Is there a way to make this work?  I know MSE disables autogen somehow, is there a config file switch that can turn it back on?  A 3rd party product that will enable it?  I finally purchased my first photoreal scenery for my home state of Minnesota to allow for accurate VFR navigation, but at altitudes below a couple thousand AGL it just feels wrong without 3d objects, especially smaller airports.  Downtown Minneapolis is stock FSX which at least has some buildings (not nearly all of even the most relevant skyscrapers, let alone outlying buildings) and there are a few landmarks like the MOA but the whole place just seems barren to me.  

In a word, no.  Having said that, my flight sim buddy Bill C recently hit on a workable patch.  See this post.  Not the best, but perhaps the least bad.

In a word, YES!

 

I'm a poor typist, so this won't be long and elaborate. Photo scenery does not disable autogen. Autogen goes with textures. Textures can be the default style land class or they can be photo based. FSX works with textures and if, and that's a big IF, there is autogen assigned to the textures it will show it. You do not want to contemplate the effects of having default land class texture autogen popping up randomly inside a photo based texture.

 

Autogen can be applied to photo based textures (the BGL file in FSX) via the Autogen Annotator. It's ease of use makes working with it a breeze. Er, not... The has been developed an autogen generating program based upon the GIS based shapefile (.SHP), but it is command line driven, involves all the GUID based options and at least IMO, is not very welcoming to use.

 

Ideally, one could take some accurate land classification data, program a nice GUI-fronted utility and try to spit out reasonably accurate autogen for wide area coverage. I ain't that smart... :ph34r:

Like I said, no.  Not for any practical purposes.  See my link above.  Not the best, but certainly better than slaving over a hot "GIS based shapefile", whatever that is.

FTX Global - hurry please!

FTX Global - hurry please!

FTX Global seems like an interesting product, but I don't know what it has to do with autogen with photoscenery. People seem to have a lot of misconceptions about what it will and WON'T be. One of the things it won't be is a replacement for photo, or even Orbx regions for that matter. At its heart, it's just textures for landclass scenery. It may be better textures, but still...

 

Scott

I'll try the suggestion in the link and see how that goes.  I'm not fond of the idea as it likely will detract from immersion whilst switching, but at least I have a fast PC and an SSD so the switching time should be minimal. Thanks all.  

I do need to come back and correct what I wrote before. The bulk autogen tool did get a GUI attached to it, but I did not take a look to see if it really helps in the construction of the project.

 

And Dan, don't be afraid of shapefiles and the sorts. You can install SBuilderX and be making your own polygons to fill with autogen in no time!*

 

 

 

*No time is roughly determined to be measured like dog's ages. One year = seven! :lol:

 

 

And Dan, don't be afraid of shapefiles and the sorts. You can install SBuilderX and be making your own polygons to fill with autogen in no time!*

 

I'm not afraid of those things, I have a PHD in computer operation and programming.  All my computer knowledge is "Push Here Dummy"!!  LOL

 

As to the loss of "immersion" while switching from generic scenery to photoreal I can't argue with that point, but as another flight simmer said while I was discussing the technique in a thread elsewhere, when you consider the number of times I pause the sim to get coffee and then to visit the rest facility and then answer my good wife when she says "Honey can you..." one or two more pauses is completely immaterial.

Ok, new topic along similar lines:

what's the "best" photoscenery out there?  Should I keep buying up Megascenery or is there something else out there I should be looking at that has similar quality and coverage area (whole U.S.(soon at least))?

Best is highly subjective and always a moving target. There *was* CONUS coverage, but that developer is now doing the MegaScenery product. As time goes by, people should learn better and easier(?) ways to accomplish development tasks. Even if he's an old man, who grew up in Orange County... Shouts out to Larry!

 

I think best also has to consider the cost involved. Doing comparisons to some European work, France is about the size of Texas. To get France done really nice runs over $900. The UK is about the size of Oregon. To get the UK done nicely costs $500~.

 

I'm making myself some photo work for Kali, Kali, Kalifornia. Due to the size of the state and the fact that it took four months to fly, I'm seeing more color variation than I would have liked. So it's simple, right? Go in and color balance the source. Except there are 11,030 files, each around 190mb. So my 2tb HD won't hold all the source, much less the resulting 2tb of output. I want the results to be as good as possible. But there has to be limits to the time and energy spent trying to accomplish that.

 

Multiply Kalifornia's size by 20 and you have the contiguous U.S. That's a whole lot of files and some serious storage. So while the end results might not always be the absolute "best", I hope there is some consideration to the scope of the project. Especially when I see people clamoring for all the seasons, night textures, full autogen, etc. My usual response is to think to myself "they haven't got a clue...".

 

Sorry if I rambled a bit.

I understand the scope of work involved is massive, just want to see who's made the best effort at it so far so I can use their product.  

You might want to look into "tileproxy" as another method to the same end.  There is a Tileproxy forum elsewhere at Avsim forums.  I don't use it, I use MSE, just offering another possibility

I've heard of tileproxy.  I suppose what I would be after is user feedback or a good comparison of the two.  

There are several posts at the screenshot forum (elsewhere here).  Try using the search term "tile proxy"  (duh).  IMHO it looks at least as good as payware photoreal but is for the more computer ambitious than I (me??).