And down low, once you look carefully the fake nature of any landclass scenery is readily apparent - the vector data will never, ever match the tiles. So roads run through houses and anything else that gets in their way!

 

This happens in FSX and P3D, but not in X-Plane since it doesn't have any urban "base tiles". The entire city is built up as a complete 3D scene.

Anyway, when you get down low, the fake nature of photo scenery also becomes apparent. It's blurry and flat, and tall trees/buildings appear to be laying sideways on the ground when viewed from the "wrong" angle. Both methods are approximations of reality.

For me, it's easier to disregard a road cutting through a 2D building imprint, because the overall scene with all the 3D buildings, trees etc. looks more believable and less like an abstract impressionist painting.

 

The devs are now saying they are working on a high resolution texture DLC. We'll see how much they improve on the resolution.

We are all different. It's easier for me to disregard the "flat" look of photoscenery (assuming that the resolution is high enough) than landclass scenery that bears little resemblance to reality (even if it is covered with autogen).

I'm with Christopher on this too...

 

When I used Xp10, I really preferred to even turn completely off the OSM + Autogen and stay only with photoscenery...

Froogle seems to like  Aerofly 2 and rates it better than Dovetails offering so far.  Check out his video review. So maybe not as bad as people make out, although everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Froogle seems to like  Aerofly 2 and rates it better than Dovetails offering so far.  Check out his video review. So maybe not as bad as people make out, although everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

 

Well DTG Flight School was never meant to be a complete flight sim. AFS 2 is aiming much higher (evident by its price tag) so it *should* be better.

 

Again didn't see him going very far from any of the airports, where the scenery turns to mush. A lot of the initial reviews seem to miss that problem. Hopefully the new high res DLC will make it a non-issue.

 

Hopefully the new high res DLC will make it a non-issue.

 

It will have to, otherwise "low and slow" VFR pilots aren't going to be impressed. That entire south western USA region needs to be of a consistently high resolution. I really don't care how much hard drive space is required.

It will have to, otherwise "low and slow" VFR pilots aren't going to be impressed. That entire south western USA region needs to be of a consistently high resolution. I really don't care how much hard drive space is required.

 

I will try it out as soon as it comes out.

The latest word was

 

ipacs aerofly

We will try to publish a high resolution texture DLC soon. Give us time to convert the images.

 

So it doesn't sound like it will be that long.

I look forward to your report, Jimmi :smile:

It will have to, otherwise "low and slow" VFR pilots aren't going to be impressed. That entire south western USA region needs to be of a consistently high resolution. I really don't care how much hard drive space is required.

 

Low and slow VFR pilots will also appreciate a mixture lever and more in-depth systems. Which also applies to all the other stock aircraft, of course, no matter whether you fly them VFR or IFR.

 

In my view, this is the first step Aerofly should consider in order to advance to the next level and enter into the simulation arena. We are all impressed by their graphics, we all see a huge potential in this engine and we all appreciate they will release additional high resolution terrain data. But terrain comes later in my personal priority scale.

 

 

I want it to look sharp from 500 feet, and for that you need high quality 0.6m data with consistent colouration.

You don't even get that from ZL18 and just Europe in ZL18 is well over 1TB of storage Good luck with the 100-200 TB of Storage that you need for world coverage. Also you need an developer that is willing to shell out a few million dollars in fees for satelite images in that quality 

I am not looking for coverage of the entire world. I just want to see the south western USA in 0.6m resolution......and that does look good at 500 feet.

I am not looking for coverage of the entire world. I just want to see the south western USA in 0.6m resolution......and that does look good at 500 feet.

 

And some more complexity in the engine and systems modelling too :-)

I don't agree that it looks better than P3D. If you compare stock scenery of both products, it compares quite favorably. However, there are severe restrictions due to the use of satellite imagery.

 

-No autogen. Airports and major cities have quite a few objects manually placed, but outside of that, it's very flat.

 

-There's a tree coverage database, but it's not very accurate. You can see trees sticking out of roads or 2D building imprints etc and the tree coverage isn't very dense.

 

-The texture resolution rapidly tapers off away from major airports and cities. For example, take off from KHAF and fly south along the coast at < 6000 feet. It's worse than Flight Unlimited II from 1997.

 

The superior performance is mostly thanks to the sim being very basic at the moment. Compare the number of 3D objects being rendered at a typical OrbX airport in P3D, or the crazy number of autogen buildings in X-Plane's "plausible world", to the few scattered 3D objects that shown up in AFS 2. It's basically just an elevation mesh draped with satellite imagery, which is not very demanding for the computer to render. With only basic systems being simulated, no ATC etc., the sim is simply doing less, thus performing better.

 

You sound a bit jealous Jim? Comparing an early access product with one in development for 283 years give or take a few is easy right...

 

I thought David Womacks review was pretty good. Gave a good flavour of what the sim could and couldn't do and highlighted how the developers are working on the product for the future. The visuals certainly are pretty that's for sure. David is right to point out the potential, the bottom line here is that the developers want to create a platform like FSX / P3D and it's shortcommings will be open to the community eventually to solve if they have not put something in place beforehand.

 

You just seem to knock everything back and given 1. the position in the development cycle and 2. the potential on offer for something new and exciting it just seems a bit unfair.

It will have to, otherwise "low and slow" VFR pilots aren't going to be impressed. That entire south western USA region needs to be of a consistently high resolution. I really don't care how much hard drive space is required.

 

Hi Christopher, the early access release is 30GB already. Are you sure you want your early access testers downloading even more GB's - thats not practical on a regular basis. I think the developers have stated that higher resolution textures will be available eventually although I can see them releasing this as an optional pack.

We are all different. It's easier for me to disregard the "flat" look of photoscenery (assuming that the resolution is high enough) than landclass scenery that bears little resemblance to reality (even if it is covered with autogen).

 

Thats a good point. The irony is that photoscenery looks best when the terrain isn't flat.

 

This seams like an X-plane 10 verses Aerofly - both however have significant problems with consistent global coverage. P3D/FSX uses something in the middle which I prefer but I'm still waiting for the next evolution of this technique.

 

I'm convinced the like of Orbx Global and GEX products can get significantly better and I'm hoping Dovetail could be the key to this solution but they are going to have to improve a lot to get near what IPACS have achieve with Aerofly FS 2 in and around the airports which is pretty decent.

We are all different. It's easier for me to disregard the "flat" look of photoscenery (assuming that the resolution is high enough) than landclass scenery that bears little resemblance to reality (even if it is covered with autogen).

 

I think the X-Plane approach is the right one. I've yet to see anything that looks more realistic than photoscenery + 3D OSM objects.

 

Of course, for best results it requires good OSM coverage and good art assets for buildings. OSM coverage is better in Europe than in USA, but fortunately OSM coverage linearly improves every week/month/year. It's much better than it was 5 years ago, and in 5 years it will be much better than now.

 

Here's Innsbruck with photoscenery + 3D OSM objects:

 

 

 

I am not looking for coverage of the entire world. I just want to see the south western USA in 0.6m resolution......and that does look good at 500 feet.

 

For a ZL15 (approximately 4.8 m / pixel), each tile fills about 400 to 600 MB.

For a ZL16 (approximately 2.4 m / pixel), each tile fills about 1.8 GB.

For a ZL17 (approximately 1.2 m / pixel), each tile fills between 7 and 8 GB.

For a ZL18 (approximately 60 cm / pixel), a full tile would fill about 32 GB.

 

This is the cold facts of x-plane photoscenery. The size is pretty much similar for all flightsims.  A tile is a 1° longitude x 1° latitude area, so a square km. surface varies its latitude about 111 km. (70 miles) x 111 km. (70 miles) and 78 km. (49 miles) x 111 km. (70 miles) at 45° latitude.   So just make your calculations how much space your hard drive would require and what needs to be transfered over steam to your PC.

 

ZL18 will never happen for anyone unless you do it yourself with tools (like ortho4xp or g2xpl in xplane)