OMG it's going to happen for sure IMO. What better way to make mega bucks than to have a subscription service ($19.95/mo) for simnuts to log on and fly anywhere and have scenery that is current and super hi resolution. The client software might have the terrain mesh fully complete and compatible with the online scenery feed, therefore lessening the amount of data to transfer. Plus, there is the added benefit of providing enough autogen with the front end install so that offline simulation is doable as it is now. The key will be in getting the resolution super hi for online flight and of course having some algorhythm to lose all scenery outside of your immediate range. It's a marriage made in heaven IMO. I'd pay 19.95/mo if the quality was about what you get in San Diego downtown on Keyhole: 3" resolution! Ok, I'd still sign up at 1' resolution :() Can't wait! Now if someone will get on it with a nice cheap full motion simulator package . . . Noel

Donny AKA ShalomarFly 2 ROCKS!!!Not to get too far off topic, but cheap full motion... Saw an article about a guy who designed a capsule that was suspended on a fan-driven column of air- a hovercraft going nowhere per se- and put in three axis controls and was going to carnivals. Not only was it cheap to build, (though ya gotta power the fan somehow!!) pilots could get in and do all sorts of aerobatics, 360 on EVERY axis with almost unlimited rate of change, now that's full motion!!! Though there's plenty of potential, there could be plenty of lawsuits if some yahoo doesn't fasten their seat belt on their true full motion Marchetti simulator... And I haven't heard about it since.

Yes it will happen, no doubt about that, not next year or the year after but perhaps in five years time. Possibly in the way you describe or on local PCs when when terabyte hard discs are common place.Bruceb

I read through this, and I think that there was a bit of confusion about the data that was available. I thought we were refering to the textures that could be put down onto the ground to replace the standard landclass textures we use now, but then someone mentioned SRTM data, which is elevation data. Anyway...The textures that we can get off of Google are indeed good enough for FS, since most of them are better than 4.8 meters/pixel, which is the best FS can lay down onto the mesh. It is true that on flat areas, (like airports) we can use higher resolution textures by creating the terrain as a scenery object, but for most of the world, 4.8 m/p is the limit. This is the resolution of the detailed areas in the out-of-the-box FS.There's a couple problems with using this data. To start with, it's copyrighted, so you would have to obtains the rights to it before you started distributing it. Second, is that to lay down een 4.8 m/p over the whole Earth would require a lot of disk space. So, some sort of compromise is needed - maybe just use this sort of data around airports.The next thing that came up is the idea of scenery over the internet. This idea has already been played with too. The idea is that when you install scenery, instead of pointing to a location on your hard disk, you could point to a location over a network. I'm not sure if FS currently supports this, but it is something they could build into the next version quite easily.This doesn't require nearly as much bandwidth as you think. This sort of scenery could rely heavily on standard textures and library objects (which every good scenery designer does already). The actual scenery files would be quite small, since the textures and libraries could be downloaded seperately. In the "olden days" of scenery design, this was how it was done - remember downloading Airport and Nova textures? As an example, the scenery files from my Buriram (VTUO) and Trat (VTBV) were 20kb and 10kb respectively. The rest of the files were libraries and textures.Larger, custom objects, (like airport terminals), might not change much over time, so they wouldn't require updating on a daily basis. But maybe small objects that move over time (cars in a parking lot) could be updated every few hours, so that when you return to an airport that you departed a few hours ago, the appearance would be slightly different.- Martin

Colour matching would be a problem too. Without every image being colour corrected and matched you'd clearly see the joins between the images.I suspect some of the other posters have underestimated the size of images that would need to be downloaded, especially if a higher rsoluttion that at present is used..Would mipmaps needs to be used and would the images need to be converted to a DXT format?

i thought about that two, and i tried starting a thread like this on the terrain forums, and people pointed out that the images are copyrighted......but still......maby fs2008?

The probelm right now is that the amount of high detail imaging like down to less than car size is quite limited. If this were to be extended across a large proportion of the earth's land surface there would indeed be potential for a revolutionary change in the way scenery is displayed in FS.Bruceb

More discussion of this is at: http://blogs.msdn.com/tdragger/archive/200.../14/439171.aspx.