ORBX TrueEarth seasons?

[AviatorMan 253]

Can anyone confirm whether the Orbx TE products (e.g., GB South, Netherlands) have seasonal variation, or are they summer only?

[GEKtheReaper 364]

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165691-orbx-true-earth-seasons-topic/

[AviatorMan 253]

43 minutes ago, GEKtheReaper said:

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165691-orbx-true-earth-seasons-topic/

Thanks for the link, it seems to say it all. I am not surprised, as the Orbx TE products seem similar in technology to the FranceVFR regional  "3D Automation" augmented photoreal sceneries, which are one season.

[Ian S 214]

I was concerned about this as I like varied flying conditions. Although TE GB remains in "summer" season, changing weather systems still apply if you have Active Sky (can't comment on others), so you can still fly in overcast, rainy or blustery conditions. You just won't see snow textures on the ground.

 

[Sethos 4,333]

Netherlands has seasons, GB doesn't.

Let your opinion be heard here https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165729-to-season-or-not-to-season-that-is-the-community-question/, if you can live with the slight reduction in resolution. Personally, I would never buy a one-season scenery product for P3D, that kind ruins the entire ecosystem established over the years.

Edited May 7, 2019 by Sethos1988

[Christopher Low 5,352]

I would never buy a landclass scenery product with seasons if I had a single season photoscenery option. It takes all sorts

[Sethos 4,333]

16 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

I would never buy a landclass scenery product with seasons if I had a single season photoscenery option. It takes all sorts

Well you're in luck, people are talking about photoscenery and seasons here, not landclass products 🙂

[Farlis 2,281]

Interesting that this question still is coming up after all these years.

 

The demands on diskspace has not changed with photoreal scenery. And with seasons you would have to quadruple the amount for each package you install.

Even with TB's of space on your HD you'd run out of room in no time.

 

And on the Developer side you'd have to find a way of artificially creating seasonal variations out of the source material.

Edited May 7, 2019 by Farlis

[Sethos 4,333]

2 minutes ago, Farlis said:

The demands on diskspace has not changed with photoreal scenery. And with seasons you would have to quadruple the amount for each package you install.

Even with TB's of space on your HD you'd run out of room in no time.

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165729-to-season-or-not-to-season-that-is-the-community-question/

As you can see, you can literally fit all 5 seasons into what just a single season takes up, at a very small reduction in resolution, something that is barely visible.

[F737MAX 5,584]

2 hours ago, Sethos1988 said:

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165729-to-season-or-not-to-season-that-is-the-community-question/

As you can see, you can literally fit all 5 seasons into what just a single season takes up, at a very small reduction in resolution, something that is barely visible.

1.2m resolution / LOD 15 is already at the limit that I (and probably most people) will tolerate. For VFR flying and the approach into airports with airliners, a LOD 14 / 2.4m resolution will look awful.

It's since been mentioned on another thread that seasons are very unlikely to happen in TrueEarth. Therefore we'll be relying on shader technology or a competitor product to give us photo scenery with seasons.

[Sethos 4,333]

10 minutes ago, F737NG said:

1.2m resolution / LOD 15 is already at the limit that I (and probably most people) will tolerate. For VFR flying and the approach into airports with airliners, a LOD 14 / 2.4m resolution will look awful.

It's since been mentioned on another thread that seasons are very unlikely to happen in TrueEarth. Therefore we'll be relying on shader technology or a competitor product to give us photo scenery with seasons.

I doubt if you woke up one day and it had changed to LOD 14, you'd even notice. Can even see the attached screenshot what a small difference it is, all the way down at ground level. He's even saying at 2,500ft, you can barely see it. So unless you VFR in a lawn mower, I very much doubt it would be a problem for most. Plus, we're on a platform that has been notorious for years with doing poor, blurry renders of photoscenery and now suddenly you reckon the majority has these high demands for crisp resolution? I personally doubt it.

Luckily, as you could see from the thread, they were talking about offering two versions; LOD 14 seasons and LOD 15 single season, so we actually had a choice.

10 minutes ago, F737NG said:

It's since been mentioned on another thread that seasons are very unlikely to happen in TrueEarth. Therefore we'll be relying on shader technology or a competitor product to give us photo scenery with seasons.

You may be confusing that statement with the plan for X-Plane. There's no intention of doing it shader-based for ESP to my knowledge and Netherlands already has seasons.

Edited May 7, 2019 by Sethos1988

[F737MAX 5,584]

22 minutes ago, Sethos1988 said:

I doubt if you woke up one day and it had changed to LOD 14, you'd even notice. Can even see the attached screenshot what a small difference it is, all the way down at ground level. He's even saying at 2,500ft, you can barely see it. So unless you VFR in a lawn mower, I very much doubt it would be a problem for most. Plus, we're on a platform that has been notorious for years with doing poor, blurry renders of photoscenery and now suddenly you reckon the majority has these high demands for crisp resolution? I personally doubt it.

Luckily, as you could see from the thread, they were talking about offering two versions; LOD 14 seasons and LOD 15 single season, so we actually had a choice.

You may be confusing that statement with the plan for X-Plane. There's no intention of doing it shader-based for ESP to my knowledge and Netherlands already has seasons.

Having come from Horizon / Playsims VFR UK photo scenery with LOD 16 and 17 in places, I noticed quite easily the drop to 15. TE is marketed as a VFR, low and slow, product. When you get down to 1,500 feet to pick out your house, or navigate using a road or railway, LOD 14 is going to have less definition again.
Why so low? If you look at VFR Sectional Charts, restrictions on GA flying limit altitude in places to 1,500 feet AGL. I want to fly realistically per the real world and not look out of the cockpit and see a blurry image.

There was talk of ORBX in-house team making their own shader tech for both sims, admitted by one of their development team.
xEnviro have shown the start of this new tech in XP. Just have to hope that someone takes up the challenge for P3D, because TE Netherlands was a once off, no seasons for future TE products.

[Sethos 4,333]

6 minutes ago, F737NG said:

Having come from Horizon / Playsims VFR UK photo scenery with LOD 16 and 17 in places, I noticed quite easily the drop to 15. TE is marketed as a VFR, low and slow, product. When you get down to 1,500 feet to pick out your house, or navigate using a road or railway, LOD 14 is going to have less definition again.
Why so low? If you look at VFR Sectional Charts, restrictions on GA flying limit altitude in places to 1,500 feet AGL. I want to fly realistically per the real world and not look out of the cockpit and see a blurry image.

There was talk of ORBX in-house team making their own shader tech for both sims, admitted by one of their development team.
xEnviro have shown the start of this new tech in XP. Just have to hope that someone takes up the challenge for P3D, because TE Netherlands was a once off, no seasons for future TE products.

I'm just basing this off what I've seen and the screenshot they've shown and I very much disagree with your notion that most people would suddenly notice. If you've seen how some people run their simulators, how the platform has looked in the past when it comes to photoscenery, I highly doubt most ESP-users have suddenly become photoscenery connaisseurs. It's only within the last few iterations of 4.x that photoscenery has stopped being a pool of blur and smudge. So I very much doubt most people would notice. And again, they are talking about offering both, so there's no need to discuss the quality, just pick what you like 🙂

And I'm very interested in this proposed shader tech for ESP. Haven't heard or seen a single example of that yet. Also, are you certain TE Netherlands was a once off, then what was the point of the thread I linked above? I don't see Venema confirming the death of seasons anywhere?

Edited May 7, 2019 by Sethos1988

[F737MAX 5,584]

16 minutes ago, Sethos1988 said:

I'm just basing this off what I've seen and the screenshot they've shown and I very much disagree with your notion that most people would suddenly notice. If you've seen how some people run their simulators, how the platform has looked in the past when it comes to photoscenery, I highly doubt most ESP-users have suddenly become photoscenery connaisseurs. It's only within the last few iterations of 4.x that photoscenery has stopped being a pool of blur and smudge. So I very much doubt most people would notice. And again, they are talking about offering both, so there's no need to discuss the quality, just pick what you like 🙂

And I'm very interested in this proposed shader tech for ESP. Haven't heard or seen a single example of that yet. Also, are you certain TE Netherlands was a once off, then what was the point of the thread I linked above? I don't see Venema confirming the death of seasons anywhere?

I came from FS9 straight to P3D4. I bypassed most of the blur and smudge, but noticed it when P3D couldn't handle better than 256 * 256 tiles before v4.4.

Shader tech was mentioned in passing by an ORBX developer. IIRC, it was canned as it wasn't thought to be as good as what 3rd party developers could seemingly manage.

RE: seasons, I don't think there's much more of a discussion after this post (compare the dates of the posts):
https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/171260-trueearth-us-washington-for-xp11-sneak-peek-video/?do=findComment&comment=1507016

CEO says, everyone else does. I really hope to be proven wrong.
 

Edited May 7, 2019 by F737NG

[Sethos 4,333]

1 minute ago, F737NG said:

I came from FS9 straight to P3D4.\I bypassed most of the blur and smudge, but noticed it when P3D couldn't handle better than 256 * 256 tiles before v4.4.

Shader tech was mentioned in passing by an ORBX developer. IIRC, it was canned as it wasn't thought to be as good as what 3rd party developers could seemingly manage.

RE: seasons, I don't think there's much more of a discussion after this post:
https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/171260-trueearth-us-washington-for-xp11-sneak-peek-video/?do=findComment&comment=1507016

CEO says, everyone else does. I really hope to be proven wrong.
 

That's what I figured, in regards to the platform -- I don't mean that condescending. P3D and FSX has always been notorious for how poorly it managed terrain, even basic textures. It was even worse with photoscenery. It wasn't until 4.4 or something that you could look at a mountain right next to you, covered in photoscenery and actually see any sort of detail. It would usually be just a big smudge if you were at normal zoom levels. So I just have my doubts that the quality we see in the screenshots and the subsequent reduction at LOD 14, would actually be a problem for the majority, at least those who want seasons. In 4.4 / 4.5, thanks to the improved rendering of terrain / photoscenery, LOD 14 would probably look better than 15 and 16 from previous iterations of the platform. So I don't reckon that's a big issue for most simmers.

And as for shader tech, I don't think any third party developers have even shown off anything for the ESP-platform? ESP has had seasons and season switching as part of its SDK for a long time, over a decade. I don't think when it has become so ingrained in how developers approach scenery, that shaders were even a relevant way of doing it. May be relevant now with these large TE packages and 4.5's ability to refresh shaders on the fly, I just don't think doing it by shaders was ever as big a discussion as it is with X-Plane. It's relevant on X-Plane because the SDK never had the functionality and now they are locked in, only way to properly implement it. I don't even recall seeing a single Proof-of-Concept doing it by shaders on all the years of ESP, like xEnviro has shown off within X-Plane.

I still, personally, don't see that as definitive but I agree, would seem like it won't happen. It really clashes with the other thread I linked, questioning the community about adding it to GB. That would also mean, that if they can fit all 5 seasons within the same space of a single season in all of GB, of course they'd be able to do it with their Washington package. Think it just comes down to workload, which is obviously a factor but I doubt it's the last we've heard of it given how many people still want seasons. Same guy who was very adamant X-Plane wouldn't become a thing for them, until it did 🙂 Does feel like they are stretching themselves with all platforms and packages.

So we'll see on the last point, if the seasons community will be voting with their wallet or they will finally break the season ecosystem within ESP for good going forward.