MSFS made money before and will do again, it`s part of a new platform with 10 million users with or without us it will make money, I think we overplay our importance.

We are completely irrelevant even in comparison with the Steam population, where every day there are over 15 million active accounts

6 hours ago, france89 said:

FSX-SE is still having a stable 2800-3000 peak of players playing every 24hours, with an estimate number of sold copies between 1 and 2 millions according to SteamSpy

It was on sale for 5$ for so many times, that I think many bought it just to have a downloadable backup to replace the aging DVDs ( I don't even have a DVD in my PC right now...)

I don't know why anyone is worried what the sim can look like in remote areas when there are technologies widely used today to create grass and trees and rocks and rain -- all with shaders apparently. procedural this and procedural that.  If raindrops can and would exist evrywhere you can go then why wouldnt grass and trees be able to exist?

40 minutes ago, sightseer said:

I don't know why anyone is worried what the sim can look like in remote areas when there are technologies widely used today to create grass and trees and rocks and rain -- all with shaders apparently. procedural this and procedural that.  If raindrops can and would exist evrywhere you can go then why wouldnt grass and trees be able to exist?

The issue might also be to tell the sim where the grass and the trees should be, 😉. So we don’t anymore get fields or villages atop  volcanoes for instance. Procedures are nice if they are driven by a terrain map. 

 

FSX had a disconnect between the textures and the mesh that caused odd issues like that.  I'm 99.9% positive MS isnt doing that this time.  There's probably tons of data available to a company like MS and a guy like Bill Gates who recently talked about the ability to live stream satellite data.  I can imagine he is getting all of of us to pay for his test ground.  works for me.

15 minutes ago, sightseer said:

FSX had a disconnect between the textures and the mesh that caused odd issues like that.  I'm 99.9% positive MS isnt doing that this time.  There's probably tons of data available to a company like MS and a guy like Bill Gates who recently talked about the ability to live stream satellite data.  I can imagine he is getting all of of us to pay for his test ground.  works for me.

This not a conflict between the mesh and textures, this comes  from a wrong geographical assignment of textures. This is an issue present all over the FS world, outside OrbX fat regions. Last example : this morning a guy on the OrbX forum showed that there was no highrises downtown Syracuse, NY, only flat industrial/commercial buildings (He wrongly thought that came from the new HD buildings). Even OpenLC NA which is much better than default, can be wrong.

I don't think that every cities in the world even in the US will have sat/aerial imagery processed in 3D . And I don't even speak of Borneo  or the Amazon  basin.. FS20 will also have LC terrains. Call that a reasonable intuition.

. 

I like to think that facial recognition software can and has been retrained to identify just about anything we want to identify in any photo and, for the purposes of flight sim, this means finding forests or buildings.  Azure is probably more than capable of taking an available entire world of satellite data and combining it with known map data of all kinds to accurately simulate the entire world.  It may not be perfect but I think thats where we're at. No, the whole world wont be as good as the preview pics of Houston but a simulated middle of nowhere in Africa thats based on recent satellite data would be really good...probably...surely...hopefully 🙂

48 minutes ago, domkle said:

This not a conflict between the mesh and textures, this comes  from a wrong geographical assignment of textures. This is an issue present all over the FS world, outside OrbX fat regions. Last example : this morning a guy on the OrbX forum showed that there was no highrises downtown Syracuse, NY, only flat industrial/commercial buildings (He wrongly thought that came from the new HD buildings). Even OpenLC NA which is much better than default, can be wrong.

I don't think that every cities in the world even in the US will have sat/aerial imagery processed in 3D . And I don't even speak of Borneo  or the Amazon  basin.. FS20 will also have LC terrains. Call that a reasonable intuition.

 . 

I don't know if they will call the new default textures tech LandClass textures, but the way it will be implemented can be way better than the way we have in FSX/P3D today. The textures can be better (resolution, diversity etc) and the way they will mix with the rest of the scenery (trees, roads, buildings other objects) can be much more improved. The way the procedural textures merge with the photoreal imagery will be also important.

We don't know how deeper will be the Azure AI usage for that, but it has enough power and features to create a wonderful database for the new sim. The African Savanna scene on the trailer makes me believe they are achieving higher levels of accuracy. 

We will have to wait for them to share more.

Edited July 3, 20196 yr by ca_metal

I think we can assume that any autogen technology has improved considerably since 2006.

Hook

6 minutes ago, LHookins said:

I think we can assume that any autogen technology has improved considerably since 2006.

Hook

For sure, even more if they have the right data to build the scenery.

In X-plane 11, for example, the autogen looks really good, even from the ground level. The biggest issue there is the database (not accurate and not available everywhere in the world), and they had to fill the gaps with not so accurate solutions (autogen basically follows the roads and is placed in the areas where the cities should be). Other issue is the lack of more regional autogen models, which is being adressed now by Orbx and SFD with their global autogen solutions.

If they have diversified (based on the architectural diversity for each region) and good-looking models (good 3d modelling, PBR etc), they will be fine.

12 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

I don't know if they will call the new default textures tech LandClass textures, but the way it will be implemented can be way better than the way we have in FSX/P3D today. The textures can be better (resolution, diversity etc) and the way they will mix with the rest of the scenery (trees, roads, buildings other objects) can be much more improved. The way the procedural textures merge with the photoreal imagery will be also important.

We don't know how deeper will be the Azure AI usage for that, but it has enough power and features to create a wonderful database for the new sim. The African Savanna scene on the trailer makes me believe they are achieving higher levels of accuracy. 

We will have to wait for them to share more.

Yes  photo imagery could help to create much better LC maps where it is too coarse to be used directly. I think for instance of the deforestation zones in the Amazon forest.

 

8 minutes ago, LHookins said:

I think we can assume that any autogen technology has improved considerably since 2006.

Hook

This is not what we see now. Trees are indeed better processed since P3Dv3, we can have very dense forests with a small impact on framerate but the building autogen impact is still horrific (cf. the LA basin in OrbX Socal). Autogen is still oversized.

Edited July 3, 20196 yr by domkle

20 minutes ago, LHookins said:

I think we can assume that any autogen technology has improved considerably since 2006.

 

12 minutes ago, domkle said:

This is not what we see now. Trees are indeed better processed since P3Dv3, we can have very dense forests with a small impact on framerate but the building autogen impact is still horrific (cf. the LA basin in OrbX Socal). Autogen is still oversized.

I suspect P3D is still using the older technology.  Microsoft will be doing a lot of things differently in the new sim.  There's no reason for Microsoft to be limited to what P3D is doing currently.

Hook

1 hour ago, sightseer said:

FSX had a disconnect between the textures and the mesh that caused odd issues like that.  I'm 99.9% positive MS isnt doing that this time.  There's probably tons of data available to a company like MS and a guy like Bill Gates who recently talked about the ability to live stream satellite data.  I can imagine he is getting all of of us to pay for his test ground.  works for me.

Satellite data might be enough for a rough approximation of forest vs. open fields, but when it comes to buildings you need height data; either OSM data or imaging from different angles other than straight overhead. That data just doesn't exist except in a relatively few places, mainly big cities in North America, Europe and the UK.

Repeating a point I've made before: My small home town is just 50 miles or so as the crow flies from Seattle and Redmond WA, one of the centers of the high-tech universe. But when I go to my home town on Google Earth Pro, it's just a flat ortho photo. No ability to tilt the view and see any 3D buildings at all, because the height data and facing images just don't exist in the Google database.

Maybe it exists in a different database. Google has plenty of imagery of my home town in Street View. But for now, you can't do a fancy 3D fly-by of my hometown in Google Earth Pro.

It's a little better with the OSM data in default XP11, and better still with the combined ortho base and hand-placed autogen in Orbx TE Washington. But still a bit wonky when you get close enough to the ground. Maybe MS can do better in the new flight sim, we'll see.

But the main point here is that If the capabilities are this limited in WA state, then what are the chances it will work any better in a remote (but fun!) flying area like equatorial Africa or Papua New Guinea? It will be fascinating to see what they plan to do in these areas, and if it looks any better than current methods in other flight sims.

18 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

they had to fill the gaps with not so accurate solutions (autogen basically follows the roads and is placed in the areas where the cities should be).

Ouch!!  So much for navigating VFR using real world charts.  I have no problems doing that with stock FSX and P3D.

Hook