Aerofly has photo coverage of the entire earth at a resolution suitable for use at typical airline altitudes and higher resolution areas as scenery packs.

 

No realtime downloading is being done.

Oh..ok...and thank you for the info.  Much better than live downloading...  Well then, that is so cool...fly anywhere...see what is truly down below, other than generated Autogen, and as you come into your DLC content, things resolve at higher settings.  Way cool....

 

Ses

Could someone post some screenshots of this area?  Since it's my backyard I would really be interested and appreciative of them.

 

Edit:  Maybe I should narrow this down a bit.  I'm particularly interested in Monterey, Monterey Bay, Moss Landing on Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.

OK, I'll do that for ya asap.

 

The San Fran Bay and Oakland is killer....  Half Moon Bay as well...

Of course it is, as always, and as this topic proves, a matter of personal preference.

 

Obviously everyone would love photoreal scenery with seasons, updated every 6 months, with accurately placed buildings, landmarks, trees, etc. In short: EVERYONE wants to see what is actually really down there. But that won't happen for quite some time, at least not on a worldwide scale.

 

Right now we have to deal with compromises and everyone simply has their preference: I know there are people who actually love completely flat photoreal, so even without a single piece of autogen, because it reflects what it really looks (or looked) down there. I can understand that. I had quite some fun with the good old Great Britain photoreal cd's a decade ago or so but already then I got allergic to the flat squashed look of everything. But again, some people love it no matter what. Some people love it above 3500 ft and not below but I myself don't even like photoreal at 30.000 feet because I can SEE things are flat. I do however like the fact that you see what actually is there.

 

One of the main reasons I like 3D stuff out there is because, as in real life, things look different from all angles. And, quite important, things look (completely) different during various times of the day due to the light playing on buildings. Even at 30.000 ft. With photoreal things look more or less the same all the time. It just doesn't look right to me. But to others it looks perfectly fine. The don't care about things being flat.

 

Someone said I am on an XP high, but I'd like to make clear that XP is far from perfect either. Everytime I start it up I have to overcome the feeling that things look like a computergame. It has something artificial and plastic. But after a few seconds already I am used to it and it looks pretty convincing to me when I actually fly, even though the textures are quite repetitive and the same all over the place. I do however not fly in area's in really know by heart because they look nothing like the real thing. 

 

In FSX/P3D I hated those roads running right through groundtextures with houses in them, well, in XP I can see the same effect in rural areas where roads run right through fields. Of course this effect is a LOT less annoying but it still doesn't look too good. What I personally do not like at ALL about XP (who said I was on an XP high LOL) is that the roads often are too wide, don't have smooth corners and, my biggest gripe, that there often are too many roads in places, pushing out the autogen, creating weird intersections and quite often ending at odd places. It sometimes (or quite often) looks terrible. Roads along mountains look like ###### too. Terrible. OSM based scenery is great but far from perfect. It often reminds me I am playing a computer game.

 

In short, as has been said already, every sim has its pro's and con's and you have to choose the one that suits you the most. Or that is the least annoying.  :wink: Or use them all. Whatever pleases you: in the end we are flightsimming to have fun, right?

This thread is a perfect example why developers should take zero notice of what simmer want. We all want and like different things.

 

To me a flight sim and a geographically realistic and accurate world sim is closely tied together. After all, I fly to see as much of planet earth as possible - in the sim and in real life. There is technology to make a very good 3D photo world, but it is still too expensive and the data is too large for home use. (Check out C3 Technologies 3D map of Oslo, Norway for instance)

 

Right now Aerofly FS 2 is the only sim that can simulate something close to real world scenery with fps that makes flying somewhat realistic. That's why I like it. I've tried photoscenery in P3D, VFR France being the best of the bunch, but fps is just too poor make any kind of realistic flight in it. And as for the default autogenerated scenery in P3D and X-Plane it will always look artificial and unbelievable to my eye. With AFS2 I feel like I've seen New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. With P3D and X-Plane I feel like I've seen P3D and X-Plane...

AeroFly FS2 is downloading as I type these words. I am looking forward to testing the performance with my 2GB GTX 770 graphics card. It could provide useful information for other interested customers :smile:

This thread is a perfect example why developers should take zero notice of what simmer want. We all want and like different things.

 

 

LOL So true!  :smile:

 

 

 

With AFS2 I feel like I've seen New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. With P3D and X-Plane I feel like I've seen P3D and X-Plane...

 

I get what you mean and I understand it but at this moment in time I personally prefer a world that looks a bit like it might be real (but isn't) than a world that looks pretty real in a few places but falls flat (pun intended) in most places. I simply can't get used to parts of the city looking like the apocolyps has occured a few hours before. To me that is absolutely far more immersion killing than a not so real but believable world. One street with a few missing buildings I 'I feel like I've seen AFS2'.  :wink: (Also, the roads with baked in cars which, obviously, don't move, is an immersion killer for me. I like to see the world being alive!) Again, it's all personal! (Some people don't care at ALL for moving traffic!) And I still will get AFS2 as soon as I have the time for simming again, as I said to support development, but also to hopefully enjoy those very small places that DO look convincing for a few minutes (and to be ready whenever a real breakthrough is coming when it comes to the scenery :wink: ). 

 

BTW I think it also depend on how you fly: I know some people like to take off or even start a flight in mid air and then enjoy the scenery and quit the program when they have seen enough. I myself always need some sort of goal: simply flying around for instance NYC doesn't give me real joy: I need to take off (preferably cold and dark) and go somewhere and actually land (and go back to cold and dark) otherwise I am bored within a minute. For me this would mean, I think, I HAVE to fly over empty photoreal scenery in AFS2 OR do extremely short hops around NYC. But well, I will let you all know how it goes and what my experiences are when I have the time to download ASF2.  :wink:  I actually kinda look forward to it LOL

A lot of this back and forth is also based on a premise that I've never really subscribed to: that you kind of have to choose one sim and stick with it. Like a marriage or something.

 

After I listed some of the things I disliked about Xplane..... I fired up Xplane and flew around DD's New York, really appreciating the differences in approach between their version and Aeroflys. And I love Xplane at night.

 

I have many sims on my computer, and have things I like and dislike about all of them. But I purchased all of them because I believed there was something there for me to enjoy, and that hasn't changed just because something else came along. The exception is FSX/P3D, which I just can't take any more. 

 

In my Aerofly era, there's still room for Xplane, and unless they really fudge it up, there should be room for DTGSim, though possibly not if it follows the Flight School template........

 

Heck I still have Microsoft Flight and fire that up as well! And DCS and Rise of Flight and.........

 

Why do we so often act as if we have to choose only one and settle down for life?

 

I can understand having a preference, but one sim forever? How boring!

 

I like Pepsi, but I drink Coke too. And tea! I love tea! And.......

 

I try not to drink to much of the Kool-aid, though.

The cold and dark stuff is why I no longer fly in the real world - All the preflight work was such a chore - I just wanted to get off the ground ASAP!

 

The good thing about a sim is that I can do just that. I can pick the weather I want, the aircraft I like and just go fly. I don't have to worry about weahter, crowded airspace, flight planning, ATC, fuel, wear and tear, engine hickups, flat tires, faulty gauges etc. 

 

Sadly a desktop simulator gives a fairly terrible representation of real world flying as you don't get the physical or mental sensations that comes with it. All that is left then, for me, is the scenery, and the only reason I enjoy flight simming is because I love geography and exploring planet Earth. And I love classic aircraft that you can no longer fly as a pilot or passenger in the real world. It is a joy to learn about these technical marvels in such an interactive way, but I usually just start them up and take off. I don't get a kick out of flying them in the sim - the kick comes from the engine rumble

 

 

Why do we so often act as if we have to choose only one and settle down for life?

 

For me it's cost, I simply cannot afford to buy the best payware for more than one sim.

Great if you can be happy with the default aircraft and airports, but I need complex aircraft, great airports and first class weather and there is no way I can spend that type of money upgrading more than one platform.

I also need the platform to support my hardware which P3D does the best at so far.

Some screenshotsof Aerofly FS2 for those considering getting it. Most of these are with the DLC of Switzerland around Zurich (that scenery costs an additional £6.99, as does the NY State scenery, but it's a lot of bang for your bucks). I positioned the LearJet over the UK (see pic) to give people an idea of what the rest of the world looks like, it's okay from about 10,000 feet AGL, but it's pretty low resolution when you get down low, so at the moment you are limited to flights to and from California to either New York State or Switzerland if you want to actually land, or just around California if you don't get the additional DLC, but there is nothing stopping you from flying anywhere in the world and it looks okay if you stay up high, and as you can see from the pics, the airports look good although those aircraft are all static and there's no ATC. On the plus side, notice on one of the night shots, the runway has some sloping modeled.

 

Some of the aircraft have more of their avionics operational than others. If you like flying airliners, at present it is somewhat akin to creating a flight plan with the default FS flight planner, whereupon you will have that in your airliner's Nav systems, but if you like messing around with FMCs/CDUs, at present, you can't and neither can you do any fancy ILS approach set ups, so be aware of the fact that you'll be doing some hand flying on those airliners.

 

The gliders are well implemented, they have variometers with audio, spoilers and all that stuff, and there is thermal and ridge lift modeled, and of course around Switlerland that is really cool with the ridge lift. The spin characteristics of the aircraft are a bit iffy: I managed to get the F4U Corsair to spin (once) and the correct recovery technique worked to get it out of the spin, but on another occasion, I couldn't get it to spin at all despite really giving it some, so there is potential in the flight modeling, but it ain't spot on as yet, thus you need to be aware of that if you are interested in chucking the aerobatic aeroplanes about which are included (Pitts etc). As I said before, it's really crying out for a chopper, because the included scenery is great and would be fun to explore low down in a whirlybird, especially around NYC.

 

If you like flight sims (which presumably you do if you are on this forum), it's definitely worth a go in my opinion, even if it never gets any more than it has at present.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why do we so often act as if we have to choose only one and settle down for life?

 

I can understand having a preference, but one sim forever? How boring!

 

 

All that is left then, for me, is the scenery, and the only reason I enjoy flight simming is because I love geography and exploring planet Earth. And I love classic aircraft that you can no longer fly as a pilot or passenger in the real world. It is a joy to learn about these technical marvels in such an interactive way, but I usually just start them up and take off. I don't get a kick out of flying them in the sim - the kick comes from the engine rumble

 

For me it's cost, I simply cannot afford to buy the best payware for more than one sim.

Great if you can be happy with the default aircraft and airports, but I need complex aircraft, great airports and first class weather and there is no way I can spend that type of money upgrading more than one platform.

I also need the platform to support my hardware which P3D does the best at so far.

 

Three quotes, three different reasons for simming, for picking one sim or not, for prefering scenery over system depth, etc. and everyone can add their own preference to this. Isn't it great that we have all these options today!!!???  :smile: I myself like things clean and tidy and organised and so I like to have ONE sim in which I usually fly ONE plane LOL And I do like to look out of the window a LOT but I also like having something to do during my flight (fiddling with systems or VOR to VOR flying or at least flying from A to B). Some sims are more suited to a specific preference than others. I think we often forget too soon that others might be simming for a completely different reason and hence we seem to be talking about the same but we actually aren't. Hence the sometimes heated 'discussions'.  :wink: But in the end everyone wants to have a good time with their sim, doing what THEY like to do and so there can't really be a good or bad sim or a better or worse sim: it's all very personal. I will try to keep than in mind whenever I post something about a sim I might not prefer myself.  :wink:

 

I'd like to add that I do like to talk about all these sims nowadays! These are great flightsimming times! It could well be I spend more time talking about this marvelous hobby than I am actually flying LOL!

AeroFly FS2 is downloading as I type these words. I am looking forward to testing the performance with my 2GB GTX 770 graphics card. It could provide useful information for other interested customers :smile:

Make sure you don't have 1/2 Refresh Rate in the nVidia driver suite.  If you do, you will only get 30 FPS at any time.  The best vsync setting is Adaptive.  Just a head's up.

 

 

 

 

 

 

LOL If you hand't used a capital for Imagine I wouldn't have gotten the pun.  :wink:

 

 

If you like flight sims (which presumably you do if you are on this forum), it's definitely worth a go in my opinion, even if it never gets any more than it has at present.

 

Is there any way to get rid of the pilot figure ?

Is there any way to get rid of the pilot figure ?

 

well, you can sit where he is and then if you looked over to the right there is no co-pilot modeled :-)

 

Actually, he is quite well animated, his hand moves with the throttle and yoke pretty convincingly compared to some of the iffy efforts at that we've seen over the years in various sim planes. But he is in MY seat.

 

How do I download and install the High Resolution Texture Pack? When I click on "download" in Steam, it just loads AeroFly FS2 itself :huh: