Hopefully Microsoft FS Team looks at the forums. I would like to see an improvement in the resolution of ground textures to 1 meter per pixel. This would offer a much better setting for the highly detailed structures and aircraft. Right now all of these items must set on a blurred base which not only looks odd, it detracts from the work of the artists. Yes at 30,000ft who cares but once you are either on the ground, or a 1000ft above it, the here-to-fore good looking texture becomes a visual liability.The impact on frame rates will be significant. However, by adding one, or two, optional mip-mapping levels the transition would be smoothed out and the user could optionally turn off those two new levels. Of course, there will be the customers who will rant and rave that they paid for the new texture clarity and demand that their 800mhz pet PC display it at 30fps.Photo-real scenery seems to suffer just a bit more from the current level of texture resolution. One meter per pixel aerial photography sources are available and would look fantastic. I am sure that Microsoft has similar levels of aerial photographs for the FS2004 photo scenery areas. Yes, the photoreal scenery takes disk space but by the time of the next release that will not be a major issue. Imagine the Lago Budapest and Venice products displayed on a 1 meter/pixel base.Despite the objectives of Microsoft the FS series has evolved into an excellent scenery/geography viewer. Microsoft can capitalize on this and market to an expanded audience highlighting the educational opportunities not only to learn flying, but also to have visual experiences only afforded to the more wealthy that can fly about the world for real, as they please - read, your Boss.Dick Boley KLBE

FS is intended to be a general purpose simulation, not VFR capable at 1,000ft.Although the project sounds feasible, just what percentage of simmers would find it desirable? How many of those would change their tune if the cost in FPS terms was double-digit, forcing treble digit upgrade costs? Just look at the Megascenery to see what the market penetration will be. Or FSScene. tiny percentages of small percentages is not consensus, it's specialist. And if it makes FS costs a single penny more to meet the needs of the very very few, how loud do you think the protests would get?Best thing you could do Dick, is market the add-on yourself. Make millions and then sell the concept lock, stock and barrel to MS. Then they'll listen. I fly mainly VFR. You make it I'll look at it and if it costs next to nothing, needs next to nothing in terms of upgrades, doesn't slow the initial loading by more than a few seconds and means I can fly over my house and look into my neighbours garden you might have one sale.But then VFR Scenery delivers some of that already, but at appreciable cost.Allcott

According to the FS2004 Program Manager the product is intended for a wide range of audiences. The increase in basic texture resolution has appeal in all of the markets. While at 30,000 ft the ability to properly discern the median of a dual carriageway is of little value. The improvement of the base texture, usually tarmac and grass, would be visually beneficial as would the improvement in the base textures for major cities where the altitude is much lower. The benefits for VFR flyers is, of course, obvious. As mentioned in the message, the new resolutions should be optional. I also acknowledged the outcry from those who will say that they paid for the improvement and cannot use it despite clear labeling. Now the cost issues. As I stated in my original message. Such an improvement is at least one revision cycle away. However, I believe it deserves strong consideration. Given the extended timeline of 2 to 4 years PC capabilities will change. We may actually be able to read scenery data directly from DVDs in that timeframe. PC speeds and memory capability will have increased. There will be a new Windows version out (currently called Longhorn) that may offer more improvements that FS200x can utilize. Yes there will be a "cost" in terms of the need for more capacity and performance. However, it is far too early to measure that cost in either dollars or capabilities. Microsoft is in a much better position to make that judgment than we are. By lobbying for improvements, such as I have suggested, we are asking Microsoft to consider in the context of the marketplace and the anticipated technology the request to improve the resolution of the basic textures. You, and others, may believe that such improvements will not be feasible and will prematurely deny the consideration of other change that are perceived to be of greater benefit. The basis decisions on which requests see the light of day will be made by Microsoft and to suggest to remove them from consideration by Microsoft is presumptuous.Dick Boley KLBE

You forget the acquisition costs of the media itself. Although I would expect the costs of such detailed data to reduce, there must be a huge distribution cost to disseminating such complex data. And as SOMEONE will have to pay, it will have to be the end user. Even Microsoft are not in a position to tell satellite service providers to just `give` them the information. It's unrealistic. And then autogen would need to be hand-appplied on a global scale!The current generic-texturing-with-occasional-satellite-imagery may not suit your tastes, but as the generalist product we both agree FS is, I can't see that the acquisition and strorage costs could be anything other than astronomic. One-off repetitive texture tiling utilises far less data at substantially lower costs, cost savings which can then be passed on to the consumer or used to provide benefit elsewhere. I guess the question is why should FS meet YOUR specialised needs when you acknowledge that others may not share your (our, for I do agree it would be nice) viewpoint? What you are asking for would require a re-write of the entire texture engine, or in effect the whole sim, just so that you can count the irrelevant number of dotted white lines on the road. If it IS relevant for a number of simmers, then expect the aftermarket to provide it, not MS.I suspect the day will come when such imagery will be commonplace - around 2020 I would guess. The problem is that FS may have evolved into a completely different form by then - helmet or glasses-mounted virtual environments, surround sound with immersive vibration effects, no texture rendering, direct channel feed to the visual cortex etc. etc. Allcott

Interesting idea... lets do the math.The land area of the United States is 9158960 sq km. At 1,000,000 sq m/sq km, that works out to 9,158,960,000,000 pixels. (9 trillion) If we want 24 bit color depth (16.7 million colors) this gives us a file size of 25,589 gigabytes. (number of pixels times color depth divided by eight) We can get away with a really lossy jpeg compression ratio of 25 to 1, the artifacts probably wouldnt be as noticable as they would when compressing a photograph. So now we are down to 1024 gigabytes. 8.4 gigs can fit on a single-sided DVD, so we'd need 122 DVDS just to cover the United States, for one season! Even if we dropped to 16 bit color (65536 colors) we'd need 81 DVDs. So, I don't think this will happen anytime soon.Doesn't mean it won't happen in the future, though. In 1988, he first hard drive I bought was 20 megabytes, and it cost me more than twice what I paid for the car I was driving at the time. I thought I would NEVER need more storage than that. Just 15 years later, my hard drive is over twelve thousand times larger, and costs about the same as one tire for my car.So, give it 10 years, then we'll see what can be done.

Let me concur. Getting higher resolution for ground textures would be a great boon. In the current FS2004 version, the contrast between the textures on buildings and aircraft and the base ground textures gets pretty severe at low altitudes.There are two issues. The first is whether higher resolution portrayal of ground textures is feasible and desirable. If I read Dick correctly, he suggests that Microsoft code this high resolution rendering system for the generic textures. While other artists might construct "photoreal scenery" for special areas, the idea here is for the Microsoft team to change the rendering system and not the concept of generic scenery.The second issue is the attractiveness of photoreal scenery. One supposes that this is a really wonderful feature from the comments of those running the VFR-UK system. But of course, the practicalities of using this scenery approach world-wide are problematic with the current state of our technology.However, let's acknowledge that "photoreal scenery" and a "high resolution ground texture system" are two separate issues.Best,Mike MacKuen

Dick, I couldn't agree more. Ideally Microsoft would design in support for higher texture resolution. The resolution should be limited by the designer's or user's decision, not an arbitrary limit in the software. The resolution could be set in options so the user could match the resolution to the power of the computer. Higher resolution will certainly reduce frame rates, but then computers double in speed about every eighteen months. If the next version comes out in October 2005 computers should be about three times faster than today. For generic textures storage wouldn't be a problem. For photoreal, DVD's could be practical. (It's ridiculous - my last two PC's had DVD's fitted but still practically everything still comes on CD's. About the only use I've found for the DVD drives is to watch The Lord of the Rings. Maybe FS2006....) There are also some interesting fractal compression techniques. This is definitely a feature I'd like to see in FS2006. Best regards, Chris

I think they should rather increase the variety and quality of the textures. Also, mip mapping needs some drastic improvements - 4 is too soft, 5 gives me flickering, and AF produces artifacts, at least on my system (ATI9000).Just look at the texture folders now - they are rather huge - and most textures are even compressed to dxt or 8bit!Creating more detailed textures has 2 additional shortcomings: 1. where to take the quality and make it tile perfectly 2. how to make them look un-repetitive?Just try out the woods_desert textures (or what they're called), what an improvement over default MS textures! With the same resolution.Also, many FS users are already complaining about performance (me too ;)) And just to include 1m resolution support doesn't seem that feasible to me. I don't know why they had it in FS2002, but maybe it was a performance hog or something.And the size and performance requirements for satellite imagery - I don't even wanna think about it.-Daniel

Well, although I'd like better textures, I have to say for day VFR flying, I'd rather FS developers spent ALL the money on a better dynamics engine for the aircraft, atmosphere and weather. There is some sense of flying in a fluid atmosphere in FS9, but it's nowhere near real. Yet.Trouble is, these would all be real benefits to all simmers, but would hardly be visible, wouldn't create something that people could twiddle with in the hope of improvement and would simply be ignored by the majority of non-flyers. Probably more sophisticated in terms of coding than adding terrabytes of stream data for higher resolution ground textures.I think there are other more important issues than texture resolution, and flying THROUGH the air is more important than flying OVER the ground. Allcott

Hi Dick Boley, they could change the texture or improving texture and resolution size such as 512x512, but DVD I don't think you will see these until 1gig video cards.Do not forget when you are talking about texture, you are talking about all MSFS texture, ground, aircraft environment etc loaded to the 3d memory cards MB availability and loading time. I have not saw any video card available to do this for now with many Photo Sat, higher resolution texture and size etc.The compression DXT1 format is the right procedure in FS to compresse the texture whitout screwing up the quality and increasing performance and space for others texture, there is not much difference between 16 bit 565 and DXT1.I really doubt you will see any un-compressing texture in fs, they can't because of the amount of texture In fs is too wide and needed for a type of CV simulator type.If you can speak with 3d game engineer developper, they will tell you, we are limited for this.#1 Adding more texture in fs= more MB in the memory needed = more loading time, less frame rate#2 Un-repetitive texture in fs= more texture, more MB needed in the memory cards, more loading time, less frame rate#3 Un Compressed texture, remove 50% of the actual texture in fs, alot of performance reduced + stutters.#4 Increasing resolution to 512x512 or 1024x1024 = more MegByte needed, less performance, higher better video cards needed MBThanksChris Willis[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFs

I for one would love to see that once generally available hardware has the capacity to handle it at reasonable frame rates. I do an awful lof of my flying below 5000' AGL so sharper ground textures would be a real plus. It makes sense as with 2004 there are many times when I'll go to an outside view and be really taken aback by the almost photographic quality of the scene. This is something that's only going to become more convincing in future revs as hardware improves and the software takes advantage of it.TonyDigital Flight