Why use short autogen buildings in cities?

[Guest ferguson]

This seems like a no-brainer, but why are the autogen buildings in major North American buildings always so short? A poly is a poly is a poly for framerate, whether it is the size of a five-story building or a twenty-story, so why not populate the major metropolitan areas with proper office buildings? I find the typical cities in FS look rather puny, simply because the building sizes are not appropriate in the downtown core. Even New York, which is pretty well done, populates the whole area between uptown and lower Manhattan with wimpy little two-story blocks. My hometown, Toronto, is a mass of skyscrapers in real life, but in FS the whole thing looks like small-townsville except for a handful of strategic buildings.Surely some creative playing around with the landclasses/autogen could improve this?

[JimmiG 244]

I tend to agree. The idea seems to be that bigger buildings should be manually placed as custom objects, rather than semi-randomly placed by the autogen. MS has done this at a few major cities.Have you seen X-Plane 8's city scemery? Cross country terrain still looks far better in FS2004 but look at those shots that I just found at X-Plane.org:http://www.xplanefreeware.net/~jim/1-3-05/

[Guest ferguson]

The manually placed major buildings are fine, and add the right city-specific character. They just need to scale up all the other autogen stuff in the major cities. The X-Place scenes look more like it.

[Guest Vilk]

uh-oh, man, you did make me look out the window..."mass of skyscrapers", eh?greetings from hogtown!;-)

[Hornit 3]

I have to agree, most cities have a core(maybe even two or three) of built up area where the buildings are pretty dense. MS chose to go with what can only be described as a "suggestion" of a city in most cases. I think filling in the city areas with some simpler buildings would make it look a whole lot better than it is now. NY, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, all suffer from this problem. Most medium size cities look decent but could also use some help. It would be nice too if the buildings would draw a bit farther out also. Most of the time outside of a few miles they are just grey colored blobs that dont look very convincing.Hornit

[Guest ferguson]

>uh-oh, man, you did make me look out the window...>"mass of skyscrapers", eh?>>greetings from hogtown!>;-)OK, I exaggerate a bit, but the main Queen-Bloor-Yonge-University core is full of tall buildings. The freeware scenery for the GTA area from Flight Ontario is great, but it's just begging for bigger buildings. Over here in Europe (where I am now) you can get away with smaller stuff, because, well, things are smaller here. I'm certainly not asking for photorealistic stuff like the recent London scenery which has (so it seems) every single building faithfully reproduced... that would be a framerate hog.

[Guest]

The only thing holding me back from X-Plane is a lack of a VC, does anybody know if they plan on adding this?