we transition between hosting providers, we’ll have extra servers for a week or two, so, um, enjoy the bandwidth!
Finally, I’ve been poking (very slowly) at the panel documentation on the wiki. In particular, I’m trying to delete documentation of legacy features. A lot of the complexity in the panel system comes from the interaction between old backward compatibility features and the latest way to make a modern aircraft. My hope is that by documented only the “modern” path, the documentation can be clear, concise, and a lot less confusing to new authors. I figure if you’re reading the Wiki, you want to know how to make a panel now, not how to make one for X-Plane 3 years ago.
The real work of the week was the new road system and debugging the new global illumination code.
So as Ben has mentioned, I’ve been working on giving X-Plane a new ATC system. To be clear, the task was not to add features or fix bugs with the existing system, it was to write a whole new one…from the ground up. Why? Because our goal is to lay the foundation for a system that can grow over time; a system that we can easily expand and add features to. So what does this mean? It means that starting with the initial release of v10, the ATC system will grow incrementally until we feel it suits the needs of most of our users. It will never be a replacement for VATSIM however!
There’s only so much that can be done with artificial intelligence and since starting this project I’ve learned that humans make decisions in ways that are really really difficult to quantify, so lines have to be drawn somewhere. If you want that human factor, that’s what VATSIM’s for. The goal for our ATC is to make it as realistic as possible within the confines of what’s reasonable. It also needs to cater to a wide range of users. Some who are real pilots and do not deviate from ATC commands at all while others are new to aviation and may make some mistakes (even some dangerous ones). In real life making some mistakes will get you killed or at least earn you a phone call to the FAA…in here, the controller may grumble that you’re not listening and encourage you to follow directions again. I know that some of you are thinking “Why not just add levels of realism that the user can pick from a menu” and we may just do that for some things in the future, but for now I can’t stress enough that the goal is to be reasonable and flexible in our system design so that we can grow the system over time…all while keeping it fun for all types of users.
Enough blabber, time for some pretty pictures. The shot below is a picture of X-Plane with the North American ARTCC/FIR boundaries turned on. This is just for development purposes but it’s kind of neat to see the boundaries overlayed on the planet. As you fly from one center to the next, you’ll get handoffs from facility to facility.
And the shot below is what happens when I turn on the boundaries of towered airports. Any airport in the apt.dat file that has some combination of Delivery/Ground/Tower specified in it will be given a living control tower.
This only covers a tiny bit about the ATC system which is quite complex even in its infancy but I’ll do my best to keep the posts coming so that you can learn more about what it’s capable of.
I don’t have time to go into great detail about subsystems just yet (that’ll be covered in other posts) but I’ll leave you with a juicy detail….See those dots in the first image in the ZBW (Boston) ARTCC’s boundary? That’s a custom ATC pack (similar to a custom scenery pack) that I created that perfectly replicates Boston (KBOS) and Bradley (KBDL) TRACON airspace. Yeap, that means you can customize the system how you want it. More on what that means in the future….
If you haven’t already noticed, I’ve added some captcha’s to our comments to try to combat the spam we’ve been getting. I don’t particularly like captchas….I usually spend several minutes staring at them like a Rorschach Test but I think this will save time moving forward. Please let us know if they’re causing any problems beyond the severity of just being annoying.
An advanced apology to anyone whose comment gets nuked as spam. This blog, like all blogs, gets attacked by spammers who put links in their comments to boost their pagerank.
So if I’m not sure if you’re a real commenter or a spammer, sorry, but I’m going to err on the side of the chainsaw.
The Cessna 172SP isn’t the fastest plane, but it would get you there a little quicker if it was a twin prop.
(This is what happens when I leave the AI planes on while randomly testing rendering bugs in the middle of nowhere. On the bright side, the two planes do shadow each other.)
Robin sent this out to the news list:
A quick note for X-Plane airport designers (if you are not an X-Plane airport designer then please disregard this message).
Good News – it is still possible to submit new or revised airport designs for inclusion in the X-Plane version 10 scenery generation process. Please send me any submissions before February 7, 2011 so that I can consolidate them and generate the special data files that will be used to generate the new global scenery. I need just the apt.dat file for each airport – if you have multiple airports, please consolidate the data into a single file.
Why is this important? When new global scenery is generated for X-Plane 10, the latest airport data will be used to:
- Define the “land use” in the vicinity of the airport. This will ensure that an appropriate terrain texture is used under the airport, and will also suppress the trees and auto-gen buildings.
- Smooth any terrain undulations in the vicinity of the airport.
- Ensure that runways have “land” underneath them – especially important for airports alongside rivers, lakes or oceans.
The best way to help this process is to define an accurate airport boundary in World Editor (WED). If no boundary is defined, we will try to approximate a boundary based upon all other available data for an airport. If you only have time to create an accurate boundary (but not the rest of the airport details) then that is fine also – I can still use such data for this process.
Let me know if you have any questions
– Robin
My apologies for the earlier false deadline – we thought we were going to cut the global scenery a lot sooner.
This is the same shot at night. The headlights from the cars illuminate the roof. No special trickery is needed for this – the cars have named lights, the cars sit on the roof, the light hits the roof. That’s the nice thing about global illumination: you attach lights and it just works; you don’t have to worry about what spill has to be baked into what texture.
This is a wider shot of the airport terminal with cars on the roof – as you can see, there’s a lot of cars. Since X-Plane 8, the sim has been able to cope wieth large numbers of objects visible for small distances. This is why we can build 10,000 3-d light fixtures at KORD and it doesn’t affect framerate. X-Plane 10 has some enhancements to the OBJ engine, including instancing, that should let us see more objects from farther away.
This is the matched night picture for the one above; you can see that having a large number of small lights casting global illumination doesn’t fps. With global illumination, the area of the screen the light covers affects fps but the total number isn’t so important.
Here are the cars with shadows turned on; like global illumination, shadowing affects everything, so you don’t have to worry about what scenery element is shadowing what other elements. The cars are on the roofs, ergo the cars shadow the roofs.
Finally, one not totally ridiculous picture. (Poor Tom – I just post his art assets to the web regardless of what state they’re in; this’ll be the last time he sends me an updated library!) The building casts a shadow on the jetway, which shadows itself and the tarmac. It’s not until you take the shadowing away that you realize how much they sell the image.
