Don't take the rfactor picture too serious.. i just google imaged it.Anyway i really don't care how far the building actually is..it's about how far it LOOKS..and IMO it looks way closer than the size makes you believe

I get your point now.But in your BIG bird you are 4 or 5 meters above the ground.Maybe if you switch to a small plane it looks better?In that case its not the view thats incorrect, its just the plane that is so big.

I tend to compare fsx to my memory of afs2, and later fs3.0, and find it to be amazingly evolved. Squishy compares fsx to his most perfect ideal, and finds it lacking. Since it is what it is, I'd say my way of looking at it results in more happiness. Just my opinion, of course.

Bob - I agree wholeheartedly, especially when looking back at sims pre FSX, rendering is incredibly detailed now as compared to before, like yourself and many others I am astounded at how far the sim has come.Squishy -You are comparing apples to oranges when it comes to your post's IMO. You must remember that when it comes to your race game (GT perhaps, sorry been a while) you are looking from a totally different perspective and all they need to render is the track and area immediately surrounding the raceway with the odd smattering of city and landscape's in the distance. Look at MS Train simulator or Microprose Grand Prix 4 (a fantastic F1 race game BTW) and you will see the same infusion of visual objects that have incredible, almost 3D like detail... it is because they can afford to render objects in that fashion as it does so without compromising fluidity in the game... and yes it does look real doesn't it.Now take FSX where you are sitting in the VC looking out the windscreen 15-30 feet off the ground depending on which aircraft you are sitting in, IMO you will have the feeling that things are indeed magnified.Standby Squishy, things can only get better, and they will.

Standby Squishy, things can only get better, and they will.

Please eleborate :(

Please eleborate :(

There is a measurement tool aircraft model that you can down load and used in slew mode.It is really just a big folding ruler that can be used to measure anything. I know it is on FS.com site so probably on here too.I think you will find FSX is not as far off as you think, in fact it is much closer to accurate scale than FS ever was.

The size of your monitor is the problem, not the scaling in FSX.Think of your monitor as a "window" to the virtual world. When you are sitting in a real airplane, the instrument panel will occupy almost 180 degrees of your view. With a monitor (dont know how large is yours), you would get just about 25-30% of the "real life" field of view. FSX draws everything on your monitor so that it looks like when you are looking out of a window. Imagine coming to a real cockpit holding a frame the size of your monitor in your hands. Will you see much when looking through the frame only?Setting the zoom factor to 0.5 basically tells FSX to draw things like you would see them if you move your eyes 2x closer to the monitor. Since you obviously didn't do it, the scenery obviously got smaller. There is nothing wrong about it.IF you look at the screenshot from the car simulator, you will see that the bridge ahead of you is at about the same distance from you as the house in the FSX screenshot. If you imagine a human standing next to the bridge, he will have about the same size in pixels, as the human standing next to the FSX house (tip: in the real world, the bridge clearance would be about as high as the house).However, the human brain tends to "enlarge" things that are close to the horizon in the direction you are looking (this is why the moon near the horizon looks much larger than up in the sky). This also works on the computer monitor, so the bridge in front of you indeed seems to be larger than the house in your FSX shot. But a simple measurement with a ruler will reveal the truth. Now, if the house would stand in the middle of the runway you are landing on, it would suddenly appear quite big :( The solution for you is to use the 2D instrument panel instead of the virtual cockpit. You will lose the "immersion" effect, but you will get decent views of both the scenery and the panel.And wow, I always wanted to drive a race car from the back seat! Hope the small champagne cabinet in the armrest is properly simulated too :(

The size of your monitor is the problem, not the scaling in FSX.----------Think of your monitor as a "window" to the virtual world. When you are sitting in a real airplane, the instrument panel will occupy almost 180 degrees of your view. With a monitor (dont know how large is yours), you would get just about 25-30% of the "real life" field of view. FSX draws everything on your monitor so that it looks like when you are looking out of a window. Imagine coming to a real cockpit holding a frame the size of your monitor in your hands. Will you see much when looking through the frame only?Setting the zoom factor to 0.5 basically tells FSX to draw things like you would see them if you move your eyes 2x closer to the monitor. Since you obviously didn't do it, the scenery obviously got smaller. There is nothing wrong about it.----------The solution for you is to use the 2D instrument panel instead of the virtual cockpit. You will lose the "immersion" effect, but you will get decent views of both the scenery and the panel.

May I amplify these comments-Flight Sim displays the world around us in 8 - 45

(this is why the moon near the horizon looks much larger than up in the sky)

I'm just going to disagree with this, I believe it is the refraction from the atmosphere that causes the light to bend in a way that the moon appears larger near the horizon, not your eyes playing tricks on you, but the light waves playing tricks on all of us.

I'm just going to disagree with this, I believe it is the refraction from the atmosphere that causes the light to bend in a way that the moon appears larger near the horizon, not your eyes playing tricks on you, but the light waves playing tricks on all of us.

I'd have to google it but i think the opposite is the case (going from memory). The moon is actually a touch smaller near the horizon due to the atmospheric refraction. It is still the eyes playing a trick on you that makes even this smaller image look larger.From Wikipedia: "In fact, the Moon appears about 1.5% smaller when it is near the horizon than when it is high in the sky, because it is further away by up to one Earth radius and also because of atmospheric refraction, which makes the image of the Moon slightly smaller in the vertical axis"

@ january. Thanks for your post. I guess it's quite obvious now that I think of it.Still I wonder how other games pull it of? Many other games offer views that would never fit inside a window the size of my monitor yet don't look so wrong as FSX.

Interesting. I've always found the autogen buildings and trees to be grossly over-sized. I've been looking for a setting to actually scale them down. Also, it's kind of annoying departing generic airports and finding huge houses just beyond the runway threshold.Unfortunately, to get a realistic viewpoint (i.e. what you see is exactly what you'd see in real life), you will probably want to invest in a multi-monitor setup.

This. Go up in a real plane some time and pay attention to the stuff on the ground - houses and stuff look a lot smaller than they do in FS if you ask me.Real life example over Phoenix - I don't see any huge looking buildings or trees here, the rows of houses look very small and so do the cars on the freeway. I don't remember the exact altitude I took this shot at, but it wasn't very high, we were about to start the downwind for KCHD.The real issue with how things look in the cockpit in FS is the lack of peripheral vision that you get in real life with your eyes. You're trying to jam something that normally takes up a very wide field of view onto a small LCD screen. Even a 30" monitor isn't going to compare with what you see using your eyes in a real cockpit. It's funny, we get complaints that this or that dimension inside our planes' cockpits are wrong and so on, and yet they're basically exact to the real design blueprints. The problem is that there's inherent distortions and tradeoffs that have to be made when you're representing objects in a 3D engine like this.For what it's worth I think that racing game shot looks very unrealistic too, I have never seen my own car from a perspective that appears so far zoomed back from the steering wheel, almost like the driver is in the back seat. If anything, real life feels like your eyepoint is much closer to the panel (both car and airplane alike) versus what you see in a game like this. If you zoom out far enough, sure, you can get something closer to what your peripheral vision sees in real life as far as the outside scenery, but you're necessarily distorting things closer to you with that fisheye lens type effect.

Just to comment on the rFactor screen. The viewpoint has been changed from the default, you can change your field of view in rFactor just like you can in FSX. You can also move the eyepoint. It appears that the person that took this screenshot prefers to have a wide view, possibly to compensate for the lack of real life periferial vision. Situational awareness is extremely important in a race sim, if you got a car on your inside and you turn in you'll ruin your race.BTW, its not a game, its a sim :D. Its used by various professional teams, at least 4 of the current formula 1 teams use it for development and driver training.

Very nice picture of Phoenix!

I don't remember the exact altitude I took this shot at

In this context your exact altitude is very important and also the focal length of the camera.

OK those FSXbuildings look way too big.In FSX this is at 3000 ft.I suppose it's impossible to compute tens of 1000's of buildings.

Heh that's actually a really good comparison pic for this sorta debate!