I have often wondered if there is any way to improve the appearance of the ground in FS2004/FS9. When looking at pictures of an airport we seem many clear, well defined "things" setting atop what appears to me as slime. As an example the recent Emma Field shown below.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/75632.jpgIs it possible with GMax to create a texture that has the detail to present a more realistic appearance of grass, concrete, asphalt, etc. in a size that would permit enhancement of an airport area? Yes, there will be speculation that frame rates would suffer, but has anyone actually experimented with GMax in that scale to truly assess the impact.We see countless efforts by artists to create "things" and place them in realistic positions and functions. However, their efforts are visually compromised by the "slime" that they must set upon.Dick Boley @KLBE

The tiling system used by FS doesn't permit that level of detail. 38m resolution is the best the mesh can achieve, and I presume the landclass (the thing you're talking about) works to similar resolutions. 1024x1024 pixels is about the best you can get, and those pixels have to cover quite an area. It is simply impossible to render blades of grass. What you're asking for would be a monumental task as each tile would have to be hand painted down to a sub-pixel level (is that even possible?)The best that can be achieved is to increase the levels of anisotropic filtering, or add the texture detail options from the FS slider menu. Even that only works down to a certain height below which the scenery goes `slimy` again. Best to fly higher and forget about it!Allcott

I really was not concerned about mesh since my primary objective would be to have a flat airport area with a large GMax picture that was grass. Rather like an airplane texture but laid flat. Thus this would not be a conventional texture such as produced by Landclass specifications but a GMax picture. Now, if the Gmax size is severely limited, and thus only suitable for small chunks of high detail "things", then the point is indeed moot.While the native landclass is quite ok from some altitude (personal taste) it is terrible below that. The trees and buildings stand out well but look silly setting on top of fuzzy swirls that only represent land from a significant distance. I have seen screen shots of Lago's Venice. It receives high acclaim but the excellent, highly detailed structures, look so odd setting on top of the blurred ground that the effect is lost and not worth paying money. I may be preaching to the choir but I have come to accept marginal flight models and am willing to adapt to the fact that FS2004 is a visual product. There is a much larger market for "flying" a so-so aircraft that really looks great as you fly along side it, over terrain (at altitude) that is quite representitive of reality. With proper landclass, and accurate 38 meter mesh, it ain't bad.I am testing AutoASM ( by Chris Wright) which, when released, will place roads, rivers, and coastlines very accurately. It does this using input from Terrascene from FLY! days. Works very well. So to me the next frontier was the ground but.......Dick Boley @KLBE

Georender sceneries look OK around the actual airport, but the rest of the scenery included is of the lower 4.8 meter/pixel resolution and quite blurry.Scenery textures in FS2004 are limited to 4.8 meters/pixel. That's a lower resolution than Flight Unlimited II used in 1997 (4.0 meters/pixel). This is a serious limitation when trying to do realistic scenery. I don't know why it's still there. Generic scenery would look much better with higher resolution tiles.Object textures including textures at flat airports can be at a higher resolution. However, this requires lots of handpainting work, or VERY detailed photographs of the real airport.The hardware capabilities of modern computers certainly allow for higher resolution. I don't think 0.10 meters/pixel scenery tiles would cause any serious problems if they are mipmapped and DXTC compressed. For photographic sceneries, you'd of course have to limit yourself to maybe 0.5 - 2 meters/pixel due to storage and memory limitations.

The future is going to be, in a way, like autogen- procedural textures, and particle based scenery.Instead of textures, each will be a mini "landclass" file with grass, asphault, dirt, etc. Upon that high resolution textures can be blended somehwat randomly to give a very realistic representation of the ground, along with 3D objects of grass, bushes, rocks and other things. This is the way terrain is modeled in high end rendering programs, and with some tweaking, the results are very convincing. Look at some games like far cry, and this is how they work. Using 3D studio Max and some procedural textures I can create a very realistic landscape in a small amount of time. The upside is that procedural textures use very little memory. Think of this like autogen vs. hand-placed scenery. The hand placed scenery will be more accurate, but there will always be significantly less of it. No one in their right mind would try to hand place all the scenery in the world, and it would take hundreds of terrabytes of data. So autogen fills in the blanks, not perfect, but better than nothing. The downside with procedural textures is that they can eat up some serious processor power (although newer graphics cards are capable of doing them- they are known as shaders- such as the reflective waters effects many games now use- not the FS9 version). We will definately see this type of process in the future, but keep in mind, just because you see blades of grass doesn't mean they would be there in real life- it will be up to the scenery developers to make it right.This will be a natural progression- compare half-life to far cry, or even FS9 to FS2000, and you see a major improvement. The slime will eventually blend completely.