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anthony_d

X-Plane Regional Review: Aberdeen --> Scottish Highlands

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I ordered my copy of X-Plane from RC Simulations yesterday, and low and behold it arrived today. Aerosoft detailed airports and all.So after the 3 hour installation, I took off from my home airport of Aberdeen Dyce. I could pick out all of the major roads around Aberdeen. After playing with the seattle demo, What I saw is what I expected and considering that this scenery is straight out of the box, what you have here is a good start: Every Road and suburb from medium size up is depicted. So after flying south to the suburb of Kingswells, I turned north and followed the A96 road to the growing town of Inverurie and onwards to the popular summit of Bennachie. It's nice flying a sim, without needing a map, and knowing where you are :(Things get better in the highlands.Rural Land use appeared to be accurately placed. Forests, farmland and upland mountain tracts were all in the right locations, and done to a much higher level of precision compared with what is possible in FSX. That said however, the textures for such land use need to be tuned somewhat, but at least they aren't way off. The fact that I could fly VFR all the way from Aberdeen to the Cuillin Ridge of Skye (correctly depicted as the rockiest terrain in the UK) following the roads, lochs and terrain without a map is testament to what a striking platform X-Plane is (and testament to how well I know the highlands :( )It was time to fly high, and this is where the limitations of X-Plane don't grate so well. Beyond 25 miles, all the terrain turns into mush. This is very obvious at high altitubes. You have no depiction of detailed coastline or relief beyond this range. It real life you certainly can see such details (particularly on a nice rare highland day).Not even the dsf scenery tile you're flying over is fully depicted. I think x-plane would do well to depict all the coastline & relief around your present location upto 100miles distant using not just the dsf file you're on top of, but also the nearest dsf files that border the one you're flying over. It might not be possible now, but it should certainly be part of LR's to-do list.As many people have already said around here, the cities don't look like cities. Lots of greenery, and some of those trees look absolutely huge. I'm sure this will be addressed in some future work, but there also needs to be some effort to regionalise the buildings and roads. For scotland, that means grey tenement buildings bunched together in town centres, and smaller detached houses also bunched together in suburban locations. It also means narrower roads for any road that is two lanes or less.That said, I also fear that if the houses are rendered smaller and more bunched up as is typical of Scotland compared to these American suburban houses, then the polygon count will ramp up, and frame rates will probably suffer.

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Hello !To see the relief beyond 25 NM, be sure you have the "3d bump maps" option enabled.If you have it checked and still do not see anything, it's probably because you have installed the scenery only over the demo.The demo doesn't include the planet maps, and the updater doesn't check for them.

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I installed the scenery over the demo. That was what happened on the installer anyway. Despite that, the planet maps were installed, but you can't see those until you're above 100,000 feet and in any case they're very blurry. It's just like the results rendered in x-plane 9 when it comes to the 25mile limit.

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Hi Anthony,Well, it seems to me, that Pascal is right and there is something that went wrong with your installation. If you have UPDATED an existing DEMO installations there are chances, that you did not install the more detailed planet textures. This happens, because the existing demo usually "only" gets all the global scenery installed (the sim itself is no different from non-demo ... its the same, just that the existing DVD lets it run as non-demo :( ).So, with a correct installation you should also get the higher resolution textures and the mentioned height map (which lets them become bumpy when 3D bump maps are enabled).You can easily check this. If you look in the folder "/Resources/bitmaps/Earth Orbit Textures/" you should have about 740 MBytes of data. If there is less (far less), then you are missing the high-res earth orbit textures. A complete reinstall might help here ... or choosing the "repair X-Plane" option with the DVD installer (at least I think so).Then your landscape should look more like this. Still not super detailed in the distance, but definitely better what your screenshots show :( !

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That in addition, yes ... but I think - I am not 100% sure - that even the newer installer doesn't offer to install the planet textures (only in "repair" mode), but only the scenery DSFs if you let it work in your existing demo folder.

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Ah. Right. I ran the installer again & chose the option to "repair X-Plane". That copied the required textures across. Then I had to run the updater again to get from 10.02r1 to 10.03r1.End result is a scene like apilotx. Much Better Money%20Eyes.gif, still a sharp boundary between sharp and soft, but at least I can see the outline of coasts further away.

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Well, it seems to me, that Pascal is right and there is something that went wrong with your installation.
It is a bug that I also see - I call it "cut off horizon". 780MB in the folder that you named, full installation with fresh installer from website. It also depends on height and viewing angle: first two pics herehttp://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php/topic/595-what-did-you-fly-today/page__view__findpost__p__30573where afterwards Pascal also thought it's because of a wrong installation. NO IT'S NOT! ;):) :(

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just to re-check: What does that number tell you? Is this because of the already installed updates or because of wrong/missing textures?

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I am not a real technical support :( ... so I don't exactly know what and how the installer does internally. But I think, it must have something to do with different file versions coming from all the updates you already did (with all the betas etc.).

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I think that, too, and did not finish the repair. Please just name a bug a bug, otherwise there won't be solutions to stuff like that anytime soon - instead we see "improvements" on the clouds. Well…

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It is a bug that I also see - I call it "cut off horizon". 780MB in the folder that you named, full installation with fresh installer from website. It also depends on height and viewing angle:
This bug is solved in the couple latest betas.I think you're mixing two things here. The said bug, which depends on view angle, and the fact that the scenery is visible but flat past the limit 25NM.
first two pics herehttp://forums.x-pilo...dpost__p__30573where afterwards Pascal also thought it's because of a wrong installation. NO IT'S NOT! ;):) :(
your second picture shows the problem we talk about, and I still think something is wrong with it.Don't remember if I asked, did you check the "bump map option" ?

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is it always the case as in second picture, flat landscape past the limit ? maybe it's a place where there are no mountains further away, although I doubt it. Otherwise, it means you're Xp10 is not using the high res maps, and that's strange since you said they are present in the folder. ?!? :huh:Maybe it's a gpu's pilot issue then ?

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I still need to have a flight with 10.03RC1 in order to see if there have been improvements. only fired it up a minute to check the clouds until now. maybe you yre right and the bug is already solved. I'll see and inform if I have any new screenshots from RC1 showing the same issues.

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