Version: 1.6.34.0
Frequency: Consistently
Severity: High
Context: All packages
Bug description: There are a lot of issues with vegetation polygons at the moment and thought I’d make one thread/report to address all of them in the hope that we can see some improvements to this tool. Currently vegetation polygons are often completely useless for many reasons which I will lay out in this thread, which means we scenery devs will have to use alternative methods to add vegetation to our scenery. All of those other methods come with drawbacks, and the best looking and easiest way would be to use a vegetation polygon.
Firstly, as already mentioned in another report, trees in Photogrammetry areas are still moving around if you move the camera to hide Photogrammtery tree blobs. Whilst this is a very smart way to hide them when flying over them, it makes them useless for custom scenery creation where there is nothing to hide. So the first needed fix is to finally have this behaviour removed from all custom placed vegetation polygons in all areas, PG or not. I reported this almost a year ago and there is still no fix for it. Vegetation polygons unpopulated in 2024 and trees are not fixed - #6 by Boris
The second issue is that custom vegetation polygons are way less populated than the autogen forests. Even when the density is set to its max value of 1. This leads to very obvious and bad looking differences when you have to patch in a forest, for example, because Autogen didn’t pick it up, or you removed some TIN. But not only that, because the density is so low for custom veg polies, it is impossible to spawn a lot of trees in a small area.
Even with Trees set to ULTRA and the density of the polygon set to max this is all I am getting. I see no reason why it couldn’t be denser since 10 extra trees surely wouldn’t harm performance when there are hundreds of thousands autogen trees around the airport anyways.
Using this example I want to illustrate their third issue: placement is not precise enough.
Even with a falloff of 0 the trees often spawn outside the set polygon. This is a problem because it means you can’t define vegetation areas precisely, so you often have to make them smaller than they should be. Which means the already sparse population gets even less.
This is a good example: the polygon clearly ends before the apron, yet there are 2 trees spawning outside their designated area. In order to not have trees spawn where they shouldn’t, I need to make the polygon this small to get it to work, leaving me with only 3 trees and 2 shrubs in the end - way too few.
Vegetation polygons not only need to be able to be more dense, but also more accurate at the same time. Look at this example here. Why is there no tree within the polygon in the green marked area, but one outside of the polygon? It makes no sense!
The fourth issue has to do biomes. Even if no other Biome is set in the vegetation polygon properties, the trees are different to the autogenerated ones. This means you cannot properly extend a forest, for example, with a vegetation polygon:
I think it’s pretty obvious where the vegetation polygon is. And as mentioned, no Biome override is set, meaning it should look exactly like the autogen around it to blend in with the area.
The fith issue has to do with TIN again. Autogen trees in TIN areas do not lose their leaves during winter to not expose the TIN blobs. This is fine, totally understandable, and actually a very smart way to do it. However, custom vegetation polygons do. This means if you have a custom vegetation polygon interacting with autogen, the difference is very clear again:
I don’t understand why you made the decision to give the TIN area behaviour when it comes to moving them around, but not when it comes to seasons. Currently they have the 2 worst characteristics combined, deeming them more or less useless. In reality, they should act the opposite of how they do now: They should not move and also should not have seasons in TIN areas.
To sum this up, there are 5 issues present with vegetation polygons at the moment:
- Moving trees in TIN areas
- Too sparsely populated
- Placement too inaccurate
- Not using the same biome as autogenerated trees
- They shouldn’t have seasons in TIN areas
See, I would use the single trees from the vegetation library instead for those more detailed areas in which I need a lot of and accurately placed trees, but the problem with them is that all of the trees in the default vegetation library are not properly LODed and suffer from severe lod popping. Creating my own trees would be an option, but even those, and even if properly looded, look way worse at a distance than vegetation polygon trees and autogen trees because they loose their leaves due to material masking issues. I have tried to mitigate it with some LODs and increasing the Alpha clip which somewhat works, but they are still worse than veg poly trees and autogen trees at a distance. So long story short, neither custom trees nor the ones from the default vegetation Lib look good at a distance and it would be better if we could use vegetation polygons. And what’s the point of having this beautiful in-sim vegetation of 2024 if we can’t use them and having to create our own again.
I hope you can take a look at their behaviour and improve them. Especially the moving tree issue in TIN areas needs to be fixed ASAP. Like I said, reported almost a year ago now.
Please take these issues seriously, they really do harm quality scenery production.
Best,
Michael