Churches still missing

Ulm Minster is sorely missed also as a crucial waypoint for VFR flights in Southern Germany. I really cannot believe they forgot the highest church in the world for WU6!

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God is everywhere, no need for churches!

Just KD, they would be a great addition, and they are there in photogrammetric cities, but unfortunately the algorithm probably cannot know what is/isn’t a church when adding generic AI generated buildings.

It should be possible though - even Bing Maps should have the information about which building is a church. Here is another completely random example:

Note the “church” symbol, which indicates that Bing “knows” that this is a church.

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Oh it is definitely possible, but probably it is not a priority, since there are more pressing matters such as trees appearing in front of runways (ex: LOWI).
I would like to see this implemented as well in the future, but they should rather concentrate their programming efforts on other things now imo.

Pffft… trees. My A320neo easily cuts through trees! The “Pylons of Death” right in front of the Geneva runway 22 (LSGG) are a different matter though…

:wink:

Haven’t checked just yet whether they have been reduced in size with this WU 6 (note: there are pylons in real life - but for obvious reasons the power lines are very close to the ground).

lmao, the size hahaha that is AI for you, it does wonders, but sometimes…

Check the great EDDF building though (it is a bug because of a conflict with one of my addons)

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Churches are integral to VFR flying, providing the majority of way points on cross country flights for many GA flyers. Not everyone is flying with their head glued to the GPS.

There’s still plenty of churches not recognised in the UK scenery.

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And why was the algorithm able to include autogen-type churches in France and Norway, then?

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the auto gen misses / can’t do most churches and train stations for some reason…
any churches you see are probably hand-placed

This problem obviously requires divine intervention!

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Yes I also observed this. The DACH countries are very similar in this regard … we have litteraly a church in every village. And we are also famous for our monestaries like Melk (the one included in the WU6) and pilgrimage churches. And they are very often used for navigation because they are often on top of a hill or mountain and can be seen from far away (e.g Sonntagberg and Maria Taferl in Lower Austria)

I also noticed that there were no additional generic building arche types. In the past every WU also added new arche types to the sim. However, the ones provided default are already quite good, but some additional ones would have been nice.

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Still a fair few though! Better than none at all.

Oh so are they missing only in that region?
Interesting, I did not know that

Sorry, but we are already there: remember the Great Britain WU? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Sure it knows: from the Open Street map data. The arche typ of buildings is stored (and for churches even the confession is stored there)

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churches would be nice in germany, they are also vfr landmarks. Hope there will be a patch soon or a freeware megapack like “we love vfr” with churches.

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A few weeks ago I talked via discord with the creator of the “We love VFR” mods and I also aked if it is possible to do churches via mod. He explained to me, it is not really possible for mods to alter the autogen system. There seems to be no API to it, so he cannot simply parse open street maps and inject his own autogenerated churches. And another point was, that it seemd (at least some weeks ago), that MS/Asobo will take care of that issue, so no need for him to do that work …

But now it seems that Britain and France are just “Happy little accidents”, and we would not get churches per default with applicable WUs :unamused:

As @WildTapestry269 said it’s more complicated than placing antennas or chimneys. We don’t have SDK for autogen at all. Will it be available at some point? We don’t know.

Currently, I’m adding a new type of object - cooling towers. With chimneys I just had many models prepared and adjusted height by burying them down in the ground. This time it’s impossible, as I can’t just bury the support base of a cooling tower. It would look weird. So just scale it, right? In MSFS you can scale objects only in all dimensions at once. You can’t stretch objects just along one axis. So we wouldn’t have realistic heights or diameters where data is available.
That’s why I’ve created a modular system that auto-generates models with available data. I feed it a “blueprint” model, dimensions and colour and it gives me a scaled and coloured model that matches the real-life thing (compared to sat images :wink: ).

But it’s a cooling tower. Quite a simple object and not that common. I have around 5000 of them around the World. So far around 200 variants generated. Churches come in ALL shapes and sizes and creating “blueprint” models and code for them would be stupidly complicated and would not give as good results as just making them by autogen. Hopefully, someday we’ll be able to do that.

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The UK World Update added the Church to the village where I live. But oddly the larger church in the nearby town wasn’t added. Perhaps an error in the land class data the AI uses.

Some parts of Switzerland are really awesome, the elevation model is crazy good. So this really makes me optimistic for other parts of the world, where the elevation model is lacking the quality we desire.

maybe we have dificults in Switzerland, that church type is not similar to country boarder but cultural border:
in french speaking area, church are more like french churches
in italian speaking, like italy
in german speaking like south german ort austria

having data available they should put at least some kind of generic churches.

Just another issue close to that issue: it seems that if inside a city there is a small grocery store or a house with a small something like shopping (boutique or similar), the whole building construction becomes a shopping mall texture, with only truck ramps :frowning: