Hi Geofa,That second pic is pretty illustrative: the mountains in the distance ARE visible - and yet closer to them there is a band of "no man's land" where atmospheric scattering makes it hard to tell what's going on.Also a minor detail: these are all pics from the air. Yeah of course you can see forever in the air! X-Plane's slider is for visibility _on the ground_. If it applied in air you wouldn't see the earth from orbit!/ben

You need to make the trip to see one live and in person, it will not disappoint I assure you of that.Even viewing from the visitors area many miles away is still awe inspiring. You truly get a feel for just how powerful this machine is when standing 5miles away and one can feel the ground physically shaking!

All ready did, got tickets to 3 on the Indian River Causeway, 2 night launches and a day launch in fact the first one after the Columbia disaster, God rest their souls! The night launches are really a sight to see, lights up the whole sky!!! The day launch, I was in the front row and without realizing it their was a 8 foot Alligator lying in the mud in a ditch just a few feet away. When the Nasa Police showed up, one almost fell in, his partner saved him. They are protected animals in Florida, as well as on the base as it is a wildlife preserve, so they couldn't do anything to remove him. Surprisingly all they did was move us back a few yards, and told us to run if we saw him come out. I was afraid the noise from the launch would scare him out, but thankfully he was quite content just to bask in the mud.

Hi Geofa,That second pic is pretty illustrative: the mountains in the distance ARE visible - and yet closer to them there is a band of "no man's land" where atmospheric scattering makes it hard to tell what's going on.Also a minor detail: these are all pics from the air. Yeah of course you can see forever in the air! X-Plane's slider is for visibility _on the ground_. If it applied in air you wouldn't see the earth from orbit!/ben

So are you saying at altitude we'll be able to see distant (further than 25nm) landmarks like mountains? If so I haven't noticed that. I go try it again!

I was in the front row and without realizing it their was a 8 foot Alligator lying in the mud in a ditch just a few feet away. When the Nasa Police showed up, one almost fell in, his partner saved him. They are protected animals in Florida, as well as on the base as it is a wildlife preserve, so they couldn't do anything to remove him. Surprisingly all they did was move us back a few yards, and told us to run if we saw him come out. I was afraid the noise from the launch would scare him out, but thankfully he was quite content just to bask in the mud.

Several years ago there was an interview with the CHief of Police for KSP about security during a shuttle launch and the reporter asked if they feared someone gaining access to the shuttle launch tower through the marsh areas and he just chuckled and said no, not really...

Also a minor detail: these are all pics from the air. Yeah of course you can see forever in the air! X-Plane's slider is for visibility _on the ground_. If it applied in air you wouldn't see the earth from orbit!

Yes but isnt the point of a flight sim is to spend more time in the air than on the ground? Which is why the 25NM visibility is such a "downer" when airborne in XP. FSX is an excellent interactive lesson in geography because of the 125nm visibility at altitude. This is where XP needs improving IMHO.

Hi Geofa,That second pic is pretty illustrative: the mountains in the distance ARE visible - and yet closer to them there is a band of "no man's land" where atmospheric scattering makes it hard to tell what's going on.Also a minor detail: these are all pics from the air. Yeah of course you can see forever in the air! X-Plane's slider is for visibility _on the ground_. If it applied in air you wouldn't see the earth from orbit!/ben

Ok just tried it in Seattle climbed up to FL250 in a P-51 over Seattle and no Mt Rainier. What's worse, is as I turned toward it as the mountains started to come into view, they appeared as building blocks starting from the bottom up not a realistic transition, and would disappear if my view slightly moved, until within a few miles of them. This was with Clear skies, and max 25nm visibility set.

I give Ping Pong the AVSIM award for one of the best posts I've seen in a long time.

Why? He obviously ignores the fact that add-ons and the learning curve constitute a major investment for most simmers. I for one don't have the time to use both. I assume most people will want to make a choice, if their focus is on the sim experience rather than playing around with different technologies. I enjoy FLYING, not dealing with the inadequacies and superegos of developers.

Why? He obviously ignores the fact that add-ons and the learning curve constitute a major investment for most simmers. I for one don't have the time to use both. I assume most people will want to make a choice, if their focus is on the sim experience rather than playing around with different technologies. I enjoy FLYING, not dealing with the inadequacies and superegos of developers.

It's quite simple, really. He made three very good points in that post I was referring to, but I'll focus on this one."But one thing was made apparent to me, recently, that is that we are all being binary in our thinking. I don't understand why people don't use BOTH sims, why does it have to be one or the other. Why join a "camp" at all, both sims are around 30 bucks now, why not put them both on your pc and use them accordingly." He did not ignore anything in this post. I think he made it clear that both sims have there positive and negative aspects, both are quite useful depending on your intent for the sim, and there is no need to join a "camp". Just look at Geof. He uses both as it suits him. I do the same, though lately have been growing futher away from XP do to the poor low-altitude ground textures. The same goes for the never ending FS9 vs. FSX debate. The only person on earth who gets the final say in which sim is best is the person using it. As for my experience with both, I find that FSX is better suited for what I use it for, it looks better to me, and it performs perfectly fine given the fact that I have every single setting maxed except for AI, which I like to keep at 70%, and I don't have a single stutter or any problems with frame rates. XP just doesn't feel right to me, but I'll be next in line right behind Geof to buy XP10 and give it a shot. Even if I don't like XP10 I'll still get XP11 just to support the sim.

Just for fun-and I think it shows the stregths and weaknesses of both sims:

So are you saying at altitude we'll be able to see distant (further than 25nm) landmarks like mountains?

No. I can't make any statements about what future X-Plane will or will not do.I am simply saying that the problem of visibility in the REAL world is a lot more complex than "how far you can see" - it is "how far you can see throguh a very specific miass of air".

Yes but isnt the point of a flight sim is to spend more time in the air than on the ground? Which is why the 25NM visibility is such a "downer" when airborne in XP.

There is a downer here, but it's not quiiite what you think it is.The visibility in air is more than 25 miles.The maximum DSF visibility before volumetric fog is _not_ large enough to simulate those pics, not by a long shot.If the sim's visibility and scattering worked the way we wanted (which it does not right now), you could set the visibility to 10 miles and STILL get some of those pictures, because X-Plane's visibility slider controls the ground->ground reported visibility, not air to air.To see this, set vis to 3 miles, clouds to overcast at, say, 500 AGL.Look around...you can't see squat. Fly up through the clouds - once you're over the top, it'll be really quite clear out.cheersben

Imagine in two years when worldwide scenery and hard drives capable of holding the 7cm scenery are available.

Worldwide 7 cm photo scenery? I don't want to shatter your dreams, but let's do a little math. The earth's land area is 148,940,000 km². Which is 1.5 x 10¹⁸ cm². At 7 cm/px, each pixel covers 7 x 7 = 49 cm². So this works out to 1.5 x 10¹⁸ cm² / 49 cm²/px = 3 x 10¹⁶ pixel. Each pixel has 32 bit, or 4 bytes, but let's assume we manage to compress the textures at a 1:10 ratio (which is quite good). This yields 3 x 10¹⁶ * 4 / 10 = 12 x 10¹⁵ byte = 12 petabyte, or about 12000 terabyte. Now assuming hard disk capacity continues to increase tenfold every five years, you'd need 1200 10 TB disks to hold all that data. Better start looking for a warehouse to store them... ;) Now you might only be interested in the US, whose land area is 9162392 km². That works out to "just" 750 TB, or 75 hard disks. OK, let's take only California, then. Land area is 404043 km², which yields 33 TB. Maybe just the Bay Area after all? Its 22681 km² would take just under 2 TB, thus almost completely filling the largest hard disk available today.

The MSFS series needed a total makeover to refine things to work with the more powerful hardware that we have today

I guess one reason why the franchise was axed might be that Microsoft finally realized exactly that, but also realized that would take piles and piles of resources (read money)... ;)

in general, X-Plane doesn't even begin to compete in the overall flight dynamics department.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried Morten's Piper Archer by any chance?Judith

This has been an entertaining and educational post. I think pretty much all involved have made valid points in a mature manner. I appreciate all of you for taking my opinions in stride and acting like an adult. I've seen the other side of the coin, but this has been quite pleasant. I think posts like this help move flight sim in the right direction! Thanks also to Ben for hanging around, listening and considering our thoughts, and providing valuable insight. Well done to all. Happy New Year!Scott

"Worldwide 7 cm photo scenery? I don't want to shatter your dreams, but let's do a little math. The earth's land area is 148,940,000 km². Which is 1.5 x 10¹⁸ cm². At 7 cm/px, each pixel covers 7 x 7 = 49 cm². So this works out to 1.5 x 10¹⁸ cm² / 49 cm²/px = 3 x 10¹⁶ pixel. Each pixel has 32 bit, or 4 bytes, but let's assume we manage to compress the textures at a 1:10 ratio (which is quite good). This yields 3 x 10¹⁶ * 4 / 10 = 12 x 10¹⁵ byte = 12 petabyte, or about 12000 terabyte. Now assuming hard disk capacity continues to increase tenfold every five years, you'd need 1200 10 TB disks to hold all that data. Better start looking for a warehouse to store them... ;) Now you might only be interested in the US, whose land area is 9162392 km². That works out to "just" 750 TB, or 75 hard disks. OK, let's take only California, then. Land area is 404043 km², which yields 33 TB. Maybe just the Bay Area after all? Its 22681 km² would take just under 2 TB, thus almost completely filling the largest hard disk available today."Worldwide scenery at 7 m does not imply that a user would have the entire world at once. I presently have the entire Western United States-1 million sq miles at 5m and an area with 2 ft resolution. (By the way-fsx users should go to the simm savvy sight and download the free 1m scenery-it is incredible!). No dreams shattered here-it is coming. 10 years ago people said the same about photo scenery of any kind-a hard drive like I presently have-1T- would have been umimaginable. I still remember being in school and being told synthetic computer speech and especially speech recognition would be impossible due to the amount of memory that would be needed. It will be coming, and that is a perfect example of fsx still having areas to grow for years despite not having the ability to be rewritten."Just out of curiosity, have you tried Morten's Piper Archer by any chance?"I am not sure-I bought a bunch of Pipers for xplane..I'll have to check.

A minor detail: Judith wrote 7 cm, and Geof wrote 7 meters. Those things are really different.7 m scenery would be considered "low res" by today's commercial scenery packs. 7 cm would be overkill for most phenomena - see my rant below.The difference in units here is ... a factor of 10,000 in storage! Now the rant:Would 7 cm scenery be...useful? Seriously, I think there has to be a real end to the increased usefulness of high-res orthophoto scenery.At 7 cm: consider...- A mailbox - 8 pixels wide, but with a vertical aspect ratio of...perhaps 3:1.- A parked car. 25 pixels wide, with a vertical aspect ratio of maybe 4:5.- etc.My point here is that when viewed from a slanted angle, the positional error of the image (caused by its not being a real 3-d extrusion) is going to be significantly larger than the resolution we've gone down to. Is a 7 cm pixel useful when the image of the top of the entity is wrong by 70 cm or more?At some point increased hardware capabilities would better be spent on real 3-d. If we are close enough to appreciate a 7 cm image* we are probably close enough to appreciate that...it's just an image.(The exception of course is truly flat high-detailed phenomena like pavement.)cheersBen* From my back-of-the-envelope calculations, you would have to be within 100m of an object to actually _see_ the object at its full 7 cm res for normal user viewing settings. At that distance, again I say: the lack of 3-d will be pretty apparent. This is made worse by the natural viewing angles in a flight simulator - that is, we virtually never look _straight_ down at what is directly below us from close range, so there is going to be a fair amount of "slant" to viewing, making the need for 3-d more apparent.

Good catch on the m/cm thing. I am usually multitasking and that was obviously a mistake.I know orbx already has 7cm scenery for fsx and the pavement is pretty incredible! In fact after watching the video I think I am gonna have to buy it!Just search for " John's video blog 004" on youtube....