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...

 

Right.  FTX Global is just better quality pictures that will still be randomly placed based on the land class defined in a given tile.  So, while it will probably look better than Ground Environment X and definitely better than default, it's still not what is actually there as you'd see it if you were flying over it in the real world.

I've just "fallen" into Tileproxy......and whilst its heavily flawed - I actually love it to the point I can't see myself going back to GEX/FTX landclass generic textures again for a long while.

 

Even considering it was left as an unfinished beta back in 2008 (??), its an incredibly clever piece of software and i'm surprised its not far more popular than it seems to be.

 

The bad so far:

its a ball acher to set up (with an unsigned driver, and the firewall blocking it)..

the photoscenery is NOT colour-matched and you can get great lines of wildly differently shaded areas

Google "warned" the developer off using Google maps - would almost no doubt have been the best source of high res imagery

it consumes/uses a vast amount of hard drive space downloading thousands/millions of jpegs that it uses to create into tiles/bmp's that FSX can use - this also fragments the hell out of the drive!!

 

The good so far:

its free

its the whole world - albeit with some areas at 30cm (USA and most of western Europe using Bing (or service example 1)) and others at up to 5 or 10m per pixel in places

I can see my house

 

Give it a whirl, it might be exactly what you'e looking for - this is the link to the most informative website I could find

 

http://www.edtruthan.com/tileproxy/tutorial/

 

You can "preview" the area you wish to fly by simply going to Bing or Yahoo maps - in essence what you see there, and the level of detail/resolution that Bing or Yahoo have there, is what you will see using Tileproxy

 

Good Luck

 

Steve

And just to add another potential downside to tile proxy, you NEED a connection to the Internet.  Without that, no beautiful textures to look at.  Also not sure on how well it would work with slower connection speeds.

I have a 50Mb connection.  I'm intrigued by the fact that there is no cost, but the initial setup and all the downsides mentioned are enough to push me back toward MSE.  

Just give it a try...you literally have nothing to lose with it being free!!!

 

Yes MSE all over the world would be the best option in terms of resolution, image quality, colour matching etc but the cost in terms of size AND cash would be astronomical-not to mention the time it would take for them to cover the whole globe!!

 

At least TP gives you a "halfway house" right now without the monetary cost and like I said, the image quality/resolution for the whole US is great everywhere.

 

Any probs just post in here, or the Tileproxy forum further down, and I (as I'm sure others will too) will only be glad to help.

 

TBH I have for years shied away from photoscenery due to the "flatness" and "liking" autogen but Tileproxy blew me away even with its faults and like I said I'm not sure if I'll ever go back.

 

Regards

 

Steve

 

Sent from my BlackBerry 8520 using Tapatalk

Now, referring back to your original post, don't forget that MSE (and any photoreal  scenery I suppose) needs a huge amount of storage space.  I think even a smaller state (I live in WV) needs something like 15 Gb of storage.  Normally sized hard drives get used up quickly.  I solved this by installing a 3rd HDD, a 2Tb WD Black.  I can now store basically the whole Western Hemisphere.  Placing 15 GB in a 2Tb drive is the equivalent of tossing a small pebble into the Grand Canyon.

 

Hard drive storage is so cheap as to be comparatively free (not really, but you take my point).  A 2Tb drive costs something like $159.00 (Newegg).  If you go for more storage, get the biggest drive you can find and afford.

I'm spoiled by SSDs. I have a 512GB OCZ Vertex 4 that's not even half full yet. Just downloaded a few more MSE states last night, a larger SSD may be in my future.

I take your point re SSD's.  It is my understanding that a SSD is not needed for photoreal scenery (and this may be way off--I'm definitely not a computer techie).   A HDD works well for me. 

Got WD hardrive at target to store files that are 1tb and 2tb to back up the USA and when Canada comes along repeat process on another harddrive. Tilepoxy only bing will be around as server Yahoo ending their service and google blocks each time.

Got WD hardrive at target to store files that are 1tb and 2tb to back up the USA and when Canada comes along repeat process on another harddrive. Tilepoxy only bing will be around as server Yahoo ending their service and google blocks each time.

How much space do you figure you need for just the US?

How much space do you figure you need for just the US?

 

I have SimSavvy 50cm for the US(contiguous) and it takes up around 850GB I believe.  It shipped on a 1TB hard drive.

 

For those that don't know already, SimSavvy is more or less MSE v1.  Larry, from SimSavvy, is now doing the MSE stuff.  So, I'm not sure how much water masking would add to the sizes, but I wouldn't think it would be too much.  I also would assume the images are the same size as the images used in SimSavvy - just updated to 2012/13 images or whatever he's using now for source data.

Not every state is yet available.  I took a quick look just now at the MSE page but didn't see a listing of how big each state was, but I may have overlooked that info somewhere.  Let me just say this, you're going to need a bigger hard drive (thank you "Jaws").  I have D/L'ed eight (8) Middle Atlantic states and still have 1.66Tb of 1.81Tb total capacity free.

 

But do remember, the mid-Atlantic states are relatively small.

I take your point re SSD's.  It is my understanding that a SSD is not needed for photoreal scenery (and this may be way off--I'm definitely not a computer techie).   A HDD works well for me. 

 

And I'm no photoscenery expert so maybe it's overkill, I just want to do everything I can to reduce/eliminate blurries at low altitudes where I do my VFR flying.  I suppose we'd have to compare loading times to have any quantifiable difference.  

 

 

I took a quick look just now at the MSE page but didn't see a listing of how big each state was, but I may have overlooked that info somewhere.

 

There seems to be a lot of variability, based on my limited sample size, and differences don't always seem to match the differences in size of state.  For example, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois are all substantially smaller than Wisconsin.  Wisconsin is almost double the file size of IL, in fact.  I just did my first flight last night from Cedar Rapids Iowa to Green Bay Wisconsin.  This took me over the point where Iowa, IL and WI meet, and there was no question that the quality of Iowa was considerably lower than that of Wisconsin, while IL seems a bit better than Iowa, but still below that of WI.

 

I'd posted yesterday about flying into the excellent KGRB freeware, and there's little question that a big part of why that flight was so good is that WI itself is so well done.  The illusion of 3D is maintained far closer to the ground than it is in Iowa, where even at 4000 AGL, I still felt like things were a bit flat.  There's just more detail there.

 

Scott

There seems to be a lot of variability, based on my limited sample size, and differences don't always seem to match the differences in size of state.

 

Yes, and there can be differences within any one state to further complicate things. I think most of the problem with variable visual quality is not with the MSE boffins, but rather with the quality of the available satellite photos at the time. Was your Iowa perhaps a 1.0 file and not 2.0??

 

All that aside, I can say that getting into a full set of U.S. States is going to involve a lot of storage.