Yeah, but...did you notice the trees are the wrong size!? I noticed the trees are the wrong size. Asobo should fix the size of the trees. And they should do a better job of hiding their aggressive mediocrity when they make surprise videos for their fans. And another thing: the trees are the wrong size! Did you not notice!? I did! DERP!!!

There. Now we have the next 2 pages of posts out of the way, can we move on?

4 hours ago, mSparks said:

High quality, hi res ortho + autogen is already freeware, why would anyone pay for it, let alone wait in line to do so?

Sorry but I have to give my feedback on this (from a scenery development point of view)...

If you know where we can get "high quality and high res freeware Ortho + Autogen" for the whole world (not just the US or Europe), then please, I would like to know where we can get these for my scenery projects... Because, unfortunately, there is no such thing...

No, high Res Ortho for the whole planet is not freeware at all. If you mean the Ortho we can generate using Ortho4XP for X-Plane 11, then yes, it's a great 3rd party tool indeed but the aerial imagery are copyrighted and not freeware at all...  But let's say it is for the sake of the discussion:

• Generating your Ortho for the full planet, let alone a continent, will take hours, requires a huge amount of space on your multiple Disks to stock them and then what about color correction / clouds / inconsistent imagery etc.
• And if we compare Bing imagery to the way they were implemented (as per the videos and screenshots), something that was done in a post on this forum by the way, we see that the imagery was processed and retouched and adjusted and refined (AI most probably or manually, I doubt). The result is way more refined and sophisticated compared, as far as we can see, to what we get from using an imagery directly (such as O4XP).
• Spending your time generating Ortho scenery vs flying... Ummm

No, there is no such thing as hi res freeware autogen for the whole world:

• XP11 default scenery or any scenery with a rich and complex amount of autogen is usually based on OSM data or has autogen generated using procedural methods.
• Freeware scenery use OSM, commercial scenery development groups have in-house tools to create procedural autogen for their imagery (France VFR had these as far as I heard and who knows, probably OrbX do)
• Back to freeware:  Rich and complex OSM data (ex: tagged footprints) is only available for the industrial continents on this planet (US/Canada/Europe). The rest of the world does not enjoy such rich freeware data...
• Way before MSFS was announced, MS released millions of free footprints for the US and Canada to demonstrate their AI. These footprints were indeed generated by their AI that analyzed the Bing aerial imagery (not traced by contributors as OSM data happens to be). So I suppose MS used this same method to generate data for the planet. In fact Asobo mentioned MS AI being used to analyze the aerial imagery for forests/trees.  

Again, I see strange arguments regarding the World Engine of Asobo that is according to anyone who knows anything about World Engines, a newer gen than anything we have on the PC Flight Simulation market. The only equivalent would be Unigine but then this one is licensed for Pro Simulation...

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by Claviateur

45 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

So I am sure you agree that any dev team on this planet, when asked by the Marketing team, will deliver previews that could be way off from perfect / polished / finished

Sure, we've previewed new features but never an existing feature that went backwards.

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by MatthewS
changed "but we've previewed" to "we've previewed"

Just now, MatthewS said:

Sure, but we've previewed new features but never an existing feature that went backwards.

What feature went backward?

Just now, Claviateur said:

What feature went backward?

Correct scaling of trees to comic over-scaling of trees.

4 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

Correct scaling of trees to comic over-scaling of trees.

Ok I suppose you mean by correct scaling of trees, the Photogrammetry trees right?

If they are working on replacing photogrammetry trees with Procedural ones, then this is a new feature that was picked from their backlog and placed in the development phase (Or Sprint if they are working with the "Agile" process)...  

3 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

Ok I suppose you mean by correct scaling of trees, the Photogrammetry trees right?

If they are working on replacing photogrammetry trees with Procedural ones, then this is a new feature that was picked from their backlog and placed in the development phase (Or Sprint if they are working with the "Agile" process)...  

How about this...  The feature is "Trees".... Previously trees were correctly scaled, in this "Let it snow" preview trees are incorrectly scaled...  Of course you can play semantics, go figure.

16 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

How about this...  The feature is "Trees".... Previously trees were correctly scaled, in this "Let it snow" preview trees are incorrectly scaled...  Of course you can play semantics, go figure.

You said you work in a development team right? Your software has data displaying ABC result. Done. Then you decide you will replace the A result with an X for any reason, this is a new feature. To get the X to look like the A you might need 2 or 3 sprints (just an example) to get to the desired result with the X replacement.

In this case, the initial data was Photogrammetry. There was a decision (good one I think), to replace the photogrammetry trees only, with procedural ones.

The development process or "stories" (If an "Agile" mode is used here) could be like this: 1) analyze the aerial imagery for trees location 2) disable/flatten/exclude the Photogrammetry trees 3) implement Procedural trees based on basic rules 4) improve the rules to address types and sizes etc. etc. etc.

It could be that the video was recorded before all the "stories" or steps are done in this particular feature that is called "Replace photogrammetry trees with procedural ones".

Again, I speak from my work experience...  

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by Claviateur

14 minutes ago, Claviateur said:

You said you work in a development team right? Your software has data displaying ABC result. Done. Then you decide you will replace the A result with an X for any reason, this is a new feature. To get the X to look like the A you might need 2 or 3 sprints (just an example) to get to the desired result with the X replacement.

In this case, the initial data was Photogrammetry. There was a decision (good one I think), to replace the photogrammetry trees only, with procedural ones.

The development process or "stories" (If an "Agile" mode is used here) could be like this: 1) analyze the aerial imagery for trees location 2) disable/flatten/exclude the Photogrammetry trees 3) implement Procedural trees based on basic rules 4) improve the rules to address types and sizes etc. etc. etc.

It could be that the video was recorded before all the "stories" or steps are done in this particular feature that is called "Replace photogrammetry trees with procedural ones".

Again, I speak from my work experience...  

Again you're playing with semantics.

The feature is "Trees", not "Photogrammetric Trees" nor "Autogen Trees", they are just different implementations of "Trees". 

If you can't accept that then you will never agree that Trees went backward in the "Let it snow" preview.

Of course, I understand as a developer, that I would also try and placate my outraged customer by telling him it's two different features.

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by MatthewS

Hey, I have a really crazy idea. Why don't we wait and see. 😆

Here's something I haven't seen mentioned yet:

There's something off about the trees in the video. I'm not sure what it is. Too wide maybe? Too tall?

Anyone else notice this?

54 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

Again you're playing with semantics.

The feature is "Trees", not "Photogrammetric Trees" nor "Autogen Trees", they are just different implementations of "Trees". 

If you can't accept that then you will never agree that Trees went backward in the "Let it snow" preview.

Of course, I understand as a developer, that I would also try and placate my outraged customer by telling him it's two different features.

A - I think I see why you got banned.

B - You just argued semantics... how amusing.

C - You're not a customer, you can't be legitimately outraged about anything.

Again: Alpha version.  Alpha.

I think I'll just be happier if I put MatthewS on ignore, because holy cow is he acting annoyingly immature on this tree issue.  I'm so tired of seeing his crusade about this, and he isn't listening to anyone's logic on the matter.

Get a grip dude.  Goodbye.

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by Mengy

2 hours ago, Claviateur said:

In this case, the initial data was Photogrammetry. There was a decision (good one I think), to replace the photogrammetry trees only, with procedural ones

I really hope not...a better decision will be to have an option to have both and the user can decide which one he prefer to enable in the sim...My humble opinion the Photogrammetry tree is a better match for a 2020 sim. however I agree that some work has to be put in improving the "blob" ones...lets wait and see I have all trust they will fix that no doubt at all.

Here's a little LifeProTip: Take a deep breath.

Why don't we just wait for Asobo/Microsoft to make some kind of statement, as to why this has happened and why they have changed this. That way, we can get an understanding as to what their intentions are. 

Then, I'm sure everyone will feel a lot less - for the lack of a better term - violated.  

Edited January 4, 20206 yr by Anders Bermann