Honestly what I fear the most about v2.0 is that they don't build a new, even if ESP-based, but improved, FDM core :-/

 

A version 2 with the exact same flight dynamics of MSFS will be a big disappointment for me, although I am served more than enough in as far as flight dynamics go with DCS World. I am actually spending much more simmer time with DCS than p3d or x-plane's demo because it is by far the only giving me credible / plausible flight and systems modelling. P3d suites me for a casual A320 flight :-)

 

In this area X-Plane10 is no option and I also do not believe anything will be modified in it's core until the next version, leaving us with two rather obsolete platforms - ESP and X-Plane - in terms of flight dynamics.

 

I am expecting, for instance, a custom rotary wing flight dynamics model.

 

Having better scenery will be great though...

I do hope that they've fixed the mutual exclusivity of autogen and photoreal.

 

 

Are they mutually exclusive? I understand that photoreal add-ons turn off autogen because it's buildings appear the wrong place.

Indeed Gerry that is the reason, there is no point having autogen on top of photo scenery if it is placed randomly, seeing buildings and trees in the middle of roads and in water completely ruins the effect, default autogen exclusion is by design. But yes of course you can put autogen on top of photo scenery if you wish, many many developers already do this, one only has to look at a company like Earth Simulations to see this. The picture below taken from their website shows autogen hand placed (with the Annotator included in the FSX SDK) on top of photo scenery and most of it is hand placed autogen and not just unique 3D objects.

 

Well, hand placed is not autogen...it's not 'generated automatically'...it's hand placed and, yes, that works fine.  Autogen is created on the fly.  It would have been extremely nice if they had had an option button to turn autogen on/off if the ground texture was photoreal.  Let the user decide if it's good enough. 

You don't seem to know the whole story, that is why I mentioned the annotator and unique 3D objects in my last post. Even Microsoft had to annotate the original textures by hand defining the autogen types onto the textures. A human had to define each texture sheet with autogen (with annotator), basically you draw polygons or lines onto the texture sheet, then assign a type of auto generated object to that line/polygon (shape). The auto part literally means that FSX procedurally places a type of building, tree or other object randomly to that position on the texture sheet, depending on what definition it was supplied with by that human. It was always defined manually by a human being.

I know my stuff when it comes to scenery as I had been closely involved with scenery development (as a tester) especially photo scenery for quite a few years. I've also defined many square miles of autogen on photo scenery with annotator over the years too.

Here is an example of annotator in action.

 

 

Picture taken from this publicly available page here.

 

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc526979.aspx#CreatingBuildingFootprints

 

 

You don't seem to know the whole story, that is why I mentioned the annotator and unique 3D objects in my last post. Even Microsoft had to annotate the original textures by hand defining the autogen types onto the textures. A human had to define each texture sheet with autogen (with annotator), basically you draw polygons or lines onto the texture sheet, then assign a type of auto generated object to that line/polygon (shape). The auto part literally means that FSX procedurally places a type of building, tree or other object randomly to that position on the texture sheet, depending on what definition it was supplied with by that human. It was always defined manually by a human being.

I know my stuff when it comes to scenery as I had been closely involved with scenery development (as a tester) especially photo scenery for quite a few years. I've also defined many square miles of autogen on photo scenery with annotator over the years too.

 

Fair enough.  I've never fooled with Annotator (and maybe I should), only the Flight1 scenery products which work well for hand placing.  I guess, getting back to my original thought, it'd be nice to at least have an option to leave on the trees, buildings, etc. on top of photoreal that you get with default scenery or with ORBX.  If it doesn't line up good, well, then the user could turn it off if they wanted to. 

Further on, annotator places a .agn file in the addon scenerys texture folder which itself doesnt contain any 3d models, those files simply dictates where FSX should automatically generate buildings. Simply looking into your own FSX installation and browsing to Scenery/world/texture you can find all the .agn files that tell FSX where to generate these automatically generated 3d buildings. It's no different from the 3d buildings and forests scenery devs place into photoreal scenery with the autogen annotator.

 

 

Further on, annotator places a .agn file in the addon scenerys texture folder which itself doesnt contain any 3d models, those files simply dictates where FSX should automatically generate buildings. Simply looking into your own FSX installation and browsing to Scenery/world/texture you can find all the .agn files that tell FSX where to generate these automatically generated 3d buildings. It's no different from the 3d buildings and forests scenery devs place into photoreal scenery with the autogen annotator.

 

Can you move those agn files into the photoreal texture folder?

Technically yes you can but you would need to figure out which of the thousands of files to copy to the correct folder, again it's possible but very time consuming. I suppose you could just copy them all over but you would waste lots of space doing this as there are likely a lot of texture folders you would need to copy them into.

I guess that's the problem I'm trying to solve in a practical sense.  I have photoreal but I'd like buildings, trees on it.   

I'm part of a project to completely cover Portugal with photoreal and autogen (plus custom buildings) and it's coming along nicely. We have both working with no issues at all.

So, if I'm reading this right (and I may not be), I could take all of my US photoreal and dump it into a single folder (assuming there are no naming conflicts).  Then I could go grab the texture folders for north america and copy them into the texture folder next to it...say the ORBX PNW stuff...and I'd have autogen on top of the photoreal?

You would have default autogen on top of the PNW stuff as that is where you copied all the agn files to in your above example. The problem is though it could overwrite any agn files that ORBX may have included with their scenery too, the file names may be unique to the texture tile and you can only have one per tile. Putting all the files in one folder is what we used to call an All in ONE install, the texture folder and hence the agn files contained in it need to go in same folder.

 

C:\example\scenery\texture

 

So all the photoscenery is in the above scenery folder and all the agn files go in the texture folder, create the texture folder if one doesn't already exist.

 

Make sure you have a full backup before you start messing about as it can go horribly wrong if you aren't careful.

 

But this is really a discussion for another relevant forum area, not here really. If you need anymore advice there are forums dedicated to scenery design with lots of information already discussed in great detail. The documentation I linked to above for ESP is totally relevant to FSX and even P3D to a greater extent.

If the autogen is located in the US, theoretically, yes... You should see it there on top of the photoscenery.