1 minute ago, Slides said:

But it can't do mountains properly. 😞

Yes, and it's extremely limited of course. But I think they've done a good job with the lighting and scenery in general. Of course, it's all hand placed.

Edited August 15, 20205 yr by bonchie

57 minutes ago, bonchie said:

The idea that AI generated scenery over orthos being streamed to you that places buildings in their exact locations isn't revolutionary is silly. Of course it is.

Yes, you can load up non-color corrected ZL19 in XP11 with all the imperfections that come with that (clouds mainly), but you can only do that for a tiny part of the world and you are dependent on incomplete OSM-based overlays. What makes MSFS revolutionary is 1) the presentation itself is indeed better out of the box than any sim by far (except maybe DCS, which is really pretty) and 2) you get decent to great coverage all over the world.

 

- Seeing you raise it: i’ve built a ton of ortho for multiple sims. You dont need AI to avoid clouds, just good source images. For Australia, that means NOT using bing maps. Arc GIS imagery for Australia - what i use - doesnt require cloud removal or color correction, it looks great out of the box.

- you chose ZL19 ortho in your example, which suggests you either don’t know anything about ortho or are straw-manning here (virtually no one uses ZL19, its not even an option when using ortho4xp in p3d). In short, i have all of aus/us/europe covered with decent ortho in p3d, along with a good chunk of Africa. It’s been possible for a good while now to do this for anyone who is interested. There’s nothing revolutionary about ortho whatsoever, though it will be a new experience for a lot if users.

- Most importantly: you and a bunch of others in this thread are wasting a lot of breath arguing/attacking me for things i didn’t say and don’t believe. See: most of your post.

Creating a city using photogrammetry is revolutionary. Placing some imperfectly-located trees over low-res ortho on an island with dodgy terrain mesh is not. The sim as a whole is game-changing in many ways, but not every aspect of it is perfect (not even close!)

 

59 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

 

- Seeing you raise it: i’ve built a ton of ortho for multiple sims. You dont need AI to avoid clouds, just good source images. For Australia, that means NOT using bing maps. Arc GIS imagery for Australia - what i use - doesnt require cloud removal or color correction, it looks great out of the box.

- you chose ZL19 ortho in your example, which suggests you either don’t know anything about ortho or are straw-manning here (virtually no one uses ZL19, its not even an option when using ortho4xp in p3d). In short, i have all of aus/us/europe covered with decent ortho in p3d, along with a good chunk of Africa. It’s been possible for a good while now to do this for anyone who is interested. There’s nothing revolutionary about ortho whatsoever, though it will be a new experience for a lot if users.

- Most importantly: you and a bunch of others in this thread are wasting a lot of breath arguing/attacking me for things i didn’t say and don’t believe. See: most of your post.

Creating a city using photogrammetry is revolutionary. Placing some imperfectly-located trees over low-res ortho on an island with dodgy terrain mesh is not. The sim as a whole is game-changing in many ways, but not every aspect of it is perfect (not even close!)

 

My 1.2TBs of orthos for XP11 would beg to differ. I used ZL19 as an example because it's very high resolution with the point being that yes, you can get higher resolution in XP11 than MSFS, but that it's still an extremely limited technology because of disk space, lack of correction, and lack of quality overlays. And plenty of people use ZL19 around airports in XP11. The same limitations I mentioned apply to P3D's use of orthos (I've always saw XP11 as the superior sim for orthos though). Not to mention that creating good orthos with proper masks is time consuming.

"Good source images" simply don't exist for many parts of the world and touching up is required. Go have fun trying to recreate the Caribbean without issues with clouds and heavy shadows.

No one is "attacking you." You are making definitive statements and people are disagreeing with you. You also continue to beat around the bush about what is truly revolutionary about MSFS' scenery, namely the AI building and tree placement throughout the world. My home town actually looks like my home town for the first time in any simulator from low altitudes. I have a ton of orthos for XP11. The overlays are mostly incomplete at best, really bad at worst. Good OSM coverage is almost non-existent outside of cities in Europe, and even then the buildings are not varied, don't fit the footprints, aren't color matched, and often look unnatural.

If you don't think it's revolutionary to stream the entire world to someone's computer with AI built overlays so good that it will place a toll booth on a road or a random house out in the middle of nowhere, then you can hold that opinion. People obviously disagree. I'd also love to see some comparison shots with whatever you have for P3D that you say is so good.

BTW, having personally experienced it, MSFS' orthos are not extremely high-res (except maybe around airports where it does seem higher resolution), but it's not "low-res" either. Flying over a city or countryside, it reminds me of ZL17 in XP11, perhaps even sharper at times (but that may be a result of the AI cleaning things up). As you get higher, it appears to load lower zoom levels. Oh yeah, did I mention the procedural grass that makes bush flying not look like you are ice skating on a green ice rink?

Edited August 16, 20205 yr by bonchie

Using alpha (now beta) since last december.

You can watch videos, but once you get used to MSFS weather depiction (used best ASN versions in FSX), and specially lighting, there is simply no way to come back to any other sim. 

Edited August 16, 20205 yr by marty2756

42 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

i’ve built a ton of ortho for multiple sims

We're flying over that without having to create it. 😄 Everywhere in the world.
 

44 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

not every aspect of it is perfect (not even close!)

It's not supposed to be, and we don't expect it to be.  It's just "good enough."  And this is out of the box.
 

4 minutes ago, bonchie said:

You are making definitive statements and people are disagreeing with you.

Funny how that works. 🙂 

Hook

25 minutes ago, marty2756 said:

Using alpha (now beta) since last december.

You can watch videos, but once you get used to MSFS weather depiction (used best ASN versions in FSX), and specially lighting, there is simply no way to come back to any other sim. 

The lighting engine is what elevates MSFS, even when you're in an area where the terrain is a little dodgy, and it's the thing that no other current sim touches.  Atmospheric scattering, subtle reflections of the cockpit instruments off the windows, etc.

The next few weeks are going to be tedious, because I foresee a lot of sarcastic "lolz" at random areas of the world in MSFS where the terrain mesh has bugged out or whatever - as will sometimes happen when you've got ML algorithms and whatnot processing this data for the sim, not handmade terrain.

9 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

The lighting engine is what elevates MSFS, even when you're in an area where the terrain is a little dodgy, and it's the thing that no other current sim touches.  Atmospheric scattering, subtle reflections of the cockpit instruments off the windows, etc.

The next few weeks are going to be tedious, because I foresee a lot of sarcastic "lolz" at random areas of the world in MSFS where the terrain mesh has bugged out or whatever - as will sometimes happen when you've got ML algorithms and whatnot processing this data for the sim, not handmade terrain.

Which will be funny because World Scenery is something any other simulator doesn’t depict well.

I can’t count how many mesh issues I have seen in the decades I have been simming. 
 

And on that matter, I would say MSFS will probably evolve really fast. They even said World Update will come every three months (they will select one region and update it every three months).

1 minute ago, ca_metal said:

Which will be funny because World Scenery is something any other simulator doesn’t depict well.

I can’t count how many mesh issues I have seen in the decades I have been simming. 
 

And on that matter, I would say MSFS will probably evolve really fast. They even said World Update will come every three months (they will select one region and update it every three months).

I've seen people, without a hint of sarcasm or irony, brag that some paid OrbX add-on looks better than the same terrain in MSFS... which was being entirely generated by algorithms and data sources, lol.

I'm sure the quality of the processing for the ortho and photogrammetry data will keep getting refined for years.  I'm pretty sure Asobo themselves have said that when they discover janky areas of the world, they don't just patch it up - they actually refine the automatic tools at the source, to make them process that area more "correctly".

7 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

I've seen people, without a hint of sarcasm or irony, brag that some paid OrbX add-on looks better than the same terrain in MSFS... which was being entirely generated by algorithms and data sources, lol.

I'm sure the quality of the processing for the ortho and photogrammetry data will keep getting refined for years.  I'm pretty sure Asobo themselves have said that when they discover janky areas of the world, they don't just patch it up - they actually refine the automatic tools at the source, to make them process that area more "correctly".

This is a better video than the OP's Kangaroo Island.

 

1 minute ago, Scottoest said:

I've seen people, without a hint of sarcasm or irony, brag that some paid OrbX add-on looks better than the same terrain in MSFS... which was being entirely generated by algorithms and data sources, lol.

I'm sure the quality of the processing for the ortho and photogrammetry data will keep getting refined for years.  I'm pretty sure Asobo themselves have said that when they discover janky areas of the world, they don't just patch it up - they actually refine the automatic tools at the source, to make them process that area more "correctly".

I really like what Orbx has achieved over the years, but, in my opinion, Asobo is achieving way better results, but, to be a fair comparison, we have to compare handmade scenery vs handmade scenery. Autogenerated scenery vs autogenerated scenery.

I have compared the Truearth series (on X-Plane) vs default MSFS, and I have to say I think MSFS looks better. But of course Orbx has thousands of POIs and Landmarks that MSFS doesn’t have, but the general looks is superior (IMO). Another thing is, the handcrafted landmarks made by Asobo are also superior when compared to the models we have on current sims. But with time I’m sure 3rd parties will up their quality a lot.

12 minutes ago, ca_metal said:

I have compared the Truearth series (on X-Plane) vs default MSFS, and I have to say I think MSFS looks better. But of course Orbx has thousands of POIs and Landmarks that MSFS doesn’t have...

And you have to pay a good amount of $ to get the Orbx Truearth. Imagine what it would cost to get the whole planet covered in Truearth? The mind boggles....

4 hours ago, bonchie said:

BTW, having personally experienced it, MSFS' orthos are not extremely high-res (except maybe around airports where it does seem higher resolution), but it's not "low-res" either. Flying over a city or countryside, it reminds me of ZL17 in XP11, perhaps even sharper at times (but that may be a result of the AI cleaning things up). As you get higher, it appears to load lower zoom levels. Oh yeah, did I mention the procedural grass that makes bush flying not look like you are ice skating on a green ice rink?

I have 10TB orthos for XP at ZL17 resolution. To my experience ZL17 strikes the best balance between visual quality and file size. It's a relief to know that the MSFS is delivered around ZL17 levels. I sure hope thought that in the future with better images sources and bandwidth, having ZL18 would be nice.

ZL19 ortho images are incredible, but the size is insane at 100GB per tile (covering ~10,000 sq miles).

@OzWhitey Rob, reading all this post (as I have nothing better to do, I guess) I’m reminded of the old saying “There’s none so blind as those who will not see” Said without angst.

Edited August 16, 20205 yr by antonvs