7 minutes ago, bonchie said:

I don't remember them saying that. And the pictures we've seen of offline mode certainly don't look like ultra-low resolution orthos.

And even if they went with like ZL14 (I don't think it comes lower), there's still too much data there to cover the world and store it locally. Whatever they are using looked generic to me.

The only thing they said I quoted it above. Degraded is my word, he used the word simplified.

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by domkle

1 minute ago, domkle said:

The only thing they said I quoted it above. 

This?

"We have also an offline mode, if there is absolutely no Internet. It looks very much like reality, it is very, very accurate, we just remove a little bit of the photosat accuracy which is more simplified but all the houses, all the trees, all the roads, all the lights, all the relief are still here."

That makes more sense then. Of course it's going to lose photosat accuracy if they are using generic orthos or textures (which is what it looks like because the resolution is still so high).

What get`s me Microsoft/Asobo could put most of the speculation to bed just by posting what will not be included in MSFS on release, but I fear that`s not going to happen.

1 hour ago, rjfry said:

What get`s me Microsoft/Asobo could put most of the speculation to bed just by posting what will not be included in MSFS on release, but I fear that`s not going to happen.

Well I think we can be pretty certain they won't include Concorde so it won't really affect you as you'll keep using your existing sim. 

17 hours ago, bonchie said:

This?

"We have also an offline mode, if there is absolutely no Internet. It looks very much like reality, it is very, very accurate, we just remove a little bit of the photosat accuracy which is more simplified but all the houses, all the trees, all the roads, all the lights, all the relief are still here."

 

I don’t know of anything else as Lionel’s EP was rather short on substance when he spoke of the offline mode.

 I doubt that we will see the LC back, it is not just painting the ground, there are regional ground classifications (rather coarse in the existing sims) and large sets of seasonalized and regionalized textures to be designed. A not so small undertaking and I don’t see Asobo licensing Global.  Hope not as, thruth to be told, mixing LC maps and vectorized data has not been totally convincing until now, specially in urban environments. I love it because it was the best we could have but its time to move away to a better ground representation.

I’d bet for a ZL16 instead of 19 but honestly we don’t know. The offline mode is one of FS20 still hidden secrets .

6 minutes ago, domkle said:

I don’t know of anything else as Lionel’s EP was rather short on substance when he spoke of the offline mode.

 I doubt that we will see the LC back, it is not just painting the ground, there are regional ground classifications (rather coarse in the existing sims) and large sets of seasonalized and regionalized textures to be designed. A not so small undertaking and I don’t see Asobo licensing Global.  Hope not as, thruth to be told, mixing LC maps and vectorized data has not been totally convincing until now, specially in urban environments. I love it because it was the best we could have but its time to move away to a better ground representation.

I’d bet for a ZL16 instead of 19 but honestly we don’t know. The offline mode is one of FS20 still hidden secrets .

I am also really curious to see how they will do the offline mode. Even with ZL16 a global ortho will be a massive amount of data to store locally. 

1 minute ago, RALF9636 said:

I am also really curious to see how they will do the offline mode. Even with ZL16 a global ortho will be a massive amount of data to store locally. 

It seems so, with a nuance though. If I understand it well TE GB South weighs 57 GB in P3D and 127 GB in XP, with the same data. Asobo may have invented a new compression technique even better than P3D. But it is all conjecture.

 

 

 

One thing I could see them doing is having really low resolution orthos and then procedurally covering them with detail. We've already seen what the technology can do with that Kenya screenshot, where the actual ortho looks like throw up in Bing maps but somehow it looks great in the sim. 

Edited December 6, 20196 yr by bonchie

7 hours ago, domkle said:

...

 I doubt that we will see the LC back, it is not just painting the ground, there are regional ground classifications (rather coarse in the existing sims) and large sets of seasonalized and regionalized textures to be designed.  ...

 

You're not understanding what Im saying.  The FSX landclass system used a landclass grid of numbers to determine which image file to put at that location.  It doesnt have to work that way though.  The landclass file could be much higher resolution than 1.2km and instead of referring to image files it would refer to procedures (aka shader code) designed to draw grass or dirt or asphalt or whatever.  If the name of the game is not so much to faithfully reproduce the colors in an orthoimage but rather the substance such as grass or dirt or rocks or sand or asphalt, then you can decide ahead of time an array of appearances that you want the sim to have for each of the categories you(Azure AI)  pull out of the orthophotos.  The colors and the storage required to reproduce those colors is replaced with a system that only cares that "this large area is grass".

I really dont know what they are doing or if my idea makes sense (whether or not I can explain it)  Maybe 'landclass' isnt the correct word but neither is ortho.  Its what Azure AI determines a section of ground to be -- thats the new landclass file -- and since the variation is in the shader code, the new landclass file only has to have as many references to texture types (not image files containing many textures) as you want it to have. and since the number of texture types is limited then the 'landclass' file can easily be compressed and hopefully cover the entire world using less HDD space.

Edited December 6, 20196 yr by sightseer

34 minutes ago, sightseer said:

You're not understanding what Im saying.  The FSX landclass system used a landclass grid of numbers to determine which image file to put at that location.  It doesnt have to work that way though.  The landclass file could be much higher resolution than 1.2km and instead of referring to image files it would refer to procedures (aka shader code) designed to draw grass or dirt or asphalt or whatever.  If the name of the game is not so much to faithfully reproduce the colors in an orthoimage but rather the substance such as grass or dirt or rocks or sand or asphalt, then you can decide ahead of time an array of appearances that you want the sim to have for each of the categories you(Azure AI)  pull out of the orthophotos.  The colors and the storage required to reproduce those colors is replaced with a system that only cares that "this large area is grass".

I really dont know what they are doing or if my idea makes sense (whether or not I can explain it)  Maybe 'landclass' isnt the correct word but neither is ortho.  Its what Azure AI determines a section of ground to be -- thats the new landclass file -- and since the variation is in the shader code, the new landclass file only has to have as many references to texture types (not image files containing many textures) as you want it to have. and since the number of texture types is limited then the 'landclass' file can easily be compressed and hopefully cover the entire world using less HDD space.

Semantically LC seems the proper word for what you're proposing, it is structured by a Land nomenclature.

I've used quite a bit  LC and orthos but, for the life of me, I have no competence to assess what you are proposing. I've never used shaders except Photoshop filters to massage pieces of imagery for inserting them in a LC environment. And never  heard of mapping from a set of procedures based on a land classification, which does not  say that it doesn't exist..  

I would say that the ground representation in any case is much complex that grass or dirt or asphalt etc(but you know that !). I am not sure that procedures or shaders can accurately  convincingly represent  the enormous variety of grounds and waters and adapt themselves to the vectorized data that will then needed..

Edited December 6, 20196 yr by domkle

maybe think of a painter painting a landscape.  The painter doesnt have tubes containing every color he sees and he/she doesnt bother to paint every pixel he sees.  The painter uses a selection of brushes and a selection of paints to put down mixes of colors in varying textures to produce an end result that makes people think they are seeing the original.

The painters mind is like Azure AI that looks at the original (ortho) and creates categories and patterns from it .  The brushes and tubes of paint are like the shader code.

The end result is a hopefully faithful enough 'painting' so that people think they are looking at the original.  

You will not need an offline mode with this, more specs being leaked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrTYsYW9S1k