What I generally miss at object generation, that the villages never have a church tower. These are valuable points for VFR and to help recognize the place and should be taken into account better by the AI.
What I miss especially is the unique church tower at rovinj, croatia. This tower is iconic for this town, without it, it is like not having the church tower at venice.
I fully agree, important VFR scenery part. Just part of visuals on the horizon.
I miss them too. An absolute emergency solution would be to import a church tower from Blender into the Scenery Editor from MFS
Anyone know where the building data for autogen is coming from? Is it OSM?
If it is, then anyone can create a free account and go check / edit their favourite buildings / churches & make sure that at least they are represented, and are at least the correct shape.
.
I can sort of understand that parish churches might be a bit too much trouble for the devs to bother with, but to not even include major cathedrals, apart from the odd few in major tourist cities, or those that have photogrammetry is a bit of an oversight. Perhaps we will have to pay extra for those, as with London? Just taking London as anf example, ignoring, the dozens of well known churches that are missing, there is no Westminster Abbey, no Southwark Cathedral, no St Pauls Cathedral, elsewhere - Iconic cathedrals are notable by their absence. Some are major Flight nav aids such as Lincoln Cathedral. That is not even represented as a building.
I am from Denmark and the chuches here, all points towards west and therefor very good for navigation. Just ask RAF during WWII.
Furthermore, the are all very simalar, so make 2 or 3 standard chuches would be enough.
I guess we shouldnât be surprised by this. Clearly the autogen process wonât handle the unique buildings that these are. Now that we have the whole world to play in - just think how many significant churches, temples, mosques, castles, monuments and other notable civic buildings that means ⊠it will run into millions.
So there can be no real expectation of Asobo (or other developer) manually fixing this. I can see it playing out one of 3 ways:
(1) Eventually the scenery map data and building generation algorithms become smart enough to start generating passable representations of unique structures - probably the technological prime path, but donât hold you breath.
(2) 3rd party developers create âlandmarkâ add-ons. Okay if you like to fly only in very localized places, and have the $$$ and disk space to install it - kind of goes against the idea of a central data base we all pull from that is continually being improved.
(3) Asobo/MS provide the tools for the community to model landmarks and add them back into the central database - Not sure how this could be properly managed though.
Anyone from Asobo? - Would be interested to hear your thoughts and strategy on this in one of the regular briefings. If it has been discussed - I must have missed itâŠ
Iâd expect an automated way to get this done, as far as I know the FS consumes bing maps data and osm. Bing knows where such special buildings are, as they are described as such in maps.
Additionally at least for some places they have the feature âbird viewâ which gives a 3d view on the objects, so they have data about how the objects look like from 4 directions. Shouldnât this already be enough to bring this information together at least as a first shot until better options are avaliable by commnity/3rd party/own approaches?
Exactly.
Perhaps the long term strategy might be an expectation of much more photogrammetry ⊠brings itâs own issues, but it does reproduce the uniqueness of cities and their buildings.
Spent several happy hour flying low and slow over Florence and Rome specifically to sightsee the monuments. Both very impressive ⊠even though the giant monster zombie trees do their best to hide some of the sights!
If Xplane has radio towers, antennas, and power lines; and Google Earth/Maps has 3D everything including churches and houses down to my front porch; then something like Bing should be able to do this without issue.
Exactly as said above, not only churches but radio towers, large power lines radar dishes things are missing and probably will be unless a 3rd party adds them.
I would love to see better photgrammetry. This seems to be the way for worldwide coverage. OSM is good for Europe and a view other places. Adding European Landmarks in X-Plane in full detail cuts my frames in half. Another thing to consider.
If you fly over Guildford cathedral you will see just a flat outline of it. But what is interesting on the lawn area on its western side there is a large building. In real life there is nothing on that lawn but while they were doing building work on the cathedral there was a large marquee at this location. They have obviously modelled that as a building!
Just like we got power line towers recently, weâll at some point get more landmarks.
OSM has all data they need for churches, radio towers etc, they just have to model some generic objects and link the metadata (e.g. âamenity=place_of_worshipâ, maybe different models for the tag âreligionâ values).
I expect this to be added sooner or later, depending on the priority.
Is there a wishlist thread for us to vote already?
Itâs easy to know where churches are thanks to OSM data but itâs hard to model church towers over any kind of building. It would be probably easier to implement in the countryside where churches are usually small and look often the same. But itâs a lot harder in big towns.
I donât think anyone would complain to have just a small set of churches spawning at the right locations - thatâs what happens with other buildings as well.
It would still be better than the state now and would allow for visual navigation.
Same applies for radio towers etc.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.