XP vs Real life

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

Well, getting good looking city centers / big skyscrapers has been a long standing issue in X-Plane. Simply - as almost all of the scenery is algorithmically generated - for the reason of the absence of really good landclass information (getting  

 

 

Great - thanks for sharing looks way better  :wink:

[Paraffin 2,197]

Talking about Munich, this must be one of the most wrong looking city in both major sims, followed by Miami. Living here I sometimes wonder how wrong all the other stuff must be in real life. 

 

Native-born Miamian here. I no longer live there, but I did a lot of commercial aerial photography based out of Miami before I retired.

 

Miami gets killed two ways in X-Plane: Once by the current autogen (not enough orange clay tile roofs!), and then again by the dark and ugly near-shore water colors in X-Plane.

 

The water looks even worse a little further south in the Florida Keys, where the default water lacks those gorgeous turquoise colors. Or anywhere else in the Caribbean... the South Pacific. I am not a fan of orthophoto scenery, but water colors in these areas is one place they can do wonders for immersion. It's why I spend very little time in X-Plane flying the 'Crib or South Pacific. There is great free scenery with hand-placed water color for a few individual airports, but you can't fly the whole area and see that. The default water color just kills it.

 

I have hopes that one day we'll get near-shore automated "waterclass" colors in X-Plane based on bathymetric and sediment data. This might also allow proper colors for rivers too, like alpine/glacial rivers with a light blue color, or the brown color of the Amazon river. If you've ever flown over the middle and lower Amazon in a small plane (I have), you know it doesn't look blue.

 

I guess this should be back-benched until we get seasonal terrain, but it doesn't seem like something that would require a lot of extra CPU/GPU load. The sim needs the database to calculate it, but it's just a simple variable in the color palette for water. 

[Richard Sennett 2,499]

I have hopes that one day we'll get near-shore automated "waterclass" colors in X-Plane based on bathymetric and sediment data. This might also allow proper colors for rivers too, like alpine/glacial rivers with a light blue color, or the brown color of the Amazon river. I guess this should be back-benched until we get seasonal terrain, but it doesn't seem like something that would require a lot of extra CPU/GPU load. The sim needs the database to calculate it, but it's just a simple variable in the color palette for water. 

 

Careful what you wish for  :wink: maybe some day your wish may come true but until XP11 becomes stable just to soon for anyone to develop such products 

[hjsmuc 393]

 

 

you can never have it perfectly.

 

Well, of course not. Nothing made by humans is perfect. But flight sim stock sceneries are still so bad in 2017 that it sometimes really turns me away. Whether you fly over my home town or Paris, London and Miami, it's a really petty depiction on both ESP and XP. San Francisco, LA and New York get some attention in XP but that's it then. I hear the voices who get excited about tire friction and propeller physics so I guess it's all about preferences. But judging from the tons of comments here I believe that the majority of users is caring about scenery and weather, and not many seem to listen. 

 

 

Miami gets killed two ways in X-Plane:

 

Similar for Munich. Roofs are wrong, building shapes are wrong, colors of the green spaces are wrong, major buildings are missing, most roads are wrong. The same on ESP and XP. On ESP even with Vector. Of course, webcams and GE have made it hard not to compare with the "real" thing. 

[bonchie 2,305]

That's my one big disappointment with XP.

 

In P3D, I loved flying in Florida and the Caribbean, but the lack of waterclass and variation in land textures/autogen just kills it.

 

I'm not sure how difficult it will be for them to one day implement that. But I have no doubt it's not coming any time soon just given LR's history.

[airlinejets 709]

That's my one big disappointment with XP.

 

In P3D, I loved flying in Florida and the Caribbean, but the lack of waterclass and variation in land textures/autogen just kills it.

 

I'm not sure how difficult it will be for them to one day implement that. But I have no doubt it's not coming any time soon just given LR's history.

Sorry but not even P3D comes anywhere near to what the Caribbean actually looks like. Not even close.

[TuFun 435]

Boo hoo... get real, fly the real deal!

Sorry but not even P3D comes anywhere near to what the Caribbean actually looks like. Not even close.

 

That's my one big disappointment with XP.

 

In P3D, I loved flying in Florida and the Caribbean, but the lack of waterclass and variation in land textures/autogen just kills it.

 

I'm not sure how difficult it will be for them to one day implement that. But I have no doubt it's not coming any time soon just given LR's history.

[bonchie 2,305]

Sorry but not even P3D comes anywhere near to what the Caribbean actually looks like. Not even close.

 

It's much, much closer (assuming the proper addons and landclass), and yes I've flown there in real life. I've found it to be a pretty decent presentation in simulator terms simply, at the very least because P3D does a good job with water class, beaches, and tropical forests (again assuming the proper addons).

 

The way XP does ground textures, you end up with a mix of desert/green and then the autogen are still US residential neighborhoods with green underlays on top of brown. It just looks really bad. And the lack of water class gives you no feeling of being in a tropical environment.

[alpilotx 505]

Well, about criticism of bad autogen ... I can only repeat: it is extremely (!) resource intensive to create artwork. Period. Even if everybody is unhappy, that doesn't change this simple fact. And to get more autogen variety (which is technically absolutely no problem in XP10/11) you simply need more resources .... And usually you can choose for "needing more time" (to have the same number of artists produce more artwork) or "spending more money" (for more artists etc.). There is simply no such thing as free beer ...

 

And about water colors .... well, I do not want to spill the beans, but some experiments have been conducted in that area (getting some halfway usable data for it was more complicated than some might imagine .... because water color is a - scientifically - complex topic ... but I think I found something halfway acceptable) and some code is in place in XP11 (which might need some tuning, tweaking) and some data to support it is now ready too .... ... And now forget what I wrote here, and be happy if something comes at some point.

[finkelstein 25]

Well, about criticism of bad autogen ... I can only repeat: it is extremely (!) resource intensive to create artwork. Period. Even if everybody is unhappy, that doesn't change this simple fact. And to get more autogen variety (which is technically absolutely no problem in XP10/11) you simply need more resources .... And usually you can choose for "needing more time" (to have the same number of artists produce more artwork) or "spending more money" (for more artists etc.). There is simply no such thing as free beer ...

 

And about water colors .... well, I do not want to spill the beans, but some experiments have been conducted in that area (getting some halfway usable data for it was more complicated than some might imagine .... because water color is a - scientifically - complex topic ... but I think I found something halfway acceptable) and some code is in place in XP11 (which might need some tuning, tweaking) and some data to support it is now ready too .... ... And now forget what I wrote here, and be happy if something comes at some point.

 

Now that is some interesting news, Andras! Thank you for sharing. I would guess that getting good reliable and global data for certain aspects can often end up being a challenge.

[Mountain Man 142]

Well, of course not. Nothing made by humans is perfect. But flight sim stock sceneries are still so bad in 2017 that it sometimes really turns me away.

 

You're talking about trying to accurately model the entire earth!  That's such an absurdly monumental task that I think the few times a flight sim manages to get it right is more notable than the many, many times it gets it wrong.  Austin's goal with X-Plane is plausibility and not "I can see my house" fidelity.  I'm not a pilot but I have flown commercial many times, and based on what I've seen out of a jetliner's windows, X-Plane is pretty darn close.

 

I hear the voices who get excited about tire friction and propeller physics so I guess it's all about preferences. But judging from the tons of comments here I believe that the majority of users is caring about scenery and weather, and not many seem to listen.

 

Well, it is a flight simulator and not a scenery simulator.

[LAdamson 240]

 

 

Well, it is a flight simulator and not a scenery simulator.

 

But........................As I've always said, I flew to see the scenery!  Never could stand that IFR shades of gray thing, when we have all the panoramic vistas of the Mountain West out here. Never the less, happily, X-Plane does a very reasonable job of creating mountain areas. One of the main reasons I like it.   I went to the expense of real life flight................almost expressly for the scenery. Not as a mode of transportation. 

[hjsmuc 393]

You're talking about trying to accurately model the entire earth! 

 

 

No, only some relevant parts of the worlds where a majority of simmers want to fly.

 

 

 

Well, it is a flight simulator and not a scenery simulator.

 

 

 

In this case we could have stopped at XP 9 and just advanced this edition. 

 

I appreciate and embrace every little progress in this niche market but in my opinion the progress is still coming in very small steps.  

 

Therefore, how about an on-line survey trying to find out what counts most for avsim members, related to the sim they prefer and sims in general? Not saying that it would impress the creative people but at least we might get a better picture of where the votes are heading to. And this would be interesting for the business because that's where the money will be heading to eventually. 

 

 

[Mountain Man 142]

No, only some relevant parts of the worlds where a majority of simmers want to fly.

 

Are there really places on earth where "a majority of simmers want to fly"?  Seems to me that most people want their own town accurately modeled, or the region around their favorite airport.  When I fly in X-Plane, I generally choose Ohio, Virginia, or Alaska since those are places I've lived (although Alaska may or not be included in X-Plane 11... bah!).  I have a feeling that if you asked two-dozen sim pilots for their favorite flying spot, you would get two-dozen different answers.  I think Austin's plausible scenery is a brilliant solution to this sticky problem, because no matter what, you're always going to have someone upset that their favorite flying spot is not accurately modeled.

[hjsmuc 393]

You're probably right regarding the "majority". Although, I still think that the US and Europe are the home of most simmers, leaving Asia and Africa and other parts of the world orphaned.

 

Also, I do not think that "plausible" will be able to do the job in the future. While it is better than the old ESP scenery approach it leaves too much too desire. Why? Because we today can see so much more of a world we've never been to. German houses in France and Sweden look as wrong as US houses in Brazil and Peru. And you don't have to have traveled to far away places to recognize. At least a continent/country based autogen is needed.

 

Therefore, I advocate a package structure for flight sims. A base package for the sim (flight model and basic aircraft and a demo area), another package for advanced aircraft, countries and continents and so on. More expensive, less plausible, but better adapted to give the customer a choice.

 

I would love to survey the opinions on this matter. This is all very subjective.