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Adding new scenery content.

rhumbaflappy

rhumbaflappy

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Hi all.

Steve has been helping me with some work on his contentconverter (within his Toolkit package). He is adding the ability to delete airport items (runways, etc...) and to account for exclusion rectangles in order to remove objects. This allows us to use, for example, ADE to rework airports, and add them as new content.

SBuilderX can create CVX (vector) scenery, and add objects as well.

Before:

c59_before-png.21388


After:

c59_after-png.21389


When Steve releases the updated Toolkit, I may be able to give a rough tutorial.

Dick
 
Hi Jon.

Some stuff isn't available yet. No photoreal, for example, or aircraft. I think my next experiments will be conversions of original scenery objects. And eventually I'd like to see if we can construct procedural buildings. Steve is a busy guy, so we all need patience. I'm also going to try a few more ADEX-derived airports to see if the conversion process is solid.

Dick
 
The line of trees along the edge of the aiport are converted from an SBuilderX BGL, using a Flight GUID for seasonal maple trees. Not seen is that I also added a pond or two and added a stream to the QMID11 area. Flight needs to have compiled BGLs without the -ADDTOCELLS used by the FSX compiler, so every added terrain vector needs to have the whole QMID11 area rebuilt when adding data. Patrick Germain has made a CVXExtractor to speed along that process, allowing us to blend additions into the default FSX conversion seamlessly. His decompiler can output to ESRI shp files, and can be imported to SBuilderX.

Dick
 
We need to figure out why addtocells isn't working properly. Maybe I have to add the logic to flip the polygons.
 
Hi Steve.

It's not a show-stopper, especially with CVXExtractor to help rebuild the cells. But the FSX 'way' almost exclusively used -ADDTOCELLS.

Dick
 
We could get endless chains of dependencies for addons. That would be a problem.

Dick
 
rhumbaflappy said:
Hi Jon.

Some stuff isn't available yet. No photoreal, for example, or aircraft. I think my next experiments will be conversions of original scenery objects. And eventually I'd like to see if we can construct procedural buildings. Steve is a busy guy, so we all need patience. I'm also going to try a few more ADEX-derived airports to see if the conversion process is solid.

Dick
Click to expand...

I stumbled across these related and linked posts, which may prove to be of interest while exploring conversion of 'legacy' MSFS content:

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/323466-a-new-lease-on-performance/

https://polypoke.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/why-fsx-has-rough-performance-2/

http://blogs.technet.com/b/torgo3000/archive/2009/04/13/a-change-of-direction-sort-of.aspx


Hope this helps ! :)

GaryGB
 
I'm not sure if you are trying to get at some specific point, but Adrian's posts are valid but not super relevant. He was referring to loading legacy content directly and not conversion processes.

While there are some techniques that were used in Flight to improve the performance of content that don't translate over during the automatic conversion process easily (building groups, texture atlases), there are several things that are done during conversion that take advantage of Flight's benefits, such as optimized model geometry, shared materials, instancing, and multi-threading.
 
Hi Steve:

Sorry for posting the above in haste without some proper contextual introduction; I had stumbled across the info during the course of a very busy day and wanted to share it here so I wouldn't forget about it. :oops:


I certainly don't wish to discourage efforts here to implement a conversion process for porting as much content as possible from FSX into Flight', and I believe the FS Community should be grateful to see that the efforts discussed in this thread are underway. ;)


I'm curious, though, in light of Adrian's discussion of Flight's differences from the FSX rendering system, whether, when "carrying forward legacy content", if your Flight Toolkit conversion utility will address the (inferred) change in Flight's shader or draw system, and will thus (as Adrian stated):

"make absolutely sure you can either touch manually or at least do some kind of scripting pass on every piece of content. Better yet, design a schema-based extensible shader system right from the start that can handle creating new values with defaults."

http://blogs.technet.com/b/torgo3000/archive/2009/04/13/a-change-of-direction-sort-of.aspx


Thanks in advance for your clarification on whether the above process is (or will be) a part of what your Flight Toolkit conversion utility does. :)

GaryGB
 
Last edited:
Hi Gary.

The posts by Adrian refer basically to making backwards compatibility I believe. Steve's conversion process alters the object's content so that it is no longer a legacy object... it is converted content. It isn't legacy content.

There are some elements in the vector system that are legacy, but that's because they are essentially the same BGL format as FSX, needing no conversion.

Dick
 
For Flight we designed essentially what Adrian described, it is simprop XML based shader system with defaults and fallbacks when the value is missing from the material. The conversion process maps from FSX materials to existing shaders in Flight using a scripted process (as Adrian suggests). Also in line with what I think Adrian was getting at is that this process is not perfect and the output is not necessarily as good as it would be if you touched everything by hand during the conversion.
 
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