I have seen a few mentions of FSEarthTiles (or FSET) across the internet in discussions related to Tileproxy, but I don't really know much about it. I am interested in using one or the other for FSX (maybe P3D).

 

For those who have any familiarity with both of these photoreal scenery approaches, what are your impressions of how they compare?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each relative to the other?

 

(Or if you aren't familiar with both but know of articles or discussions covering both, can you point me to them?)

One of the huge advantages of Tileproxy to me is that it creates the water mask that's necessary to display rivers, lakes, oceans, etc. properly as water.

 

With FSEarthTiles this has to be done manually and creating a water mask for even a fairly small local area is very tedious and time consuming work.

Uh oh. Tedious and time-consuming does not sound like something I would be interested in if there is an easier way, unless that extra work comes with some other huge benefit.

Fsearthtiles is something you use to create your own photoreal scenery, with water mask or without. You can also make night versions, different seasons, etc. As already has been said, it's a long process depending how many masks you have to do and how big an area you want to make. The advantage to this approach though when you're done is you can install it and run it locally. No network connection required. It also won't matter then how fast you fly over this scenery either as your hdd more than likely will be able to keep up.

 

The same cannot be said for tileproxy. You'll be dependent on your internet connection. The faster you want to fly, the better your internet connection will need to be. I am not sure if you can fly at airliner speeds and have it work well. I've never tried it and stayed away mainly due to this reason. You may also take a little hit in performance too as your pc has to spend time compiling the scenery as you move across the planet. The advantage though if you don't care about the speed/connection part is that it does it all for you "on the fly" as it were. So it's easy.