No, not in the same way you do in FSX, as X-Plane does not interpret this information on the fly, but it is encoded in the scenery when its generated (its - kind of - bound to the triangles in the triangle mesh patchwork). But hey, thats why - and i repeat now again - I pointed to that interview in my above post (as this tis described there in quite some detail).

 

Duhhh .... who was talking about airports at all? It was all about city autogen. The airport topic is a different kind of beast, and discussed - in other topics - many times.

 

Airports in a flight sim? Why, we have trailer parks, gas stations and traffic lights. Who needs airports?

Is there a tool to simply edit/assign landclass? I mean I could easily assign relatively accurate landclass for my own area/country simply using google earth as referance. Far more accurate than what xp has today.

 

I agree though, XP is looking really promising now.

 

I was thinking the exact same thing, why not have a crowd-sourced landclass edito app, that would allow people to touch up their own neck of the woods and upload it for others to enjoy.

Come on guys - some more screenshots please. Preferably at max density settings and a little a little higher in the air.

Still, the scenery generation is not done entirely out of "thin air" ... but with a lot of geodata (in this case landuse / landclass data), which gives a generalized classification of "what might be" in a given place.

 

How much "region-alisation" is embedded into the landclass data as things stand on a national level?

 

By that I mean the difference between Californian architecture vs Spanish architecture (for example).

The new autogen has done wonders for my part of the world and looks much, much more appropriate.

 

I agree though-if only the landclass could be better-too many completely missing areas...

Come on guys - some more screenshots please. Preferably at max density settings and a little a little higher in the air.

 

Well, here are a few of me pretending to be Arnold schwarzenegger in True Lies with the new Harrier that was added in the latest update. These are over Queens NY and JFK (which is a payware addon), but interfaces nice with the new autogen.

 

Rob

 

 

 

 

 

Yay - thanks a lot Rob. Seems to look pretty decent so far - scenery as well as the new Harrier. Much more city like than before.

 

Considering the beta page says "New autogen from Alex. This is not the complete autogen work he has done; it is an interim step." this is definitely a step or two into the right direction.

Airports in a flight sim? Why, we have trailer parks, gas stations and traffic lights. Who needs airports?

My point was, that in all the previous post we were talking about city autogen, and somehow out of nowhere, snwboardn associated it (my text) with airports ... so, I wanted to point out, that it was not the way I meant it. Argl

 

I wont answer any more questions about landclass before you don't read the link I posted above (as it answers quite a few of the questions) ...

And regionalization is always possible! The X-Plane library system has a way to differentiate any type of art-assets on a per tile basis (your granularity is 1x1 degrees in this case). See the documentation here (REGION_RECT and such): http://scenery.x-plane.com/library.php?doc=libspec.php

But, as in so many cases: the tech is there to regionalize (even autogen) ... but someone needs to create all those thousands of complex objects ... for each region you can come up with (which is not done overnight).

I installed the beta on my Mac Pro luckily as a fresh install and found that I couldn't access any of the menus using the mouse. The menu would drop down but nothing happened when clicking on a menu option. I even had to Force Quit to get out of the program. Bug report raised.

 

Airports in a flight sim? Why, we have trailer parks, gas stations and traffic lights. Who needs airports?

 

That did make me smile.

I have read the article.

 

Just a couple comments:

 

Avsim is not a forum for complainers. It is a forum for customers ( I have owned most every Xplane since version 4 or 5) . Avsim provides a forum for said customers to comment on a product they have paid for-and like any consumer with an ability to express themselves there will be both compliments and critics.

 

With that in mind I think the new 64 beta is a huge, huge improvement and has got me interested in the sim once again after shelving it for a while. The performance is superior, and the autogen improvements are staggering. I have flown over my familiar flying areas and the looks of the autogen is so much more appropriate and believable and I could be completely satisfied at this stage-if it was placed in more correct places. I believe scenery to be almost the top need for a flightsim. Scenery from the air is the primary reason I took up rw flying, and for a flat motionless desktop simulator is very important for creating the illusion of flying.

 

If I can paraphrase what I at least get out of the article it is that making the scenery more realistic is very slow and painstaking, and that one has the ability to roll up their shirtsleeves and tweak as individuals ( all though in my case have been there, done that the last 31 years and have no more desire), and maybe at some point this will all come together to manifest as the best scenery ever seen in a sim ( I have no doubts).

 

Many years ago ( I think it was with pro pilot) I remember the developers promissing a patch that we waited for on, and on-and finally a user humorously stating that he was 81-would he see the results before he would die!

 

So I read this article , and though age 55 have somewhat the same thoughts about the scenery improvements and when they will manifest in their full glory,including better more accurate landclass placement, airport buildings, and 4 seasons. We have had that on another sim for 10 years, so it is quite understandable when a consumer-especially who has owned/tried all sims is baffled.

 

So some direct questions as to scenery improvements...

 

1) ms seems to have been able almost 10 years ago to procure a worldwide database of airport buildings and populate the entire world with "plausible" buildings that in most cases represent the airport so well that I at least have not felt a need to but add on airport scenery in that platform. Surely 10 years later Xplane might be able to do the same?

 

2) Aerosoft cities translate extremely well into Xplane-fill the "plausible" cities with 1000 rw buildings bringing the sim extremely alive and capturing the essence of individual cities. The performance in xplane is incredible unlike the other sim which will often grind to a halt.Are the Xplane developers talking with the Aerosoft people about porting their work to Xplane-or even like p3d a license for Xplane users to use this scenery on multi platforms?

 

3) landclass is a huge problem, at least in the US where I live, fly, simulate. I understand from your article of the difficulties-but perhaps the collective genius at Lm can figure out a way to get this corrected sooner than later. When entire city areas are missing, or incorrectly depicted it really diminishes the immersion. It seems particularly innacurate in the United States. With FSX if you didn't like it there were multiple vendors to procure something better-easily fixed. Perhaps there needs to be a heavier emphasis on recruiting 3rd party developers so that they can take up the slack in these areas?

 

Again, wonderful improvements in the scenery for this last version-congratulations!

 

 

 

 

My point was, that in all the previous post we were talking about city autogen, and somehow out of nowhere, snwboardn associated it (my text) with airports ... so, I wanted to point out, that it was not the way I meant it

 

I'm on a complete hold until, at least, 10.30.... Total blackout until then :-)

 

Sorry in my head I was really expanding on this post, but the 99% comment made me think of how nice it would be for 99% of the airports to have at least generic buildings... I would take a trailer park in place of what we have...

 

With that in mind I think the new 64 beta is a huge, huge improvement and has got me interested in the sim once again after shelving it for a while. The performance is superior, and the autogen improvements are staggering. I have flown over my familiar flying areas and the looks of the autogen is so much more appropriate and believable and I could be completely satisfied at this stage-if it was placed in more correct places. I believe scenery to be almost the top need for a flightsim. Scenery from the air is the primary reason I took up rw flying, and for a flat motionless desktop simulator is very important for creating the illusion of flying.

 

Agreed I think we are moving in the right direction for sure. The engine itself is working much better... I for one never had a problem with the default landclass, but I am also not a real pilot and never fly VFR in the sim, and if I do I fly in places where the physical topology is your visual aide.

http://wiki.x-plane....a#Release_Notes Rob

 

OMG this sim is getting better and better by the update. I'm so impressed with the eye candy this last update brought in to XPX and as stated by Ben, this is just one piece of the package.

 

Here are more pics from around Honolulu PHNL

 

Oh and no-hits on FPS whatsoever. No pop up buildings (unlike the other sim)

Looking very good :-)