FranceVFR is very nicely done indeed, but look how much of France they have covered after all those years. Not even 1/5 of the country the size of Texas.

France VFR is a smart but small software house ... they can't compare with the production capacity of a software giant like Microsoft.Moreover, Microsoft could start with small areas (e.g. other Pacific islands) and see how they sell ...

FranceVFR team is small, but the Flight team isn't large when you single out the devs who work on the scenery part of the project. I doubt MS would want to invest an army of 200+ strong just to create scenery.

Photo-based sceneries are not nice at all. Thats just forced way we use in FSX because its easier that way.

yes - the simulation must be smooth - so the renders must be fast - these land class textures are a simpler way to provide some detail and maintain speed in renderingonly mega terrabite SSD's and i14 12 core processors running at 6.2 mhz on quadcore 4gig graphics cards could handle fully autogenated satelite imagery on true 1-1 mesh terrain while renderingsmooth, high poly 3D aircraft through realistic weather...someday before I'm dead hopefullyI'm gonna need a bigger, wall sized 3D monitor with retina display for that too

Photocenery, in fsx, is easier on the processor than landclass plus autogen. When you add hand-placed objects to the potoscenery then you're back tomeven. Flight's engine shouldn't have any problem with frame rates.Orbx is one company that's done well with hand placed objects on photosenery. I'm talking about their airports where they cover a surrounding area or town. It would be great to see one or two cities done to this standard.It's great to see so many wanting to fly over 'reality' rather than imaginary landclass-based scenery. Most simmers don't seem to care - they'll fly over their house and find it, not realising they're really just looking at a generic tile that's roughly in the right place.I never flew over landclass-based scenery when i flew fsx, and i would love to be able to fly over the real world again in Flight.

From what I see of FranceVFR, they brake things up into many small sections. Each are about 30 Euro's. They dont paint out cars, trains, aircraft, or shadows. Buying all of France would cost you around 170 Euro's ($223 US) and be over 40GB to download. Not that appealing to the target market.

And this is of course why an Outerra-like technology, if in the end not outerra itself, is probably going to be the wave of the future. The terrain itself is intelligent, and given the correct mathematical parameters can easily replicate continent sized scenerys who's accuracy would only be limited by the granularity of the input data.Seasons could change on the fly, roads could be placed or moved at will, procedurally generated cities would be accepted into the intelligent terrain with a smoothness and realism beyond even the best hand placed buildings............All at file sizes ridiculously smaller than photo textures could ever be. Aerofly comes in at 12gigs just for a one season daytime only Switzerland. Outerra recreates the entire world using approximately the same amount of storage space. Looking at it, the flightsim tech with the greatest future potential seems clear.We seem to be stuck in the past, though. Even at this late date, XP10 is the only flight sim that seems to be even toying with something as obviously beneficial and labor saving as procedurally generated city's.

Hi hiflyer, some people (like me) have little interest in flying over a procedurally generated world. It will never replicate the amazing patterns and diversity that nature provides, and even it it could i wouldn't care - i want to see what the world looks like.Photoscenery takes up a lot of disk space, but 50cm/pixel will still take up the same amount of space in 10 years as it does now - but in ten years 12gig (or a terabyte) won't seem like much...Photoscenery source data is also continuously getting better - look at google earth, then look at the historical images from a few years back.

I see what you are saying, it's just that I wonder even in 12 years, who would be placing all the buildings? Removing the baked-in cars, and bridges and incorrect/conflicting shadows........Not to mention the water masking for lakes, streams and etc.The task you are describing is absolutely ginormous, and something I can barely imagine even the government taking on, much less a game developer. There is no way I can see to make back the money on such an investment. Fsdreamscapes Vfr Hawaii is one of the most high fidelity fsx photo scenerys I am aware of, and it's been in production since the dinosaurs walked the earth.Faced with the sort of manpower and time requirements to make an accurately building and tree covered photo earth as opposed to the ability of something like Outerra to possibly spit out entire "plausible" continents using street overlays and procedural generation (that could be easily and seamlessly corrected at the user level for enhanced realism) there would almost be no choice of which option to pick. The superiority over currently existing techniques would be irresistible.Digressing, here.(I think, for cities at least, it's the only chance something like xplane has, as they simply never had the resources to cover the whole world with even reasonable approximations of the local architecture, and now have done a hail-Mary and brought in a technology to nearly automatically do it for them from existing data. The power of such an option is a paradigm-shifter, and gives xp10 tank technology in a horse Calvary universe)

Tree placement from ordnance survey data has already been achieved by fstreescapes.No one has autoplaced buildings yet - the hand-placed buildings you see in orbx's cairns or tamworth scenery, for example, work really well over photoscenery but seem to be very time consuming.Vero fs have hand placed buildings focusing on approach/departure routes at airports. This is my preferred method, focus on buildings for 10nm out from each runway approach.I'd like to see a freeware object placement tool that cold easily upload data to a central server - so we could make object placement a worldwide community project.

In my former obsession with Hawaii, I did attempt to accurately hand place buildings on Sand Island and expand to the mainland. It was a very time consuming and ultimately frustrating experience, since the nearly infinite variation of actual buildings made approximating the building footprints with a very limited set of FSX structures (many of which are monstrously out of scale in their default settings) a nearly hopeless task.All sorts of tricks and shortcuts were required, some of which I can spot to this day in some Orbx scenerys, and my conclusion was that I was attempting to build the Sistine chapel with a rusty spoon. The tools just did not seem to exist to accomplish what was needed in any reasonable time frame, without some sort of automation. (and then accuracy is lost)It would be interesting to see somebody take a whack at it, though.

I'd like to see a freeware object placement tool that cold easily upload data to a central server - so we could make object placement a worldwide community project.

that is kind of what osm2xp does... i haven't tried xp10 yet but it looks interesting... http://osm2xp.com/cheers,-andy crosby

3D Automation, a new technology for an automated autogen (forgive me please) has recently been developed by France VFR, the little but smart software house I mentioned some posts above ...Take a look to their forum (in french, but automatic translators get better and better ...):http://www.vfrnetwor...lution-autogen/No need for placing buildings by hand ... not anymore ... technology runs ..

Photoreal scenery looks great in X-Plane too ... here some screenshots over Italy in X-Plane 9, 1 meter/pixel, freeware scenery (http://www.x-italy.it/) I think it would look even better in Flight ... some parts of the world (e.g. Italy, why not?) known for their nice landscape, could be added as DLC with photographic terrain only, without autogen or with autogen just around airports, for those (including me) who like flying at medium altitudes enjoying the real landscapeA simple way to realize addon areas, which could be sold at a reasonable price. "Italy Photo" or something similar could be the name ... it might be a good idea also on a commercial basis ...