I occasionally use add-on land vehicles to explore roads. Sometimes I encounter roads that have random bumps on them.
If possible, I’d like to request for the Microsoft/Asobo team to fix these random bumps and make it so the roads are smooth. This will help both land vehicles and aircraft that attempt to make emergency landings.
Thank you for your time!
That might be a bit difficult to complete, what with their being an estimated 13 million miles of roads worldwide.
I can see it being worse in photogrammetry areas, and perhaps annoyingly in 2024 if they do increase the terrain mesh resolution this problem could get worse.
Smoothing small bumps (anomalies) on roads that are on a wide level surface might be doable, as one would be removing one or more points of a triangle to make a larger & flatter triangle whose inclination is closer to surrounding triangles. In visual terms, think of a pyramid being the “bump”. Remove the apex at the top, and now you have just a flat square base, that one can represent as two triangles with a common diagonal. If the surrounding area is also flat-ish, then the “bump” is gone!
However, to “smooth” all roads in the sim along their entire length would be harder, especially in mountainous or hilly terrain because it would require creating cuttings & embankments, which would require creating a higher mesh resolution along & beside the road. Otherwise, you get very jagged edges on either side of the flat road - whether level or inclined (i.e. with a gradient) - where the level road joins the mountain or hillside slope. These jagged edges would look terrible (and did, in some older games that I used to play a long time ago).
Even if technically possible, this super-high mesh resolution might negatively impact performance, especially when flying low & slow.
It seems totally doable with the tech they’re putting into FS24. Check out their presentation on the topic at 16 minutes:
After their machine learning algorithms detect where the roadway is, it sounds like they can tesselate local parts of the mesh that need attention, like where the terrain has to be modified to allow for a flat road. This can be done on the fly using geometry shaders and controlled with levels of detail so you only get high resolution mesh geometry as needed. It’ll require a lot of fine tuning to prevent scenery popping, but this should be totally in the realm of possibilities for the next gen sim.
I was just going to mention that. One of the trickiest things it has to deal with, and pretty much constantly fails, are roads which are embedded into a slope.
I didn’t have an image to hand for Bing but here is the Stelvio Pass in Italy in Google Maps. Note how the road is on the same slope as the hillside, rather than flat.
I haven’t been there in the sim before, but I would bet it looks just like this or worse. And incidentally looks like it would be a great place to fly!
Yes, the only way to do this globally is with AI. Some games, like the very old MS Train Simulator v1.0, had this problem of creating a flat trackbed (or roadbed in this case) on a slope, and allowed users to create a much finer tessellation just along the route of the track for the creation of cuttings & embankments. However, this was a 100% manual process and took hours of work per mile to get it to look right, and with the low-resolution DEM available at the time, never really looked OK. The other problem is the visual smearing of the ground image that results, but I’ve read that they are already working on this for cliff-faces, so could use the same technology for road embankments & cuttings too.
I guess this is a very minor issue for most flight simmers, but having picked up the crosskart on sale recently, I would love to see this done. Seeing the beauty of the world from the ground level brings an extra layer of immersion, and for those of us who enjoy driving (or maybe motor biking?!) smooth roads would open up such an exciting way of spending our time in the sim.
(Yes, I know it’s a flight sim
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