Austins plausible world

[Rations 102]

This looks like FlyTampa quality (at least the buildings)!

[manuthie 242]

Is my understanding correct that most x-plane cities aren't this sofisticated -- ie, are most of the other cities more plain and with less detail? I had thought only a few cities in x-plane looked like this. If they all look like this, then x-plane looks like the way to go.

 

Well - the answer is yes and no at the same time. The same level of autogen artwork is used for all other cities too so in theory every city has this same level of detail. However all street data is based on OpenStreetMap and OpenStreetMap coverage varies from excellent (Europe, USA) to poor (Africa, parts of Asia, ...). The neat thing about the use of OpenStreetMap is though that all streets you see in the sim are not made up but are actually there in real life.

 

Another factor that will result in varying quality of autogen looks is that the choices where to put which type of building does not yet always seem to fit. Part of the reason is that there is still a lot of autogen artwork missing so other types of buildings are put in as a placeholder and another reason might be the quality of the land usage data (can't judge on that). Right now it seems to work best for cities with lots of straight streets (as these shots of Seattle and New York show).

 

That said there was introduced quite a bit of new artwork with this latest 64bit beta version and it will be interesting to see how things will further improve over time.