Re: WS3.0 Philosophy and Status

Hi Stuart,

Thank you for that. I do have a Next build running at the moment on one of
my machines and it does indeed look fantastic, there are probably some
generation issues as gaps in tiles (Loading up in the Stranraer area from
EGOY shows these quite well I think) but, if I can get some tools up and
running then generating versions of this to fix shouldn't be a problem.

One big question I have is about Orthos. Are these part of any upcoming
plans, I understand that theres differences between the current ones and
what's needed by WS3 but, to my mind, Orthos are a fantastic way of making
the most use of the terrain data while draping it with something that can
hide oddities, and especially where there's transitions between water/land.

I recall from last year, I think, there were some issues regarding
compression of the WS3 scenery and it being unable to be loaded compressed
on some machines but I can't seem to replicate the issues I was having last
year, is this all resolved?

Please keep up the good work, the difference in terrain and overall look is
such a huge leap in what we have, even in areas that have a good WS2
coverage. The jump from those in less well generated areas is going to be
incredible.

All the best,
Alex

On Thu, 28 May 2026 at 21:51, Stuart Buchanan <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Alex,
>
> On Thu, May 28, 2026 at 10:05 AM Alex Barrett wrote:
>
>> Great, Stuart. Thank you for the clarity.
>>
>> The big question I'd like to ask, I suppose, is how can we best help with
>> the effort? There's, I would imagine, a lot of people who'd really love to
>> see WS3.0 come to fruition and enjoy the benefits. How can we mobilise the
>> curious casual user to benefit the project?
>>
>
> I think there are a couple of areas that folks can really help:  Testing
> the scenery quality, benchlining performance and using the scenery
> generation tools.
>
> However, while WS3.0 is available on 2024.1,  I would not recommend using
> it for testing purposes as it is quite far behind "next" in terms of
> development.  So that means either using "next" (e.g. build from source or
> a nightly build), or waiting for the upcoming Tech Preview 1 release.  I
> would recommend the latter for the "curious casual user", as I think
> running "next" for most users is just going to lead to frustration right
> now.
>
> (Of course, if you're already running "next" then you're already seeing
> WS3.0).
>
> In terms of helping:
>
> Scenery Quality: There would be a lot of value in folks checking out their
> favourite or local area and providing feedback on the scenery quality.
>  While WS3.0 uses regional textures, it has a single shader for all land,
> as opposed to the multiple different shaders in WS2.0, so rendering is
> quite different.
>
> Performance benchmarking:  I'd like to get a better handle on performance
> on different platforms.  This is also going to be impacted by the HDR/PBR
> pipeline as well as Core Profile support, so it's difficult to make an
> apples-to-apples comparison. However,  our hope/expectation is that
> performance will be better than 2024.1, particularly on lower-end hardware
> and systems with integrated graphics.  It would be really useful to
> understand if that is the case or not.
>
> Scenery Generating Tools:  Probably going a bit beyond the curious casual
> user, but one big improvement compared with WS2.0 is the ease with which
> new scenery can be generated.  Scenery developers can use standard tools
> such as QGIS to generate landcover rasters, then a docker image to generate
> scenery.  In the future we may have a database that will allow the scenery
> to be updated as easily as updating objects in Terrasync. Wayne has already
> been using these tools and uncovering lots of bugs and assumptions in
> them.  Having more people try it out would be great.
>
> -Stuart
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