I have a dream ...Just think what sort of improvement would be if Microsoft Flight could be connected to world photographic maps (and I think to remember that Bing maps are owned by Microsoft themselves)Photoreal scenery is the best, no match for any synthetic or landclass one ... it would be a major improvement, also easily achievable ... the photo maps could be connected online to the "game", or sold by zones ... 1 meter/pixel resolution is the standard for many countriesExample screen: Lake of Vico, central Italy, FSX on a 4-years old laptop with 256 Mb Vram video card, 2 meters/pixel photoreal scenery, no autogen

Looks great from 3000 feet, but how good does it look down low, where it's most fun to fly? I prefer a high poly fictional rendering, personally.

Looks great from 3000 feet, but how good does it look down low, where it's most fun to fly? I prefer a high poly fictional rendering, personally.

Ditto.

I would love to see the bare Bing photomaps layed over the areas MS has not released DLC for, at least.

I have everything on Max and with the exception of the city it looks pretty good.

Photo-real terrain is the wave of the future - good forward thinking. For the moment, it is not possible because:- most of the world does not have good aerial images, just not available yet.- even places with high resolution images suffer from problems like cloud coverage (check out Florida!) or bad colors.- Bing does not own those images, they are only licensed. Not Microsoft's, or MGS', to use as it wishes.- the space requirement is prohibitive, think TerraBytes here.- making color corrections, adding seasonal variation, and autogen annotation for unique ground tiles requires massive manpower and high costs.But, it is a good idea, and someday it will come true! :Peace:Best regards.Luis

The have to use some sort of Ovi 3D maps technology to provide accurate 3D rendering. Hand placing all the objects would be impossible even in the future for a large area.

Photo-real terrain is the wave of the future - good forward thinking. For the moment, it is not possible because:- most of the world does not have good aerial images, just not available yet.- even places with high resolution images suffer from problems like cloud coverage (check out Florida!) or bad colors.- Bing does not own those images, they are only licensed. Not Microsoft's, or MGS', to use as it wishes.- the space requirement is prohibitive, think TerraBytes here.- making color corrections, adding seasonal variation, and autogen annotation for unique ground tiles requires massive manpower and high costs.But, it is a good idea, and someday it will come true! Best regards.Luis

Space requirement is not prohibitive for the enthusiast any more. simsavvy covered all of US, i've made my own photoscenery for most of continent. It is probably still prohibitive from the general market's persective, at least for large areas. Distribution also would not be feasible with flight's dlc model.Clouds are not a big problem for the usa with current commercial images. Some previous fsx payware did use poor quality images and in general my fsx photoscenery uses source data that is not up to 2012 standards.Source images outside usa are a problem. Licencing is probably a bigger problem.I don't know that photoscenery is the way of the future. I see more of a move away from it towards landclass-based scenery. Most consumers seem content to be flying over an imaginary world.As to whether the senery looks ok only at 3000 feet - with modern sharp, high-contrast imagery it looks great much lower than that. Ideally it does need hand-placed 3d objects as well - particularly around airports.Personally I would love to see ms licence photoscenery for an area, and release it as dlc. Think it's fairly unlikely to hapoen though, unless it's a small area.

The have to use some sort of Ovi 3D maps technology to provide accurate 3D rendering. Hand placing all the objects would be impossible even in the future for a large area.

Fs treescapes placed all uk trees usuing ordnance survey data, for use with photoscenery.Do this, and add some hand-placed building in the airport approach and takeoff areas - and use good quality photoscenery data e.g. 50cm/pixel, at least around the airports.

#1 problem with using photo-real texture. Painting out all those cars on the road!!!!!!! Also size, color matching, shadows, clouds, coverage, no seasons, and so on. Just think of how big the Alaska pack would be!!!!

#1 problem with using photo-real texture. Painting out all those cars on the road!!!!!!! Also size, color matching, shadows, clouds, coverage, no seasons, and so on. Just think of how big the Alaska pack would be!!!!

Look what vero fs are doing with cali - seasons, color matching. I've downloaded half a dozen states of photoreal from megascenery. Clouds not a big problem in most of the usa data i've seen (alaska i think is a bit more problematic, but horizon just released scottish photoscenery, and that's a pretty cloudy area).So all these factors are fixable - if sufficient will was there.

Isn't Flight's scenery a combination of photo-real and land-class based?When you fly over the cities, there are images of flat buildings, and cars in the parking lots . . . which I thought came from satellite images.

Isn't Flight's scenery a combination of photo-real and land-class based?When you fly over the cities, there are images of flat buildings, and cars in the parking lots . . . which I thought came from satellite images.

Yep, but they're generic photo textures, not geographically accurate sat. images.

I think photoreal could become standard in the future. Much would rely on algorithms that do all the hard work, like image recognition based object removal and placement (cars, trees, ...) and getting data from national/city level databases.In dense forest no one needs exact tree placement and ground texture is mostly hidden under autogen trees, so in many places this saves space/bandwidth. Whole roads could be seamlessly replaced instead of removing cars. Space requirements could be less with streaming and maybe fractal compression. With smart algorithms it might be possible to estimate tree/building size from shadow (if not getting the data from db). Tree etc. types are generally known in many areas. There may even be data for individual trees in city parks. So, I think it's technologically doable in the near future and many useful algorithms are already in use in medical and military fields. Getting the data and really making it work is something else...(Mixing algorithms and art will give best of both and that's what we'll see in the future also)

Isn't Flight's scenery a combination of photo-real and land-class based?When you fly over the cities, there are images of flat buildings, and cars in the parking lots . . . which I thought came from satellite images.

Some area's are photo-real. Take Ford Island for instance, and most airports. Someone goes in and pain-stakingly paints out all the cars, aircraft, vehicles, and so on in each of those area's. This process takes days or even weeks for each small section. Also, they assign buildings and trees later on, and blend it into the land-class textures. To do this for the entire area would take a massive crew MUCH MUCH longer.As for the city's, they use whats called "land class" in that sections are designated "city" and others "forsest" or "parks" and so on. In each section, they have a tiled texture. Its a small texture thats repeated endlessly across that section. These sections are not sat images, but many are sourced from sat images. Its a created image sourced for photo's. FSX uses the same technology for its entire globe. On top of that, houses and trees are generated. Since the large sections are covered in repeating tiles, it drops down the file size of the map. Now that the base game has all the land-class textures already in it, more area's will be smaller downloads. I would not be suprised if Alaska was not much bigger in file size then Hawaii is, since in reality, Alaska is 99% land-class, and the textures are already downloaded in Hawaii.If you want a good example of land-class, look at the edge of a "city" as it goes into a "forest" and you will see a sharp edge. Thats the class boarder. Same for lava flows on the big island. The lava is handled as a land-class and drawn in down the hill.

I think that Microsoft has got all the instruments, crew and resources necessary to release well made photoreal sceneries, edited as for colors, vehicles on roads, water masks and so on, and with added autogen realistically made and correctly placed.Give a look at this state-of-the-art last generation scenery made by France VFR:http://www.francevfr...sp?Code=VFRHNOXPhotoreal base with added autogen (with a new automated technology). Scroll down for screenshots: I find the quality of those trees being astonishing!If that French software house can, why Microsoft crew couldn't?Of course, Microsoft could start with some areas and sell it through Windows Live, like any other piece of scenery.They have bought the right to show the photoreal images to the whole world through Bing maps, so don't think it would be so much expensive to extend part of the licences to a restricted number of Flight users, so few with respect to the all-world Bing users ...Believe me: flying over a "real" world is a fantastic experience, much better than flying over a fictional landclass-based one. One can recognize his own house, town and surrounding land, or rediscover locations explored during holidays ...What about Hawaii? Do you really like the way they appear on this initial version of Flight? I was never there, but have seen photos by friends, and the real landscape looks much better than the landclass rendition present in Flight ...Flying over such a "plastic" world sometimes looks me like a waste of time ...