World update and continued need for regional scenery makers

[Dominique_K 10,138]

11 minutes ago, OSJJ1985 said:

 

I am sorry but I don't see your point. There was an obvious disinformation (being polite) that I wanted to correct. The price of an Orbx fat region with aiports  is not exorbitant at all and their OLC product which covers a continent (without airports) is also quite cheap. That's it. Discussing the future of the scenery market  cannot start from a baseline of disinformation.

 

Edited October 11, 2019 by domkle

[OSJJ1985 134]

29 minutes ago, domkle said:

I am sorry but I don't see your point. There was an obvious disinformation (being polite) that I wanted to correct. The price of an Orbx fat region with aiports  is not exorbitant at all and their OLC product which covers a continent (without airports) is also quite cheap. That's it. Discussing the future of the scenery market  cannot start from a baseline of disinformation.

 

I never suggested otherwise. My point was that even at sales prices buying every TrueEarth region (if you want to a proper baseline you can't compare MSFS to openLC or the fat regions. TrueEarth is the closest their is) to cover the entire globe (let's just pretend they created every single region) the price-tag would explode into the thousands, judging by the region-size per region.

Edited October 11, 2019 by OSJJ1985

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

I think people are putting too much faith in Azure capabilities.

Yes, it can see where there are trees and where there aren't, same for buildings or the color of their roofs but that's it. Remember that not every country, let alone cities, are covered in photogrammetry or with the bird eye view. I seriously doubt you'll be able to have the exact trees or buildings. They will be generic trees and buildings, so there will always be a difference between something more generic and something hand placed.

The question of the price of said addons or if it's worth it in the end, well, that really is up to the users to decide.

[OSJJ1985 134]

6 minutes ago, france89 said:

I think people are putting too much faith in Azure capabilities.

Yes, it can see where there are trees and where there aren't, same for buildings or the color of their roofs but that's it. Remember that not every country, let alone cities, are covered in photogrammetry or with the bird eye view. I seriously doubt you'll be able to have the exact trees or buildings. They will be generic trees and buildings, so there will always be a difference between something more generic and something hand placed.

The question of the price of said addons or if it's worth it in the end, well, that really is up to the users to decide.

 

I don't know about you but having correct terrain features, rivers, and all that stuff that landclass would have done otherwise is by it's own already an enormous leap here. Finally going away from landclass tech, which in less popular areas (and even in the US and EU) would give you the same old same old along the way. There was no real sensation of actually approaching and being in Africa, or Asia or some remote islands, etc...! That's the one thing I am most looking forward to is the overall local impression finally reflecting the real world counterpart. I don't need every single building to be an exact representation by the window or every pool or tennis court to be correctly represented 1 to 1 as it's real counterpart. The general feel and atmosphere is more than enough and THAT I am confident Azure will surely be able to pull off. Nitpicking on small details like the correct lettering on a specific building would actually just attest how far Flight Simming has come.

[F737MAX 5,586]

I think Orbx (and other airport scenery developers) will have plenty of demand by continuing to produce a variety of airports.

Further down the line, they may even develop a product which beats the offline landclass in MSFS, similar to how their Global range replaced FSX and P3D landclass textures.

In the meantime, their Global, Regions and TE range of products are now defunct for the new sim.
 

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

I wonder what 3rd party scenery content will do for performance, and I still find it hard to believe that it will be integrated that easily. Allowing "hand-made" content usually means extra work for the base platform. You need error handling routines, additional file handling, file input streaming, a database of some kind and probably a lot more. In the old world, addon devs were often very creative with the technology, in many cases introducing/provoking special processing and/or error handling in the sim, usually manifesting as stutters, increased load times and crashes. Personally I would prefer not to go back to that state of affairs with MSFS, and I would welcome a simulator world "curated by Microsoft". 

I also think that at this point we should not have any preconceptions about how the scenery system actually works. The content-to-screen pipline may very well be completely different from anything we used to know. That goes for aircraft too, IIRC they said that they were thinking about a "legacy mode" that would allow old aircraft to work in the new sim with minimal adaptation. That mode would then be an emulator of some kind, a piece of software inside the software that translates the old tech into the new. That can't be good for performance either. If we as the end users will notice the difference, that is another matter though.

Wait for the alpha builds, then make plans.

Best regards

[craig_read 43]

20 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

I wonder what 3rd party scenery content will do for performance, and I still find it hard to believe that it will be integrated that easily. Allowing "hand-made" content usually means extra work for the base platform. You need error handling routines, additional file handling, file input streaming, a database of some kind and probably a lot more. In the old world, addon devs were often very creative with the technology, in many cases introducing/provoking special processing and/or error handling in the sim, usually manifesting as stutters, increased load times and crashes. Personally I would prefer not to go back to that state of affairs with MSFS, and I would welcome a simulator world "curated by Microsoft". 

I also think that at this point we should not have any preconceptions about how the scenery system actually works. The content-to-screen pipline may very well be completely different from anything we used to know. That goes for aircraft too, IIRC they said that they were thinking about a "legacy mode" that would allow old aircraft to work in the new sim with minimal adaptation. That mode would then be an emulator of some kind, a piece of software inside the software that translates the old tech into the new. That can't be good for performance either. If we as the end users will notice the difference, that is another matter though.

Wait for the alpha builds, then make plans.

Best regards

Interesting perspective and I am inclined to agree with most of this.  Interesting second point too, the only addition I would add to that is that MSFS 2020 will be 'properly' multi-core in its implementation (at least that's what's been implied to date) so it may be the case that this 'better' use of multi-core CPUs offers some respite to any performance loss in the emulation of legacy products.

But like you I am excited, looking at the images, if they're as good as they seem I personally don't see a reason for me to buy regions again, I'm normally an IFR flyer in my simulator so this, if its accurate, is more than enough for my purposes.  I have made the decision that from this point forward I will be buying no new addons for P3D or X-Plane until this is released and we really understand what it means for the community.

[simtom 495]

58 minutes ago, OSJJ1985 said:

That's the one thing I am most looking forward to is the overall local impression finally reflecting the real world counterpart. I don't need every single building to be an exact representation by the window or every pool or tennis court to be correctly represented 1 to 1 as it's real counterpart. The general feel and atmosphere is more than enough and THAT I am confident Azure will surely be able to pull off. Nitpicking on small details like the correct lettering on a specific building would actually just attest how far Flight Simming has come.

I completely agree with you. Some people are already complaining about scenery stuff while the simulator is still in pre-alpha. I mean, just stop for a second and look at what we have now (P3D and X-Plane) and compare it to MSFS. What we're seeing is like comparing apples to oranges: there simply is no comparison, MSFS is in my opinion in a separate category.

And yes, from what we've seen there are some artifacts to be seen (like weird square bumps in the terrain, or ugly meshed trees) but I'm sure those will be patched out. And even if not all of them are gone, I'm totally fine with that. I might be wrong but I have a feeling that some people just can't accept change, I mean, you can now fly over your own house!

This might not be a valid argument to allow glitches to be present but I mostly fly IFR, so I won't notice them (only at take-off and landing). I do admit that I'll probably do some VFR flying as well because the world looks so much better now.

Anyway, can we keep the nitpicking for when the sim actually releases?

Edited October 11, 2019 by simtom

[carbonbasedlifeform 179]

2 hours ago, HighTowers said:

Oh man. I can see the feedback logs filling up about trees. 

 'Um your satellite data has a Maple tree 20m from my house but its actually a Sycamore tree. Please update!.'

So how far do you take this? X-plane has about 2 types of trees. Is that enough for you if you’re into GA?

This is not really an issue for MS/Asobo. I don’t expect them to create region-specific objects for the entire globe.

Its also not about satellite imagery.

 

[Dominique_K 10,138]

18 minutes ago, simtom said:

 

Anyway, can we keep the nitpicking for when the sim actually releases?

No, it will be too late. Why do you think that the MS/Asobo tean is so open if not to get feedbacks. Some nitpicking may seem ludicrous to you not to others and the other way round. ASobo will sort that out.

 

[carbonbasedlifeform 179]

27 minutes ago, simtom said:

Anyway, can we keep the nitpicking for when the sim actually releases?

It’s just a discussion. I don’t expect Asobo to release every plane in existence and I don’t expect them to model every type of regional objects that matter to a lot of GA fliers.

[pmb 5,137]

1 hour ago, Lorby_SI said:

I wonder what 3rd party scenery content will do for performance, and I still find it hard to believe that it will be integrated that easily. Allowing "hand-made" content usually means extra work for the base platform.

It's a good question if MFS will support addon sceneries at all, and if so, in which way. Will it have something like the legacy Scenery Management Menu and scenery.cfg? I am inclined to answer in the affirmative, but no one knows -  even more as this might entrap people to add all kind of legacy sceneries not appropriate to MFS, as we have seen in the beginning of Prepar3d.

Kind regards, Michael

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

2 hours ago, OSJJ1985 said:

 

I don't know about you but having correct terrain features, rivers, and all that stuff that landclass would have done otherwise is by it's own already an enormous leap here. Finally going away from landclass tech, which in less popular areas (and even in the US and EU) would give you the same old same old along the way. There was no real sensation of actually approaching and being in Africa, or Asia or some remote islands, etc...! That's the one thing I am most looking forward to is the overall local impression finally reflecting the real world counterpart. I don't need every single building to be an exact representation by the window or every pool or tennis court to be correctly represented 1 to 1 as it's real counterpart. The general feel and atmosphere is more than enough and THAT I am confident Azure will surely be able to pull off. Nitpicking on small details like the correct lettering on a specific building would actually just attest how far Flight Simming has come.

You are assuming there will be different kind of building models for different continents. They haven't said that, have they?
In places where photogrammetry isn't or if you are playing offline it's likely that there will be a generic autogen. Maybe more varied, with the right color on the roofs, but still a generic one.

We haven't seen anything around rural places so far, especially in Africa and Asia. Once its time arrives, then we will know what they actually managed to do.

 

As for the last sentence, have no fear, they will manage to complain about those things for sure.

"Bing is still showing my old car outside my house, please fix"
"I redid the roof two years ago and the color wasn't updated, i thought Bing was updated often??"

[OSJJ1985 134]

1 hour ago, domkle said:

No, it will be too late. Why do you think that the MS/Asobo tean is so open if not to get feedbacks. Some nitpicking may seem ludicrous to you not to others and the other way round. ASobo will sort that out.

 

 

Agreed on that. But let's keep the "nitpicking" to the relevant stuff. Having my apartment building with the correct color and window-configuration isn't what I'd consider relevant.... all that matters is that it's location is right and is recognizable as some kind of apartment building.

[simtom 495]

1 hour ago, domkle said:

No, it will be too late. Why do you think that the MS/Asobo tean is so open if not to get feedbacks. Some nitpicking may seem ludicrous to you not to others and the other way round. ASobo will sort that out.

 

I agree on the feedback but not on the small details.

 

2 minutes ago, OSJJ1985 said:

Agreed on that. But let's keep the "nitpicking" to the relevant stuff. Having my apartment building with the correct color and window-configuration isn't what I'd consider relevant.... all that matters is that it's location is right and is recognizable as some kind of apartment building.

That's what I actually wanted to say so thanks for putting it better than me 🙂