It's got the look!

Through iterative rendering, testing, and mainly due to user feedback, I deemed it necessary that some of textures in the resource pool require better appeal, but also, many of the resources lacked a proper color grading.

The following resources have received visual upgrades, and proper color grading was applied:

landuse:farmland

landuse:forest

landuse:grassland

landuse:meadow

natural:water

natural:wood

Additionally, farmlands and forests have received 10 additional resources, totaling in 25 instead of 15 - further increasing diversity in the final renders.

As a result of this color grading, the post processing effects that were applied when the Ortho4XP tiles were created, have been removed - meaning the renders are exactly the way the engine has rendered them.

Below you can find some examples.


















Data mismatches

While I was preparing the tile +50+009 for publishing, I noticed that the renders show up empty areas, where as the map on OpenStreetMap for the same area shows farmlands and meadows.

After inspecting the dataset of the tile, and the changeset of OSM, it became clear: most of the farmlands and meadows were added last month - thus, this data is not present in my current set. My core data is the Europe PBF file, which is from about eight months ago.

Luckily, the issue is local and only to some specific areas in that tile. I am working on a mechanism to update the data without causing mismatches with the remaining existing tiles. When I have a solution, I will post it in a separate post.


Buildings on renders

Earlier iterations of the engine incorporated buildings of many tags, but as buildings use up large amounts of memory when reading the data and decompressing it into RAM. Every building is, equal to any OSM tag, its own entry, complete with coordinate nodes and other additional information.

Additionally, I used to store buildings in separate data blocks, which also caused CPU spikes when reading them.

To solve this issue, I have removed buildings from the rendering pipeline - so that X-Plane can add geometry on top of the ground imagery. Strong recommendation: X-World or X-World Pro, as these use the same OSM data that I do.

I have found an alternative that I am going to test further, and if successful, I am considering offering separate Orthographic tiles which include buildings as well as roads under the name Orthographic Pro.

As soon as there is viable and presentable material, there will be a post about it.