If you want to know what satellite imagery in P3D looks like just try megascenery. The loss of autogen makes the state look very flat and ruins the approach to landing and take-off phases IMHO. There is a reason the big box sims render the area around the airports with high detail 3D objects. All those additional objects helps provides sufficient cues to vertical height.

 

I can't see LM caring much about direct competition with MS on graphics. The value of the ESP engine to them is for packaging and resale to militaries and government agencies as training software. The environmental graphics are less important to those organisations than the physics and interaction between simobjects. P3D's use of avatars, ships and submarines has been on the ESP roadmap since its launch as a standalone commercial product in 2007:

Quote

Future versions of Microsoft ESP will expand beyond aviation into ground and maritime operations, indoor and avatar-centric simulations for commercial, government and academic learning opportunities.

Look at SimDirector's documentation. It's an interactive training scenario creator focused on recording and demonstrating cockpit drills and checklists. Why do you need to develop fancy environmental graphics when your moneymaking USP is all about closeup work?

All we simmers do for LM is provide an at-scale product testing function over the widest possible range of endpoint hardware combinations plus revenue to cover the fixed costs of the dev team. Every contract win from there is the purest profit, I'd guess.

The next thing we might see in P3D is buildings you can explore with your avatars. Maybe that will become airport terminal buildings in our consumer P3D product? Get out of your simulated car in the simulated car park, walk through the simulated terminal, spend 45 minutes staring at the back of other simulated heads in the simulated security queue, half an hour dodging through an awful simulated strip mall, then another 45 minutes staring out of the simulated departure lounge windows at static aircraft while sipping a simulated cocktail...🤣

18 minutes ago, KenG said:

If you want to know what satellite imagery in P3D looks like just try megascenery.

Not necessarily. A French company* - FranceVFR or so - also take sat pics and runs them through an algorithm to create very believable autogen. So it's not a P3D limitation of any kind.

* among other companies, of course

3 minutes ago, d.tsakiris said:

Not necessarily. A French company* - FranceVFR or so - also take sat pics and runs them through an algorithm to create very believable autogen. So it's not a P3D limitation of any kind.

* among other companies, of course

No disrespect, but France is the size of Georgia maybe and they still divided the country into regions. Seems like the technology to do such is very limited. 

Even MSFS, I wonder how realistic the airport is going to look when the identifier has as many numbers as letters. Places where the forest is a blob of trees on satellite imagery and the airfield is a strip of dirt. 

Microsoft were touting the ESP code in 2007 for someone to develop from it, LM took it for an inhouse tool for the company. No game studio was interested not main stream platform, and according to Phil Spencer the reason MS dumped FS was the studio was to large in manpower for one product  

2 hours ago, Theboot100 said:

No it's been stated thats not the case.  Asobo can do this because theyre using Microsofts infrastructure at no real extra cost to Microsoft (Bing maps, worldwide server farms, Azure) 

I think what LM need to focus on (and Xplane) is better autogen and better land graphics.  IMO human designed autogen can look a lot better than what Asobo uses.  Modern games will show you that.  The detail isnt just in a cube shaped like a house, its in fences, driveways, garden beds, plants, bus stops, roads, walkways etc

Can you point to any interview where Asobo or Microsoft said that FS2020 is a one off payment and no further charges?

Thanks

8 minutes ago, ideoplastic said:

Can you point to any interview where Asobo or Microsoft said that FS2020 is a one off payment and no further charges?

Thanks

https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/hablan-creadores-del-flight-simulator-2020-nid2318927

English translation:

-------------------------------------------------

-If I want to have access to the maps and all the features, do I have to use the Game Pass model?

-No.

-What then is the difference between the two marketing models?

-The subscription is for those who want to have access to other games for Xbox or PC.

-Suppose I just want the simulator. If I buy nothing more than the FS2020 do I also have access to streaming maps and other features?

-Exactly.

-------------------------------------------------

This is Jörg Neumann, chief developer of MSFS. 

Kind regards, Michael

28 minutes ago, KenG said:

No disrespect, but France is the size of Georgia maybe and they still divided the country into regions. Seems like the technology to do such is very limited.

True, but that doesn't have to mean the technology itself is limited. It could be other reasons: licensing, or computing power and available storage. The message here is: P3D can display it, if it is "fed" correctly.

On 4/14/2020 at 7:13 AM, domkle said:

Well, Lockheed Martin  knows a thing or two about sat imagery.

Not only they design satellites for collecting  imagery from space, they also design software to analyse the data. Their  recognition system uses open-source deep learning libraries to quickly identify and classify objects or targets in large areas across the world out of  Maxar’s Geospatial Big Data platform (GBDX), a  100 petabytes imagery database.  They don't need Google 😉.

Conclusion. If LM wants it so, the P3D team could access to anything they need to compete with MS.  My feeling is that they will in due time.

 

 

I agree. In Lockheed's press release, they indicated that P3Dv5 was laying the ground work for the next generation and they were committed to the platform. I think we will be overtime getting a product that may exceed MSFS2020. They're taking their time which they should. I'm completely happy with what we have now and will continue to support the platform. After all they saved us when MS abandoned us years ago.