I think what most people are complaining about the look of cities in X-Plane is not the regionalization etc, but simply the fact that there's too much green in urban areas. Seems like X-Plane 10 treats urban areas landclass as rural landclass and just splashes autogen and roads over green fields. IMHO one of the first things the artwork makers at Laminar should do, is producing generic base urban textures to replace the current generic base green texture in urban areas.

Well, yes, I think, here you are right ... and the green is definitely sometimes "a bit" more than one would expect it. I will bring this point up internally ... but I suspect, that it is nothing "new" And this should change, as the city artwork will change/improve over time. So, I ask for a little patience ...

No problem here! I'm one of the strongest X-Plane supporters. Your shots of natural landscapes are great!

I posted a topic on this the other day.. I agree, about being not recognizable.. What do we look for when we fly, even in real life?? Landmarks, areas of a city/town that we recognize.. When flying into the airport here (in real life) i recognize the tall buildings downtown, water towers, even transmission towers.. When i fly over main road intersections in real life, i see fast food, large retail stores ect.. Could i fly over an area in real life, or in a sim and point out a particular home?? Probably not because it doesnt stand out/catch my eye in any way.. I believe (and i would like to work on this myself if i could figure out how), but i believe the first thing to knock out would be simple generic business buildings that are ALL identical..:Example, nearly all the McD, TacoB, PizzaH, ect restaurants look alike.. Make one, simply place them in their correct locations throughout a city and that alone would be a major improvement.. Same thing for large box stores, HomeD, Lowes, Wal-M, ect.. Build one of each, place them in the true areas in a city that they are and you have made a major change..Then you begin focusing on large commercial builds, of which only one exist in the world..Just a thought..

How does the community go about adding stuff like this to xplane in a coordinated way so that things are not overlapped or you have to worry about getting two different scenery projects for the same area. Both are ho hum but together they would be good. Couldn't LR be the organiser of something bigger? Even if it was something as simple as a google earth 'tour' or what ever they call it where people could mark landmarks and LR could download the dataset of everyones contributions and put buildings on all of those gps coordinates.

Very nice shots. I agree that the cities require more clutter though. Or at least replace the grass texture with concrete in those areas.

How does the community go about adding stuff like this to xplane in a coordinated way so that things are not overlapped or you have to worry about getting two different scenery projects for the same area. Both are ho hum but together they would be good. Couldn't LR be the organiser of something bigger? Even if it was something as simple as a google earth 'tour' or what ever they call it where people could mark landmarks and LR could download the dataset of everyones contributions and put buildings on all of those gps coordinates.

Hi Jason,It's called OSM (Open Street Map). It already exists and will play a big part in what we see below us in XPX. At least I hope so.

Thanks Mike, I have heard of OSM on the forum but did't know the role it played in the project overall.

Thanks Mike, I have heard of OSM on the forum but did't know the role it played in the project overall.

OpenStreetmap is even now very important. All the roads/railroads/powerlines/coasts/rivers come from the now. And there are many ideas floating around, to use even more of that data in the futures ... So yes, it will be more and more important.

And again I reiterate ... even US cities are far from finished (as they see them now). Some of the artwork is missing, and is often "replaced" by some generic houses.The main idea is, that you will not see much of the ground texture (the green), where you shouldn't (in dense areas). Lamiars idea is, to plant enough real 3D clutter on top of it, so you don't need those photo-like urban textures ... in theory :-) So, thats why you often see too much green, because many of the denser urban areas are lacking the right art assets now and only get the smaller houses, which have a too small footprint (and don't cover enough of tha green). AND ... now you might ask .. what happens if you go further and the houses disappear. Well, there are trick (and a few first examples of this tricks are already in) to make the same texture look different, if you go further away of it ... if you are close, its green ... if you are far away, its more like a classic urban texture (for the technically versed users: think about mip-map trickery ;) )

OpenStreetmap is even now very important. All the roads/railroads/powerlines/coasts/rivers come from the now. And there are many ideas floating around, to use even more of that data in the futures ... So yes, it will be more and more important.

Hi Andras,That is really great news. There are so many things we could do with OSM, it's really hard to fathom. Can I ask you, is WED on the discs being sent out to us this weekend?thanks

Hi,I - as one of the Global Scenery developers - wanted to share with you a more comprehensive selection of "outside the demo are" screenshots from around the world. To not make this post explode, I uploaded them to a picasa album, where you can look at them in a slideshow. There you will find 125 pictures from quite some locations (mostly Europe) from these places:

• Austria - Zell am See
• Barcelona
• Corsica
• Hawaii
• Japan
• La Palma
• Norway (yes, the fjords, as someone requested)
• Pyrenees
• Scotland
• Switzerland

Follow this link: https://picasaweb.go...capesOfTheWorldI hope, this pictures will help you to better understand what the 8 DVDs can give you.

Some of the pics look Fantastic ! Hawaii doesn't look tropical at all, It looks more like CA. Hopefully that will get fixed in time !

As a case in point, the shots of Barcelona just don't do it at all for me - its does not look like Spain's second city at all and I don't mean from total accuracy/each and every building in the right place point of view, but very generally from the lack of buildings, the greeness of it all. It shoud be a sprawling mess of urbanisation but it looks like a rural village when you look at it from a building density perspective.

Yes, this was *exactly* what I thought when I looked at the Barcelona shots, and exactly my feelings flying the Seattle demo area. I take the point about how difficult it would be and how long it would take to cover the whole planet with regionalised autogen, but if I'm reading things right then if I buy this sim right now today not only will I not get downtown buildings, landmarks or airport buildings, i won't even get cities that look like, well, cities.I do not wish to sound critical, but I'm imagining that city-to-city hops in regional jets would be pretty dull. You'd take off from an airport with no jetways/stairs/airport vehicles/airport buildings, fly over green fields with no cities and buildings that don't relate to the country you are flying over, and then land at an equally sparse and empty airport at the other end. I suppose you could make it more fun by flying in thick fog!

...I suppose you could make it more fun by flying in thick fog!

Or at night

One more night video:

I think, and I'm not 100% sure, that the 3D lights that look so nice in your videos are emitted from the autogen roads and buildings. So if you don't have a lot of them, you won't see a lot of lights. Also, if you don't use the HDR rendering mode, the lights don't illuminate the surrounding areas so nicely. My PC isn't powerful enough to either have a lot of buildings, roads or HDR so you can imagine it wouldn't spice things up all that much.- and there'd still be no airport buildings, vehicles or jetways once you landed :-(EDIT: I just checked, and the 3D lights are indeed emitted from the buildings and roads. So if you have low slider settings like me, your night view is as sparsely populated as your day view.

Intestingly I just flew over Detroit in Xplane 10 (with the xplane 9 tiles)and real weather. I see the logic of the generic city-the buildings may not match complete reality but they are clustered correctly and one can see downtown Detroit and the New Center area off to the right, and the huge number of building autogen really makes it look like a city. If one is not looking for complete 100% detail in individual buildings and a couple missing stadiums I'd say the flavor is pretty good...(there are a couple extra bridges to Canada though that should not be there).By the way-the new patch really increased performance for me! :-)