I am interested in trying this program, but have a couple questions about it.Is there a commercial or freeware utility similar to Tileproxy on MSFS, which automatically downloads and overlays satellite/aerial photographs onto the landscape you are flying over?Are terrain meshes available at a higher resolution than 70m SRTM, such as the third party 38m DEM mesh for Europe/ North America in the MSFS world?Thanks,Steve Stobbe

I am interested in providing just that.(being the author of Tileproxy for FSX may help in this case)I recently succeeded to compile FlightGear from source on Windows XP.

I would be grateful if anyone could point me towards some resources (text, not source code ) that outline the TERRAIN ENGINE that is currently being used by FlightGear.From what I found so far it appears FlightGear uses irregular grids to approximate the terrain. Are these grids created at run time or by offline tools?Have a look at this AWESOME paper (try to ignore the militaristic title about battlefield visualizaiton):http://www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocumen...1__fulltext.pdfCan we get this level of detail, please? ;-)In above paper they use Displacement mapping (Vertex Shader 3.0) to get 30-60 FPS on extreme elevation detail. That's the kind of graphics that I would love to see in FlightGear. And on top of that we can map photorealistic terrain. *grin* Would be kind of cool if FlightGear could outwit the FSX terrain engine with more advanced technology.Another thing that I would love to see in a flight simulator is self shadowing of terrain in accordance to the sun's position. We have that in FSX, but it's updating slowly (tile by tile) and the resolution appears to be low: LOD 15 (4.75m/pixel), i.e. 256x256 pixel per tile.

And I too hope that things are going to go this way. Although I read a thread somewhere in which FG's developers seemed to be taking a stance for simulation vs. reproduction.