LAdamson and Geofa,I truly appreciate the attempt to help me. I honestly think we might be on a different page here though. I have tried everything. I have tried no autogen and everything. I just think that you don't know what I am referring to. I am referring to the blurry ground at low altitude. There is nothing anybody can do to actually help me fix this graphic problem. It's in the game default no matter what kind of hardware you are running or what kind of tweak you do. Only add-on software at this point can help. FZ02: Portland is beautiful and this is the way I feel it should look at low-level flight. If I could get some help how to post a screenshot here I would love to do so. I will take a ultralight up and take a few screenshots from different altitude. Problem is when I take screenshots they become too big to upload here. I would love some help around this and I will get to taking some screenshots with scenery maxed and autogen off to show what I mean.Bottom line here is the default scenery for FSX is awful for low-level flight. Like I said, it works great for altitude. You can fly from point a to point b with beautiful scenery underneath you with default scenery. It's just when you are either landing or taking off it won't be pretty. It's meant to be viewed from top-down because that's where the picture was taken from. In order to achieve what I am looking for we need aerial photography and very accurate and detailed hand placed autogen. Just compare the video that I originally posted here to the pics that I posted.

> If they could possibly do what Vauchez and his team did with FZ02 for some more airports and leave other airports for 3rd party then it would be great.The earliest screenshot of Flightscenery Portland was from OCTOBER 2005 - A full year ago. He and his team (*not a single man) took over ONE YEAR to develop the scenery in the Portland, OR area. You are suggesting that MS has the time, personnel, and money to do the same process across "more" default airports?!I'm sorry, but that's just not possible for MSFS's current price. You're looking at hiring more artists, field researchers, and commissioning or purchasing all that aerial photography. You're going to up the price of the sim significantly with that, and one of the goals of ANY software development team is to keep things affordable. > Aerial photography with better autogen (hand placed, more detailed, more variety all based on this aerial photography) used in airports and surrounding radius would create a much more visually satisfying experience.Speaking of "affordability", we are already at 2 DVD's worth of content for FSX. How many more DVD's and GB's of storage are you looking to dedicate to the simulator?I understand your frustration with the textures, but there are many more factors behind it than just pinning all our hopes on the perceived deep-pockets of Microsoft. Things improved by a factor of 4x since FS2004 - I think this is a reasonable step..Leave the Flightzone 1 & 2 "boutique" airports to the true EXPERTS. -Greg (A "proud" owner of Flightzone 1 (KPVD), who lives in a 5 mi radius of the airport. )(Why people have to claim to be "Proud Owners" of addons escapes me...)

I took this default FSX screenshot the other day with water & auto-gen off. Was either out of KSFO or KSEA, as I don't remember. Looks great from this altitude and the city scape textures look real good on initial climbout. I'll have to load up FSX and get some more.With auto-gen and water off, fps run in mid 20's to 30 even with this scenery.http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/159380.jpgL.Adamson

excellent post Greg. It's just too bad that the market doesn't call for this because MS definetley could do it. It's just too bad that we can't see it happen. On flightscenery.com I looked at the product list and it looks like they plan to release 4 more airports. Does that mean 4 more years?? If that's the case then the last one they choose to make is going to released on FS11 and maybe even FS12.

I use the UK VFR Photographic Scenery which is based on aerial photography but its manuals still say it is is best viewed from a height of at least 1500ft. The reason is still the way the Flight Simulator generates images as I explained in my previous post.Also, I think you under estimate the problems of using aerial photographs on a significant scale. Developers of photographic scenery have to rely on existing aerial photographs. These are taken by survey firms for their own purposes - not for flight simulation. For instance, the UK scenery doesn'tcover Scotland because not enough of Scotland was flown to give adequate coverage. Surveys are often flown at higher resolution over built-up areas and lower resolution elsewhere so that the different resolutions may need to be matched up. Also, because the surveys are flown at different times new developments may be shown on one photograph but they may not appear on the adjacent one. It's also usually necessary to colour-correct the photgraphs otherwise you'd see differences in colour between different tiles. Finally, there's also the cost to be considered. Digital photographs in the UK cost

>I use the UK VFR Photographic Scenery which is based on>aerial photography but its manuals still say it is is best>viewed from a height of at least 1500ft. The reason is still>the way the Flight Simulator generates images as I explained>in my previous post.>>Also, I think you under estimate the problems of using aerial>photographs on a significant scale. Developers of photographic>scenery have to rely on existing aerial photographs. These are>taken by survey firms for their own purposes - not for flight>simulation. For instance, the UK scenery doesn'tcover Scotland>because not enough of Scotland was flown to give adequate>coverage. Surveys are often flown at higher resolution over>built-up areas and lower resolution elsewhere so that the>different resolutions may need to be matched up. Also, because>the surveys are flown at different times new developments may>be shown on one photograph but they may not appear on the>adjacent one. It's also usually necessary to colour-correct>the photgraphs otherwise you'd see differences in colour>between different tiles. >>Finally, there's also the cost to be considered. Digital>photographs in the UK cost

This "problem" of blurries will only really go away once the ground detail data is vectorized and serialized for low overhead (such as where a road goes) and then turned into a mip-mapped image which both gains graphic detail and 3d image detail as we get closer.It'll be a long, long, long time before photos will be able to do what proxies can!There just isn't enough resolution to be able to see, for examples, roadside guardrails with painted lines - even at the correct angle - everywhere they belong.But eventually, FS (or whatever) will contain road detail like this which will appear when we're close, and photos may never match that for objects which need details.My guess is we'll see very good satellite imagery used, but not for the roads and detailed areas.Andrew