I hope Flight devs are looking at their competition. XPlane guys have finally thought about terrain detailing, and what they did is amazing. They are automatically placing houses along vector generated roads, and it looks gorgeous. In FSX with UTXE small vector roads removed almost all autogen buildings. I hope Flight devs will do something about it, and hopefully they will change the way cities are generated. Placing generic city texture with 3d objects scattered around doesn't work anymore.Compare these shots with FS9/FSX...http://www.x-plane.com/pg_news.html

I think it's safe to say I'll be buying a few addons to enjoy XP10...

I hope this thread won't turn into flame war...

Nah, this can only be a good thing. I'll be running both sims. Competition raises the bar and hopefully we'll be getting better products as a result.

I hope Flight devs are looking at their competition. XPlane guys have finally thought about terrain detailing, and what they did is amazing. They are automatically placing houses along vector generated roads, and it looks gorgeous. In FSX with UTXE small vector roads removed almost all autogen buildings. I hope Flight devs will do something about it, and hopefully they will change the way cities are generated. Placing generic city texture with 3d objects scattered around doesn't work anymore.

Isnt XP10 using generic texture and 3d objects .. they are just rendered differently, correct?

Not exactly. Towns and cities are not built on the city texture, but on grass. First, they lay vector roads layer from www.openstreetmap.org data. Then they checks where should be small houses, bigger one etc., compare that to vector roads and place houses along them. I believe each house has it's own small terrain texture placed under.It's a similar approach to UTX Alaska:http://www.scenerysolutions.com/media/Anchorage2UA.jpgHowever UTXA buildings are not autogen, but placed scenery objects, and they are much slower to render than autogen. XP10 buildings are placed automatically by some kind of procedural algorithm, and I believe it's superior to anything we have in FSX.Sorry for my English ;)

I'm impressed by the realistic shadows. And it looks like the trees share in this too.

XP-10 is looking really good ! MS has thier work cut out for them !

Placing generic city texture with 3d objects scattered around doesn't work anymore.

In my opinion, it has never worked.

I would also like to think and hope that autogen buildings in Flight would be more architecturally appropiate to their respective countries. According to FS9, my back garden in England is the proud owner of something that looks like the Parthenon.

Can't beat a steaming great Parthenon in your garden.Its rumoured that the ancient Greeks first sampled the finest teas from ancient Cathay in that very place.Andacles

Yes, the XP10 city autogen does look good.However, it is common for competing products to "leap frog" eachother to one degree or another.So, let's keep in mind that FSX is using (and limited by) over 10 yr old code and we still have no real idea what the Flight developers have in store as they develope new code.I'm shure they (and MS) realize that the general public can no no longer be impressed by the dated cartoon like graphics that are a big part of FSX.

I hope Flight devs are looking at their competition. XPlane guys have finally thought about terrain detailing, and what they did is amazing. They are automatically placing houses along vector generated roads, and it looks gorgeous. In FSX with UTXE small vector roads removed almost all autogen buildings. I hope Flight devs will do something about it, and hopefully they will change the way cities are generated. Placing generic city texture with 3d objects scattered around doesn't work anymore.Compare these shots with FS9/FSX...http://www.x-plane.com/pg_news.html

The houses look really good, but the autogen trees in those shots look so flat and leave a lot more to desire for.

The houses look really good, but the autogen trees in those shots look so flat and leave a lot more to desire for.

The trees suck, I hope they do something about that....

The autogen in XP10 sure looks good.In FSX the houses/trees are ridiculously over-sized, with houses as big as warehouses! In XP10 the houses/trees look correctly scaled. Hopefully XP10 will only 3rd party devs to create highly customized/region specific autogen. Hopefully also the autogen will support different housing densities, including overcrowded 'slum' type areas.