Just collecting some wishes that Santa Claus should bring us

Regarding pre-loading of flight plans, would it be possible to create FSX-style BGLs along the flight path, and use TileProxy as it is now (ie. FS9-style BGLs) only for 'background' scenery, that is, for the low resolution tiles further out?

Those BGLs would have to be rectangular.Flight plans follow multiple interconnected lines and would require lots of mosaiced BGLs to cover appropriately. Then you would have to rescan your scenery library to recognize all these BGLs.There's other tools to preload scenery into FSX BGLs. One of these is discussed heavily in the forums on www.fspassengers.comhttp://www.fspassengers.com/forum/read.php?f=9&i=4634&t=4634dang, this thread grew LONG.Christian

I think we have a clear trend here. Most people want some good AutoGen on their photo scenery. If done automatically by a machine, this will mean a *lot* of CPU intensive image processing.If done by humans, we need a good editor integrated (newly developed or third party) and a feature to share the placed autogen with others through a server infrastructure.I guess it would be a good start if we could manage to get forests detected automatically. Dark forest areas are one of the more easily detectable features.As a next step one might try to detect buildings. However this will need some side information, mostly we need outlines of city areas. Otherwise the algorithm will start identifying rocks and other things as buildings. So we will need a good database of urban areas first. We could also consider having humans outline the areas with buildings and then an image processing algorithm picks out individual buildings and places Autogen on top.An integration with better street vector data might be feasible. The OpenStreetMap project is a good place to start looking for data. This could improve the accuracy of road traffic so you would see cars travelling on minor roads also. OpenStreetMaps is a project that is going to grow a lot, much like Wikipedia. I don't think it will die anytime soon.Oh, let me quickly announce that I intend to reuse some of the Tileproxy code to get photorealistic terrain mapping capability into FlightGear. Why? I think I will get a MUCH better performance loading textures there, having access to the entire source code of the project. So the tile loading backend of Tileproxy may stay much the same, but the "proxyUser.EXE" simulator interface has to be merged with or adapted to Flight Gear. The most challenging aspect of this work is that their terrain is based on irregular shaped meshes. This makes texture mapping very difficult. Yet I need to reuse this mesh because anything else would mean rewriting their terrain engine. And frankly, I don't have the time for this ;) Note that this contribution may become an unnofficial branch of FlightGrar. There may be a lot of resistance against integrating this with their official code base - mostly due to legal concerns.Christian

I am sure I will use Flight Gear next year !great news !:9

Christian,Just curious if you ever looked into using Tile Proxy with X-Plane and if there are any possibilities there?Ted

No, haven't looked there yet. But I think the default textures for x-plane aren't so bad. Grand Canyon looks pretty spectacular already.

I don't have X-plane but would get it ( or Flightgear ) if Tile Proxy worked well in it. I admire and appreciate what you have done with Tile Poxy in FSX but I just can't get the tiles to load quick and crisp enough. I just suggested X-plane because both Flightgear and FSX seem to have some large hurdles for you to overcome.Ted

Object generation, building or trees, needs some serious improvement before I use it with pleasure. Satellite imaging is the only available way to have a reproduction of reality (roads, etc...). It's flat,it's daytime, it's one-season, but it's real. I'll go with whatever sim allows me to fly over that with reasonable d/l speed.Looks like FG wants to go the other way, so it'll be Xplane. Or some other not born yet. How'bout Fly by the way?

uh oh, we got a tie!On the "loading speed" front: I think my API hooking techniques have improved to a point where they are reliable enough. That means I can intercept the CreateFile / ReadFile calls before they even touch the file system layer. That could shave off some overhead.Also I am considering hooking deeper into the FSX code itself. But I will have to be a bit careful with the EULAs here, to see what is allowed and what isn't.Christian

How about getting to work with Vista.Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease.B

works for me on Vista Business Edn.... ;) just a few hickups, but nothing like you reported.

by popular vote, I just about doubled the tiles per second.I turned my kernel driver into one giant RAM disk. Consumes morememory, but it's well worth it. Expect to see this in a Beta 7preview version.

Very good news! Can't wait to see it.

http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/183097.jpgThis is on a Core 2 Duo, after going to the scenery library and hitting "OK", triggering a full scenery refresh. ;) Took no more than 15-20 seconds to reload the scenery. Look at those TPS figures...