New Product ‘X’

For the last few years we have been listening to some of the things our users have been requesting.   Mainly, these are things that will greatly improve VFR flight in FSX and allow users to more readily recognize local landmarks (i.e. shopping malls,  strip centers, schools, etc).  And, we have long heard requests to actually have houses that follow accurate roads, instead of having housing autogen in FSX that follows the “fake” roads in the landclass textures.

A lot of people have been wondering what we could possibly be up to for the last 6 months.  Well, we have been very, very busy working on a new product development system (internal software).   This system will allow us to create large, semi-detailed scenery areas with a reasonable amount of manual work.

Each scenery area that we will release will provide:

1) Semi-Custom objects that are accurately sized, shaped and positioned according to there real world positions.   We call them semi-custom because the textures are generic, even though the building shapes and locations are accurate (generic textures will help performance).

2) Generic buildings from TeleAtlas POI (Point-Of-Interest) data.   These are buildings that are placed using POI data and oriented to face the accurately positioned roads.  So, you will see a generic "Auto Parts" building where one exists in real-life (or close to it).  Same for churches, restaurants, etc.

3) Finally, you will get housing terrain imprints and actual housing objects that follow accurate roads.    Urban landclass is completely removed.  So, you will no longer see the "fake" roads that are embedded in the landclass textures.  The only roads you will see are accurately positioned ones.

For years we have been discussing this potential product line.  Internally, we called it Ultimate Objects.  Since the project does not have an official name right now, I am just calling it project ‘X’ in this thread.

The goal of scenery packages we create with our new system is not to provide incredibly detailed buildings at close range.   Instead, we are going for "perception of reality" from VFR flights.   So, users familiar with an area will see something that looks very close to reality, without completely hammering frame rates.   Things like large shopping malls, universities, high schools will all be custom drawn in a very efficient manner.   Other areas based on the POI data used will have appropriate generic buildings placed.   In residential areas, you will finally be able to locate your street and see houses following it, although the houses are generic and not spaced like they would be in the real-world.

At this time, there is no information available as to when products will be released with this new system, how they will be packaged or how they will be priced.    One very probable situation is that we include the technology in our upcoming Ultimate Terrain X Alaska package as a kind of a demo.   Alaska might work well because there will be very few urban areas.   So, there would be no need for a separate Alaska product using this new technology.

The new product series will work terrific with Ultimate Terrain X.  Although, Ultimate Terrain is not necessary.   This new product is kind of like an Ultimate Terrain for buildings.   Ultimate Terrain provides the ground terrain features.   This new product provides the 3D objects to work with the accurate terrain in Ultimate Terrain.

Our internal test scenery area is a 2,500sq kilometer area around Tyler, Texas.  I will post a couple comparison shots showing the new technology.  But, please remember that while the system is in place, a lot of the textures and building repetitions need to be improved upon.    I just wanted to show you guys what has been going on to build some excitement.

Enjoy !   Screen shots to follow (hopefully they will post today).

Here is our version of Tyler, Texas.   You will notice a noticably present downtown area, stadiums, storage tanks, businesses, schools and accurately placed residential roads with houses.

Our new development system has a feature called “dynamic object positioning”.    This allows us to create things like apartment complexes, warehouse districts and even downtown areas without having to draw out each object by hand.   Instead, we mark off an area and the software populates it with appropriate buildings aligning the roads.   This will allow us to included city centers for even the smallest cities and include them in a product covering a very large area.

Here we have a couple of apartment complexes using the dynamic object technology.

Hi,

This is nothing short of revolutionary! Been thinking about this idea for a long time - obviously I have zero skills to actually pull it through so it is great to see that you are working on it. The screenshots demonstrate excellently the difference - finally cities might actually take shape replacing the current blob of buildings and the archaic landclass system at least for towns.

Finally also a tool that could solve the issue of autogenless photoscenery. BTW how are the green areas addressed inside a city such as parks, greens and trees alongside the roads?

I am really looking forward to see the demonstration of the technology in UTX Alaska.

Thank you,

Alex

Way to go team.

My areas to fly in FS are Alaska from Southcentral north and west, Upstate NY, Montana, and East Texas. After all, I live within 10 minutes of Tyler, TX. I have a reworked version of Tyler Pounds Field with the new terminal and AFCAD for UTX if this doesn't address that.

Mine also includes the Air Museum static display by the old terminal, control tower.

Keep up the good work, and I'm looking forward to this and UTX Alaska so I can update several sceneries to work with it.

David

Yes, this is great news Allen.  i have been waiting for some information on this and it looks and sounds even better then i expected.  i lok forward to some more information as it becomes available, the screen shots are great to see as well.  I have to start saing up for this. 

Kyle

This looks very exciting!  I'll be keeping an eye on it for sure.

Thanks Allen.

Jim

"You mentioned you eliminated the urban landclass, what lc textures will be used in place of them as a base?"

We will use the most appropriate vegetative landclass textures that available as background images.   In this particular area, the best textures are forest textures or forest/field textures without any structures embedded in them (like farms).

"And how will they blend into the surroudings? Maybe youn could post a pic of the border area of your test area."

This should blend in perfectly with UTX and pretty well with FSX (withoug UTX).  The roads with houses will directly replace the urban/residential roads in UTX (which most people turn off now anyway).   So, most roads that are tagged as urban/minor roads in UTX will have houses with this product.   Since the urban/rural classifications in the commercial road data are not perfect, there will be some roads that have houses when they should not and vice-versa.  But, the overall improvement in accuracy over landclass will be huge.

Some day, we might reclassify all roads by hand to be urban or rural.  But, this is a huge project.  So, for now we just have to rely on the commercial source data classifications.

"How will this effect 3rd party landclass? Will Poject X override other landclass in urban areas?"

Yes, it will override other landclass packages.   If you have UTX, then you just turn off the city landclass layer (no need for the extra overhead).

"How will this effect 3rd party textures such a GEX?"

It won't.

"I noticed a lack of vegetation autogen will this be corrected?"

The replacement landclass logic was just recently added.   I believe the texture that I chose for some areas was missing autogen definitions.   You will notice that the forested landclass textures used around the city have a lot of vegetation.

There is also a slight possibility that the maximum number of autogen objects in FSX are being displayed (6,000 ?).   But, I don't think this is the case.

We still have a lot of work planned for the texturing.    So, while this is pretty close to what the finished product will look like, there is a lot of polishing to do.

FWIW, I have no doubt that GEX will further enhance project 'X'.   And, as Nick says, we are still a long way from actually having a released product using this technology (except for maybe Alaska as a demo).

What we do know, is that there is interest in what we are doing, it looks good even in the current state, and will not slaughter frame rates.

I will keep you guys updated and try and provide a few new screenshots at times.   I would like to come up with an official name for the product ASAP, instead of calling it project 'X'.    One possible, but some boring name would be "Ultimate Cityscapes", which would play off our Ultimate Terrain product line.

empeck wrote: This is one of the best FSX projects I've seen lately. Are you considering Europe version too?

Absolutely.    Europe is going to take some additional work because of the different textures and the diagonal "block buildings" in the larger cities (I don't know what they are called officially).

This new product is going to require us to expand our development team in order to get the products out in a reasonable time.    Even though we have highly automated the process, there is still a significant amount of manual work that must be done in each area (depending on how many semi-custom areas are present).

At this time, I am pretty sure that we are going to have to break the products up into smaller regions than UTX, if we provide a significant number of semi-custom objects.  The size of the product regions will also depend on the amount of urban areas present.   Since Canada is fairly rural, I can see it being a unique product.  But, the USA and Europe will probably have to be broken up a bit.    I will have more details as time goes on.  

What I am doing right now is creating test areas with the development system and trying to see how long it takes to work a region.   When the development system has been tweaked to the max for developer efficiency (speed of development), then it will be time to decide how the products will be packaged and how large the development staff will need to be.  At some point I will probably ask for some user feedback on the packaging.

kiwikat wrote: This is just incredible!!!  The magnitude of difference this will make is staggering.  Sounds like quite the project though. Allen your PM inbox is full.  If you don't mind could you PM me with another means of contacting you?  Thanks. Keep it up guys.  This will be the biggest thing to happen to MSFS yet!

I cleared out my mailbox a bit.  So, you can PM me if you want....

"Sounds like quite the project though."

Yes, the software development has been very challenging.   A few of the base ideas came from a Terramodels development system that I did for Fly! several years ago.    But, this system probably has 20x the functionality.   The goal is to speed up object placement as fast as humanly possible, cutting corners where applicable.   For example, instead of modeling the entire downtown area for Tyler above, an area is marked off using satellite imagery, a category is selected using my software (medium sized city) and then the software populates all areas along the roads in the marked off area with appropriate objects (from the selected category).    So, the downtown area is the exact size as real-life.  But, the buildings placed are semi-random.   I don't know if that explaination made sense :)

I have been buried in code for at least the last 6 months on this, which is why I have not had much of a forum presence lately.   

I am hoping that this product can breath new life into FSX.  But, it is being developed with other simulator platforms in mind also just in case :)

Allen, i thought your comment about breathing new life into FSX was dead on.  if FSX is the last of the breed, then developers like yourself are the ones who can make it a whole new sim again.  i think the project looks amazing and cant wait for more info.

kyle