Re: WS3.0 Philosophy and Status

Hi all,

What is the consensus on exposing or promoting any the following

https://terrasync.b-cdn.net/ws3
https://terrasync.b-cdn.net/_old_ws3
https://us1mirror.flightgear.org/terrasync/ws3/

The USA link at 
https://wiki.flightgear.org/World_Scenery_3.0#Currently_Available_Scenery 
is no longer valid, can I change it to point at either 
https://terrasync.b-cdn.net/ws3 or 
https://us1mirror.flightgear.org/terrasync/ws3/?

Is it OK to point users to either of these two repositories?

Does anyone know exactly what https://terrasync.b-cdn.net/_old_ws3 is?

Thanks,

  Wayne

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 5/28/2026 3:58 AM, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
> Hi Folks,
>
> Extracting one of the specific questions that came out of another thread:
>
> On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 12:20 PM James Turner wrote:
>
>>     On 27 May 2026, at 11:21, Willie Fleming wrote:
>>
>>     I think the best bang for the buck commits would be stuff I
>>     desperately want to know myself like
>>
>>     What is the philosophy behind WS3.0 and what is its status?
>>     How do the various rendering options work?
>>     How can I get good results from each aicraft with the new compsitor.
>>
>>     If i knew that stuff Id be delighted to write it up and commit.
>
>     Well, the former, isn’t a docs topic, it’s a ‘ask here’ topic, and
>     Stuart will enlighten you :)
>
>
> The philosophy behind WS3.0 was to replace the original terrain 
> scenery (which I'll shorthand as WS2.0, though that's not really 
> accurate) with something more maintainable and which would address 
> many of the limitations that had become more and more apparent.
>
> For those not familiar, WS2.0 terrain is made up of tiles of 
> approximately 30kmx30km.  Each tile is an irregular mesh of triangles, 
> and each triangle is a flat surface of a particular landclass (forest, 
> desert, water, road).  Airports are generated as separate files and 
> holes are created in them mesh for them to slot into.
>
> It's worth acknowledging how ground-breaking FlightGear's original 
> scenery was:  It was designed from the ground-up to properly model the 
> earth's curved surface using WGS84 at a time when contemporary 
> simulators were building flat terrain, and support a diverse range of 
> scenery sources.  It is a really impressive piece of work.
>
> However, it has a number of fundamental limitations:
> - As the visibility range increases, more and more tiles have to be 
> loaded.  Doubling the visibility range from 50km to 100km requires 4 
> times as many tiles to be loaded.
> - Increasing the scenery detail level increases the number of 
> triangles massively.  This is particularly apparent when adding more 
> roads to the terrain itself.
> - The tile edges are irregular and vary depending on the triangles.  
> You cannot update just a small piece of scenery without creating 
> discontinuities in the mesh.
> - Updating airport layouts requires regenerating the underlying scenery,
> - The mesh wasn't "graphics card friendly" as each landclass required 
> a separate Effect.
>
> Furthermore, there were specific maintenance limitations:
> - WS2.0 scenery generation process required a very large custom 
> database.  Martin Spott did a fantastic job creating this database 
> covering the entire world and using a variety of datasource at a time 
> when satellite data was less ubiquitous than it is now.  However he 
> retired from the project and the status of the database was unclear.
> - Even with the database intact, the process to update with new 
> scenery data was difficult.
> - Because of the impact of airport layout changes on the underlying 
> terrain, airports were not updated.
>
> WS3.0 seeks to address these limitations by:
> - Using LoD model so that scenery further away has less detail than 
> scenery close by.  This means increasing visibility has far less 
> performance impact.
> - Encoding landclass information as a texture rather than triangles so 
> that a) increasing scenery detail has less performance impact and b) 
> tile edges are regular and individual tiles can be regenerated. c) 
> scenery rendering is more graphics card friendly
> - Draping line features such as roads over the top of the terrain at 
> runtime
> - Fitting airports into the mesh at runtime so new airport layouts 
> don't require new scenery.
> - Using more standard tools so that scenery generation is much easier 
> for scenery developers.
>
> Current status:
> - WS3.0 is supported on "next", and will be part of Tech Preview 1.
> - The tooling for users to generate scenery themselves is available as 
> a Docker image.  Wayne has been patiently testing this and finding 
> plenty of bugs as he works on detailed scenery for the US.
> - We have detailed scenery for part of Europe, and Nia did a complete 
> build of the world using Sentinel-2 data, which is available on Terrasync
> - We've still to work out the details on delivering WS2.0 and WS3.0 
> scenery models in parallel.
> - There are still some rough edges.
>
> -Stuart
>
>
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