Wishlist item for Blackshark AI: marinas, piers and small (sail) boats

In the last Dev Q&A, Jorg stated that there will be more church procedural buildings in the next world update.

2 Likes

Just to note, USS Missouri in Pearl Harbor has the same underwater image treatment as small (sail) boats, which is a bit disappointing as well.

It’s just an effect of the current AI method of working with water. If satellite imagery of the underwater parts exists, it will be covered by water.
Since marinas and boats are present almost all over the world, I would expect they can train the AI to detect them.

Aircraft carriers / battleships are more rare, so maybe that’ll be a bigger challenge for the AI, and might be better implemented as manual scenery.

Yeah, I wasn’t wondering about the cause, just saying that it is still a bit jarring a whole battleship submerged (and not to mention, comically unfortunate for one at Pearl Harbor!). I agree small boats in marinas should be a priority for AI tools.

I think the small boats should be pretty obvious targets for AI in most cases, since they are usually white,aainst a very dark background and already in places classified as water (barring boats on stashed in winter storage etc, but those are not nearly as noticeable). They could be mixed up with some ice rafts, though, so maybe there’s that edge case holding these back.

nah, I think their main focus so far has been on the land based stuff (judging by the amount of issues they’ve been having getting the water masks to work automatically, bringing them in manually for now). Still, judging by the land based results they’re getting, I’m sure this should be possible.

Yep, I meant a priority wrt. AI-generated battleships :).

Manual water masks? That is unfortunate, would you happen to have any links to share on that topic?

pff, not directly. It’s been mentioned in some of the Q&A’s I think, but can’t recall which ones anymore.

Ach. Thanks anyway! That is an interesting tidbit.

Yeh, would be so much nicer if watermasks worked automatically.

Most boats in harbors are not 3D rendered, we can only see a flat picture that shows boats as if they were all sunk. It seems only a few ferry or largest boats are 3d rendered. Please add generic models for small boats, at least in harbors.

Maybe Seafront simulation can help :wink:

Since they only do certain harbours (like custom airports) it would be nicer if the AI could do this. There must be millions of little marinas around the planet, and they all look pretty much the same. Sounds like a perfect task for the AI to pick up on.

5 Likes

Boats in marinas and parked at docks are just 2 dimensional white shapes most of which appear to be under the water. Docks along the water on lakes and rivers also appear to be under water. Is this just the way it is or do I have some other problem I need to deal with.
I would attach a screenshot if I could figure out how to do it.

HI,

Thats how it is on mine too.

Same here. Even where there’s boat house some are flat and blurry for me.

You are seeing the images of boats from the satellite photograph. The sim AI doesn’t automatically render these as 3D objects.

1 Like

Especially due to the fact that probably no one would care if such a “generic marina” would be displayed instead of the exact replica of the original. At least for me :wink:

Pretty much yes, although I feel the piers should be pretty easy to generate based on the imagery (for a given value of easy).

1 Like

thanks INoooch for adding this to the Dev Q&A session.

This is very easy for Blackshark AI to do. All Blackshark AI needs to do is determine what constitutes a marina. Once the AI can figure out what is a marina, it can set the boundaries of the marina and anything inside those boundaries that passes as a “submerged” boat can easily be replaced by a 3D boat. I don’t think this is too hard for Blackshark AI to do.

1 Like