With V4 being announced and being 64 bit, what are the chances ortho4xp or something similar will be released for v4?  It would be nice to have some good photorealistic terrain for the US.  I figured with a 64 bit platform it might be an option.  

It has nothing to do with 64bit. As far as I know you can use photoscenery that worked in V3 also in V4 as they are usually only textures and autogen. For the US there is plenty freeware available.

The BEST photoscenery you can get your hands on for a handful of states now is at https://store.ultimatevfr.com/.  It is recent stock and color corrected by a professional videographer familiar with aviation scenes.  The best part is it includes Autogen Trees, Buildings placed where they belong, and EXCELLENT Night Lighting.  If you're interested in the SW US, California in Particular, there is no better.

FB page for UltimateVFR.   https://www.facebook.com/UltimateVFR/

I read somewhere that photo-scenery was always loaded into the memory in v3, making it impossible to use in a large scale due to VAS issues. Perhaps that will be solved in v4. In any case, Ortho4XP is easy to use and free. Not sure P3D has/will have something comparable.

6 minutes ago, tgcbraun said:

I read somewhere that photo-scenery was always loaded into the memory in v3, making it impossible to use in a large scale due to VAS issues. Perhaps that will be solved in v4.

Photoscenery is treated differently than default scenery or scenery like Orbx.  It will load if you have it enabled in your scenery.cfg.  If disabled, it will not load.  If you have a lot of photoscenery you will not be using during a flight session, it is wise to make sure it is disabled as it takes up valuable resources while loading.

38 minutes ago, Jim Young said:

If you have a lot of photoscenery you will not be using during a flight session, it is wise to make sure it is disabled as it takes up valuable resources while loading.

Will that still be the case with version 4?  Specifically, will the sim still load photoscenery far away from your present position?

1 hour ago, denali said:

The BEST photoscenery you can get your hands on for a handful of states now is at https://store.ultimatevfr.com/.  It is recent stock and color corrected by a professional videographer familiar with aviation scenes.  The best part is it includes Autogen Trees, Buildings placed where they belong, and EXCELLENT Night Lighting.  If you're interested in the SW US, California in Particular, there is no better.

Looks good but not much to select from. What does 'early access' mean? Not done yet?

Cheers,

Mark

His work is a work in progress.  He works full time, so he doesn't have much time to give to the project.  And it costs him a lot to host those.  He needs encouragement, and some sales, to keep it going.  Not sure what the future on it is, but I can tell you he's probably more knowledgeable about that kind of scenery than anyone else, he has tons of ideas that I wish he would be able to monetize on and drop his day job to work on.  He's fanatical about it, like we all can get about tweaking our sims.  But we all gotta eat.

2 hours ago, MadDog said:

Specifically, will the sim still load photoscenery far away from your present position?

I see no reason for this to change.  One good thing about V4 is the fact it will be 64 bits and Windows will allocate about 8 terabytes of VAS for the application.  This means you probably will not run out of memory because of a lack of VAS.  Still, it will not prevent a HDD from thrashing if you have a large amount of photoscenery installed and enabled because the photoscenery has to load and every bit of photoscenery enabled will load beginning from the time you start up the application.  One of the things that can be done by anyone during a flight or excessive thrashing is to run Process Monitor configured as per the AVSIM CTD Guide.  You will then see everything loading while P3D is running.

Best regards,

Jim