Tileproxy and MSE2 couple comparison shots.

[DAL1850 51]

What exactly is the driver doing?

 

I'm too lazy to look, but I did note that the source code is included in the TileProxy distro if you wanted to poke around. My guess is that it's either doing some uber-low latency raw packet i/o or doing something unorthodox to inject BGL texture data directly into the sim in realtime that requires elevated (kernel-level) privileges. Either prospect makes me nervous But then I'm just speculating.

[dtmicro 1]

This is going to be a LONG post, so my apologies, for anyone not wanting to read a long post, please skip over

 

For those of you trying to find the best scenery and that don't own much Orbx stufff yet, I think you might find some good info in here.

 

I think much of Orbx stuff is better than TileProxy on average, even though at its best TP can look better than Orbx. I will post some Orbx screenshots in a moment. The big disadvantage to Orbx is they mis-textured some areas and some of their trees look bad when flying low sometimes (but that is ok because a lot of Orbx stuff is mind-blowing quality). Orbx is magical in some regions. If your machine is configured properly and you fly at the correct speed, then Orbx looks Photo-real in many places even when a certain area doesn't have much PR coverage, because I think they based some repeating textures on Photos, so really there is a lot of near Photo-Real Orbx coverage if you know where to look. The desert mountains N and NW of Bend OR are fabulous looking. The mountains right outside of Stewart airport from Orbx if you buy it and own PFJ as well are true photo-real in a small area and those look good. The grass textures and city area of Missoula, Montana is I think a mix of PR and regular by Orbx and is incredible and a masterpiece, as well as the Spring and Summer textures around Bozeman, MT (if you buy the Bozeman airport). The winter textures around Bozeman also look good (though a bit cartoony).

 

The Grand Tetons though (but maybe Jackson airport helps this) aren't that great by Orbx, they are ok. I own CRM but not Jackson airport (will get Jackson later). The Tetons lack definition and it takes a while to load them if flying close up. Orbx does best at mountains that are in real-life somewhat rounded, rather than steep cliffs like the Tetons. I think the 2 weaknesses of Orbx are that and the trees, but otherwise Orbx is near perfect. Steep cliffs also require more complex loading in FSX, rounded mountains are easier on the game.

 

One thing is many people are probably not seeing Orbx textures at full quality because sometimes they don't load fast enough at 1920x1080x32 (at least on my i5, not sure about an i7). Flat areas (even photo-real) pretty much always loaded fine from Orbx on my machine, but the mountains texture-lag to me unless I am viewing in the distance. Hence, closeup mountain flights Orbx textures always had loaded too slow for me. I decided to play at 1280x720 instead, it doesn't look much worse (occasionally some pixelization in clouds), and the instrument panels are harder to read, but otherwise if you want textures to load faster, this might help maybe (not sure still testing). I will try 1920x1080 again, but for me right now 720p is working better even on my 106" projector screen. I'm able to fly 250+ knots without Orbx textures lag-loading on me too much. I think a lot of the tweakers online are full of BS so be careful about those, of course HighMemFix and UsePools can help, but many of those tweaks just mess your system up.

 

So I don't use TileProxy that much anymore, I think Orbx is funner and less hassle.

 

I'm not trying to make trouble, but those screenshots above are not even close to realizing what TP can do. My screenshots from the other thread were not edited, that is not true. Microsoft Bing maps bought the highest detail possible around their hometown area (Seattle and Tacoma) and the source quality there is unbelievable. Go fly just south east of Tacoma, WA and see for yourself.

 

THIS IS NOT EDITED...

 

Tileproxy is an absolute monster to configure properly, you can make it work much much better by excluding LOD's and using the correct mapping provider.

 

The problem with TileProxy isn't just the connection speed so much, it's the map providers throttling. In the old days, I flew over the Rockies without caching at around 500 knots and the textures kept up as good as Orbx textures. I don't have that great of a machine anyhow with my i5 running at 3.7 ghz. That said, if you want to fly just any flight path, then yah TP requires an insane amount of caching. You need to get it to around 100+ GB of cache just for some of the popular spots in the Western US before you even start to fly around properly, which means about a week of setting up auto-pilot flights in circles.

 

There are places where TileProxy cannot work right with the current map provider, these places include Hawaii and Arizona and a few other states (some of AZ and Hawaii look right, but much of it doesn't). The biggest disadvantage of TP is straight-up cliffs in some cases to where it darkens them due to a lack of angle on the photo. It however can do Rocky Mtn Park and Glacier Mtn Park pretty good for the most part.

 

If you only buy two things from Orbx, definitely get PNW and CRM and then fly Bozeman to Missoula (or was Missoula NRM), anyhow do Bend to Govt. Camp, Bend to Eureka. Much of those flights will satisfy your photo-real cravings. None-the-less,

 

My next post won't contain rambling, just screenshots

[fscottee 10]

Those screenshots I posted of TP was with 60cm/pixel, so yes that's as good as it gets at 60cm/pixel for Concord NH.   The screenshot you post above is much higher altitude.  I could have loaded up 30cm/pixel of Concord NH, but what would the point be?  It's virtually unflyable at that resolution.  You'd have to download a huge amount of data before you have anything useable. 

 

Right now I'm finding that even with 60cm/pixel requires a large amount of time.  I guess it's the equivalent of downloading a 30gb State from MSE. 

[dtmicro 1]

 Agree, you need 100+ GB of cache for TileProxy to start to shine. I know I know, though what I meant was TP doesn't look as good in all areas, some areas are better than others.

 

That said, for people that really want the end-all of all experiences, you need a 3D projector. I am not a fan of 3D, as a matter of fact other than an occasional animated movie, I don't really watch 3D movies as they drive me crazy. However, with the correct 3D projector, Microsoft FSX comes alive (it's alive son, heh j.k). I use a Benq w7000 which cost about $2000, but you can now get some good 3D PJ's under $1000. In 3D, the textures automatically look better and higher-res because it creates extra dimensions. The only problem is the airport lights and night flying is useless. I am not sure how 3D on monitors compares to on a projector, as I've never tried it. Microsoft FSX + Orbx was made for 3D, this is the only game I ever play 3D in, and it is like these two are soul-mates.

 

Again, I think some will be surprised at how good Orbx can look (2d as well), Orbx own screenshots don't do their own product justice funny enough. Their screens aren't nearly as high quality looking. Orbx free PNW region isn't near or even close to how good some of Orbx is.

 

Flying now and grabbing some of the best Orbx shots

[fscottee 10]

Would love to see an RAW video (compressed only for YouTube) of a flight from KCCR to KSFO (no edit transitions or shortening) ... any chance you could load one up onto YouTube?

 

 

At 60cm that would be impossible.  I'd have to preload all the 60cm textures for the flight and that would take a long time.  It's basically the same as the plane that took the photos... to get the high rez tiles, you have to fly over every tile within the LOD 60cm area.  Kinda like a reverse of what the photographer did.  Then Tileproxy has to convert them to bgl files.

 

So essentially you have to fly a short distance, pause the flight, allow TP to download and convert, then proceed a short distance (about 10 seconds of flight), pause, rinse, repeat, etcc.   Until you get all the tiles.  Of course this all depends upon the speed of your computer.  I run an i7 3230QM laptop with Geforce 650m SLI cards and 8gb memory on and EXTERNAL SSD USB 2.0 drive.  My bottleneck right now is the USB 2.0 transfer rate.  I am soon going to get a 3.0 external hard drive enclosure for my SSD drive, so that will help tile loading times immensely.

 

Now at 1.2m/pixel is may be possible because they are 4 times smaller than the 60cm tiles.  So they download and convert quicker.

 

However the good news is that you only need to do this once.  Once they are downloaded you have them for future flights.

[dtmicro 1]

Tileproxy will work differently for everyone, it depends not just on your connection speed but how fast a particular cloud server that is providing the maps is loading to you at a given time. It is better after midnight (sometimes).

 

It's because I am presuming MS throttles now, I used to fly at 60cm with very little pixelization at around 300-500+ knots in some areas by flying a square pattern (but I wouldn't call it in flying in circles either).

 

You can sometimes fly at 60cm without too much trouble if you are lucky, but it depends on a lot of things. Also you really have to experiment quite a lot to get this done by lod exclusions so that TP doesn't download too much data.

 

Best and easiest solution is to just auto-pilot square or circular waypoint patterns overnight, then come back. That said, TP has some caching bugs (or something), sometimes even when an area is cached exceptionally well it resets when you load FSX. Though that area will be better after the re-load, it will not be fully resolved. I had over 1+ TB of TileProxy cache on my drive one time, so I should know.

 

The caching bug is the main reason I quit Tile Proxy, though some may have better luck with it. Actually I didn't totally "quit" Tile Proxy as every now and then I'll fire it up, but am enjoying Orbx more now.

 

I started a thread showing some problems with Orbx as well, though many times Orbx looks great, they are not without faults either. All of these methods have their advantages/disadvantages. Personally though, if Orbx just re-did some of the tree texturing, I'd pretty much be in constant FSX nirvana. Please Orbx, focus on fixing auto-gen trees, your trees are sometimes worse than MS default auto-gen... STOP using the same auto-gen trees that you created 3 years ago!

 

Their trees around airports are often exceptional, but their black checkerboard auto-gen tree texture has to go. It bothers me so much I've tried to find the file to replace it myself for my own personal uses!

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/425893-screenshots-orbx-uses-photo-scenery-too/

[fscottee 10]

Well, The Ultra-Res Cities that are rolling out are processed at a higher LOD in FSX, which means the downloads are far larger, so the coverage area is smaller to compensate. At the present, you could render a whole state in this higher detail using the 50cm imagery, however, the filesizes become non-viable, plus the processing time becomes quite extreme. It can take a week of non-stop processing time 24 hours a day to process just one state of photoreal at the normal MSE 2.0 render quality... But its the filesize that is currently the limiting factor. That may change in the future! But for now, you can take a look at the UR City packs that are being released to get an idea of how things look with those (which are comparable to the 60cm TP image you posted above in quality in fact).

 

Well I encourage you to put out some 60cm states.  Take New Hampshire for instance, it is 7gb in size at 1.2m, if you convert that to 60cm it quadruples the size to 28-30gb, which is smaller than your larger states like Washington. 

 

Look I love MSE, don't get me wrong.  In fact I just purchased Colorado today with my generous 50% coupon.  But after flying Tileproxy at 60cm, it is too surreal.  It increases the 3d effect dramatically which makes takeoff and landings that much more real.  I think you guys should be on the forefront of this.  There is not that much 60cm scenery out there.

[dtmicro 1]

Some of the problem is their source maps (USGS isn't that great, it's ok), but there are ways to get better quality and to re-sample. Garbage In/Garbage out does apply to some degree, but these days there are very advanced ways of re-sampling and re-mastering things. I don't understand why they are claiming they don't have enough money or sales to do any of this (come on). If that is true, this most be a horrible business or they are just hoarding the money because they have no competition. I am seriously contemplating releasing my own Photo-Scenery as some freeware at first, then if I can get it good enough maybe some payware (a big IF, I am still studying). I've been coding for 20+ years and have done a lot of re-sampling graphics over the years, so I have the experience, but FSX limits you to what you can do. Regardless of how technical you are, FSX is limiting and it requires trickery.

 

The problem with MSE 2 is they are not sampling the photo-real correctly, the fact that a re-sample would affect all textures is not true, you can resample based on histogram and charted color response (or a hundred other ways of re-sampling only certain areas). That said, I am not giving all my secrets away as I want to do my own scenery. I am just working on a single airport for now though, might take me 6-12 months of learning before I can even START to build a region, unless I were to just download USGS maps like MSE 2 did and release those, sell them for $40, and claim it took a developer a bunch of time to do that (some time for water masking, otherwise there was no DEV in this). The cost is too high for a near-zero dev project.

 

I know it's harder than just creating your own photo-real quickly in FSET or similar, but the truth is that other than the water masking, they didn't do a single darn thing. Yes, there is complexity navigating the USGS site and getting the right files, and then compiling them, this takes some time to figure out, but it certainly isn't worth $40 state

[PCAviator 37]

We are not hoarding money... If only that were possible! The fact is that the business is tough at the moemnt. It's not like 20 years ago where you could sell 10,000 copies of a product routinely. Now, you are lucky if you sell 1/10 of that. Also consider there are substantial costs in delivering the end product too. That much data requires a lot of bandwidth and pretty fast servers to deliver to a large number of customers at a time at reasonable speeds. There are more costs involved than meets the eye initially.

 

I'd be interested to see what you could come up with over large scales though. Would be a journey worthy of taking notes and sharing.

[dtmicro 1]

Thanks for the comments, I didn't realize the project was owned or sponsored by you, my bad.

Yah, that is a tough business then, my fault (I did say either or). I figured it might be, but I do appreciate the info you provided. 1000 copies is tough, but I think your problem is the Orbx scenery, you need to figure out some new techniques instead of using pure unsampled maps.

 

I am not expecting (but am hoping) to be able to get to Orbx quality for at least one thing I make, I mean I can dream. Hard to say what my own limitations will be as I used to graphics work all the back to the 1980's, but after a month of studying in FS-Developer, oh my this is a difficult thing to do. Modeling and stuff like that is simple compared to dealing with FSX limitations, heck anyone can open up Vue 'd Esprit and make something awesome (3DS Max is harder), but I mean in general the FSX SDK does not make this stuff easy, nor does the frame rate issue.

 

I am not for knocking the other guy down or just trying to make a bunch of money (that's not why I do this of course), I just love doing it. It'd be great to make a living doing this than my regular job, but I know it's a fat chance 1 in 100 at best (if that). FSX is one of the harder methods I've ever seen for compiling sceneries, ouch... So many technicalities, and the fact it's a sim means things need to be in the right place generally, in other games/apps you can cheat with that.

[gizmosellsbunnys 106]

Well I encourage you to put out some 60cm states.  Take New Hampshire for instance, it is 7gb in size at 1.2m, if you convert that to 60cm it quadruples the size to 28-30gb, which is smaller than your larger states like Washington. 

 

Look I love MSE, don't get me wrong.  In fact I just purchased Colorado today with my generous 50% coupon.  But after flying Tileproxy at 60cm, it is too surreal.  It increases the 3d effect dramatically which makes takeoff and landings that much more real.  I think you guys should be on the forefront of this.  There is not that much 60cm scenery out there.

Not practical with the hard drive storage available, and 1m is acceptable for flying vfr its real clear above 1500 agl works out  fine.  50cm is fine, but not gonna buy it unless 50tb hard drive becomes available for 200 dollars or less. 

[dtmicro 1]

50 TB is do-able these days in a storage array if you are willing to spend the money. You can find 2-4 TB drives in bulk OEM for about 70% of newegg cost sometimes. It will cost a couple thousand in hard drives, but some people have spent more than that on just a single Yoke and controls

 

Anyhow, darn these forums for getting me hooked on this hobby (hehe), now I've got all these huge plans and no time to have a real life. Right now I'm using a projector, but I want to use three in one of my spare rooms and project an entire cockpit, but I also would like to figure out how to make it 3D without having to wear glasses (not just passive 3D, but active 3D without glasses). I'm thinking some type of active panel material in front of the screens. Anyways that is off-topic.

 

My dream though is a full-sized (well bigger than full size) 180 degree cockpit made with 3D projectors

[nhall72 0]

 

 

I know it's harder than just creating your own photo-real quickly in FSET or similar, but the truth is that other than the water masking, they didn't do a single darn thing. Yes, there is complexity navigating the USGS site and getting the right files, and then compiling them, this takes some time to figure out, but it certainly isn't worth $40 state

 

I disagree.  I have experience with this whole process and I could do this myself but it would take weeks to a month of downloading, processing, importing, etc. to produce even one state of average size.  I think it's easier said than done (especially at this large scale).  If I can spend $40 to save a month worth of work...I'll do it every time.  I think it's a good deal and worth every penny.  I spend more than that paying someone to mow my yard and that only takes a few hours a month!

 

I don't have any issue at all with the cost of MSE.  My biggest concern right now is the lack of night lighting.  But if MSE continues to revise and improve their product I will probably be a loyal repeat customer for years to come.

[dtmicro 1]

It does take a lot of time to download, but it is a one-time thing for someone doing a mass distribution, but my point was it's like anything else, once you've done it once, you know how to do it easier the second and 50th time. I can do my downloads from a Gigabit DC connection if I want though, and I'm assuming so can they. Cogent bandwidth and a few other providers have gotten dirt cheap, so it's not really that expensive to just download them. Now letting everyone download them from you does cost some bandwidth, and I realize that is part of their $40 cost, but it's really cheap to just mail out some burned Bluray disk copies USPS (At least in the US).

 

I agree with you guys though, if MSE is barely breaking 1000 copies, then I am wrong, that is a harsh business. I figured as long as they've been around they were doing better.

 

Also, let us not forget that Bluray readers are very cheap now-a-days, and that you can burn some pretty large size disks. I think a better model is not downloading these things, but instead to ship them out when it comes to Photo-Scenery.

 

I wouldn't have an issue with the $40 if it was clearer and color-corrected, there are some simple standardized ways of increasing sharpness in textures with some standard filtering techniques.

 

I am a videophile so I am a bit OCD about this stuff. BTW, also keep in mind I am on a 106" screen, some of you guys are playing on an LCD monitor! So I see every flaw in its GREAT blown up glory.

 

Oh btw, cannot say this enough, don't forget to calibrate your monitor (even if just by eye) to get FSX looking better, because I find a default calibration doesn't look as good.

[PCAviator 37]

Thanks for the comments, I didn't realize the project was owned or sponsored by you, my bad.

Yah, that is a tough business then, my fault (I did say either or). I figured it might be, but I do appreciate the info you provided. 1000 copies is tough, but I think your problem is the Orbx scenery, you need to figure out some new techniques instead of using pure unsampled maps.

 

I am not expecting (but am hoping) to be able to get to Orbx quality for at least one thing I make, I mean I can dream. Hard to say what my own limitations will be as I used to graphics work all the back to the 1980's, but after a month of studying in FS-Developer, oh my this is a difficult thing to do. Modeling and stuff like that is simple compared to dealing with FSX limitations, heck anyone can open up Vue 'd Esprit and make something awesome (3DS Max is harder), but I mean in general the FSX SDK does not make this stuff easy, nor does the frame rate issue.

 

I am not for knocking the other guy down or just trying to make a bunch of money (that's not why I do this of course), I just love doing it. It'd be great to make a living doing this than my regular job, but I know it's a fat chance 1 in 100 at best (if that). FSX is one of the harder methods I've ever seen for compiling sceneries, ouch... So many technicalities, and the fact it's a sim means things need to be in the right place generally, in other games/apps you can cheat with that.

 

Fair comments. We are not out to try and compete with Orbx. We have a different product to them so we are not really in direct competition. To be honest, if you have talents like yours and the experience to go with it, there are thousands of better fields and genres out there where you could make a lot more coin for your invested time (if that is your goal). If I was a 3D modeller, I'd be making and selling models for 3D printers right now, or modelling implants and crowns for the dentistry industry!