Scenery status meet Feb 2024

Notes for a casual meeting for Scenery interested people held online on Feb 4th 2024. The contents just reflects status of different initiatives without specific commitments.

Agenda

• Introduction to each other (who, areas of interest in FG, ...).
• Present purpose and/or status and/or future direction and/or dependencies on different projects (ca. 10 min per project - not mandatory)
• Discussion of common topics.
• Possible influence on NEXT.

Notes and Links on Projects

Project/Initiative	Links	Owner(s)	Status / Notes
osm2city	Osm2city on wiki, repos on GitLab	vanosten, HB-VANO on FG Discord	Support for WS 3.0 / NEXT = up-to-date Migration of land-use from Python to C++ = plausible generation of lacking buildings ongoing, rest done Docker image = available FGElev API and memory reduction = not started Integration of instanced scenery object = waiting Better textures for buildings = only conceptual level started Roads/railway bridges, embankments etc. = waiting for WS3.0 settle Street lamps have good heuristics in osm2city - better than the data in OSM = ditto The reflection of mesh buildings vs. random buildings is different = why? Migrate lessons learned from random buildings - incl. normal maps, reflections, roof shader = waiting for random buildings to settle
Random Buildings update	https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/fgdata/ci/random_buildings/tree/	Volador on FG forum, volador_uk on FG Discord	Summary of progress: TheFGFSEagle has a random buildings development fork with the current work Fahim solved roof texture coordinates that were skewing textures. We can now have skylights and solar panels on pitched roofs as well as tiles/surfaces with improved detail (more work required to avoid clipping roof features). Eagle and Gabo solved lightmap, reflection and normal map problems but still some final tweaks required. A new 4k regional texture atlas available based on the layout of the current atlas for simplicity (now 4k agreed with Stuart and Rick) for UK / maybe Northern Europe?, working on one for Southern Europe but need photo contributions. Next steps: Enable normal maps (and maybe reflection maps) for roofs (to discuss effort vs return) Fahim to port texture coordinate solutions to the HDR shaders. Gather contributions from the community around the world to create regional textures (should be coordinated to avoid duplication) suggesting only a few key regions to start with. Assign new textures (once complete) to areas of the globe: Help required to implement this. Resources available for other contributors: Blender project to automatically create roof planes of given tile shape collections with geometry nodes. Output can be texture and also a separate normal map. Basic Blender skills required. Photoshop .psd and gimp templates for rows of houses and shop/apartments ready to share with contributors who can take pics locally, tweak perspective, follow a grid and send them in for integration and slot into larger texture atlases.
WS3.0 Water Features	World Scenery 3.0 coastlines	Stuart	Summary of Progress Created a python script (genwaterraster.py) to create a high resolution (1m/px) water feature PNG raster including coastlines, lakes, rivers for L6 LoD tiles. The PNG files are compressed and approx 4MB total per 1x1 degree tile. This is read at runtime by FG and for Medium/High/Ultra rendering settings overlays the terrain raster Next Steps Add to docker image

Discussion Topics

Proposed topics:

• Scenery build for 2023.4:

   * If based on WS2.0: use FGMS data to select areas with actual traffic to cut down on processing needs (e.g. for osm2city)? 
   * Do we change the default airport?
   * Update airports list?
   * Consider updating the manual to include end-user stuff for osm2city choices in rendering dialog.

• Scenery build for NEXT/WS3.0:

   * Which area(s) to pick with a commitment to "often" rebuild / adapt to latest changes in code/features? (Should probably cover different types of base data like Corine vs. US stuff vs. ...)
   * Do we go for a new future default airport? Are there any new "features" (like previous carrier, volcanos) in NEXT? E.g. EDDM for photo scenery (Bavaria).
   * Update airports list?
   * Also kept up to date for NEXT? 

Topic: Night Textures

• Have several lightmaps for different points during the night? => No too much work for artists. Should be able to do with shaders to use lightmaps more or less during night.

Topic: Screes etc. in mountains

• Doing the same as for water in WS3 might not be the right approach. Probably better to update the underlying (Corine) data at e.g. 10m resolution based on normals and/or OSM data for screes.

Topic: WS3 underlying landclasses

• Which source for different areas - outside of America and Europe?
• SENTINEL could be one source. Needs to be investigated how to do the mapping - and whether it can be generalized across regions.
• Need to distribute work to different people to find the right data sources in different regions.
• Pipelines need to be automated - manual work kills the possibility to build the world regularly.

Topic: Shared models vs. osm2city

• Consider turning off shared models in scenery database. Use OSM data (probably through osm2city) is a better source.
• Possibly delete existing shared stuff for NEXT, not 2020.4.