3 hours ago, mtr75 said:

You uninstalled it? Good for you. Nobody cares. 

23 hearts and 5 up arrows say different.

6 hours ago, SceneryFX said:

I do not think Xplane 11 ran bad FPS wise at all after Vulkan, a bit better than MSFS to be honest, but it's not a fair comparison. If I lowered the settings on MSFS enough though, MSFS would probably beat it.

Yeah. You gotta consider all those 3D trees, grass, volumetric clouds, more detailed buildings, etc. Not sure how the XP engine would handle this. I am sure there is a reason why in Orbx you only get patches of grass.

Edited August 21, 20205 yr by tweekz

13 hours ago, rtodepart said:

... tell you this go rent a banner ..

Careful.. People have been fired from their jobs by organising a banner tow... 

I'm off to uninstall Flight Sim World. Not getting MSFS until there's a decent MD-11 available for it..  🍻 Should give me enough time to save up for a new PC to run it!

Joking aside, I'm nearly as excited about what the new sim holds for the hobby in the future..

3 hours ago, tweekz said:

Yeah. You gotta consider all those 3D trees, grass, volumetric clouds, more detailed buildings, etc. Not sure how the XP engine would handle this. I am sure there is a reason why in Orbx you only get patches of grass.

The grass is even animated 🥶

14 hours ago, JerryT87 said:

Right? I flew over my house, my buddies, and my brothers. All there, and done completely by VFR using the roads and landmarks. Freaking amazing! 👍

Now Asobo just needs to do some fixes and tweaks to make this the only sim to buy.

Er, it's a long, long, long way from being competent at being anything other than a VFR GA simulator (which even in its current state it does very well).  If you're happy with that as your entire flight simulator experience, fine.

But if you're into IFR, seasons and accurate tubeliner flying it's not enough and won't be for a long time.  And what I get out of tubeliners isn't a graphic experience, it's a procedural one, of controlling an extremely complex system in a realistic way.

And LM will continue to develop P3D as a training tool - I can see them teaming up with Google to provide on-line scenery.

I think the two will co-exist, although I think X-plane will be looking for a niche in the medium term.

Edited August 21, 20205 yr by Malcolm Street

34 minutes ago, HighBypass said:

Careful.. People have been fired from their jobs by organising a banner tow... 

I'm off to uninstall Flight Sim World. Not getting MSFS until there's a decent MD-11 available for it..  🍻 Should give me enough time to save up for a new PC to run it!

Joking aside, I'm nearly as excited about what the new sim holds for the hobby in the future..

The most important thing IMHO is that it provides an up-to-date mass market product backed by a major name in the gaming industry.  It will attract large numbers of gamers to flight simulation and grow our hobby.

Edited August 21, 20205 yr by Malcolm Street

Honestly, I tried to fire up my P3Dv4.5 (I removed v5 last month due to instability issues in my system) and XP11 to compare yesterday, I don't know if is me but I realized that I care too much about the scenery, landscape and the weather and it turns out that, I love VFR on MSFS 😄 

I removed XP11 a few weeks ago, a platform I enjoyed for a couple of years, but there are so many issues, niggles and undesirables, with the need for a ton of tweaks and apps, that I'm delighted to be rid of the bloody thing. While waiting for for the final of MSFS I put back P3Dv4.5 and had some fun with it again, and in many-many ways it's far better than XP11, but this morning I thought I'd have a little flight using it, just as a comparison......... and it's gone 🤣

@Malcolm Street I know that. 

Just realised I didn't finish off the last sentence I wrote in that post, my bad:

"Joking aside, I'm nearly as excited about what the new sim holds for the hobby in the future as most of the current users are."

13 hours ago, SceneryFX said:

However, that's really not fair comparison as this is streamed.

Just for your information: The whole FS Global  package that gives you up to 1 meter mesh and 4 meters overall is only 80GB.

Integrating a mesh of that resolution should be absoulutely no problem for the Bing service. The actual imagery takes a gazillion times more space.

47 minutes ago, Farlis said:

Just for your information: The whole FS Global  package that gives you up to 1 meter mesh and 4 meters overall is only 80GB.

Integrating a mesh of that resolution should be absoulutely no problem for the Bing service. The actual imagery takes a gazillion times more space.

I never mentioned mesh, when talking about "compared to 30CM", I was talking about the apparent resolution of the orthoimagery, not the mesh. The apparent resolution of most of the ortho I've seen in MSFS is 80cm to 1.2m, if comparing it to Ortho4XP or Orbx orthoimagery directly.

Really never cared for increasing mesh resolution as it makes such a minimal difference for photoscenery. Mesh will not fix the perceived resolution of the aerial orthoimagery, it has to be the images themselves that go over the mesh. Don't get me wrong, it can help a little, but it's very very slight.

The problem is the textures on steep surfaces are not captured by the camera, it is captured as a shadow or blob due to the angel of the camera taking the aerial photos (that's just one issue). The other issue is when you downscale orthoimagery, the steeper surfaces are the most affected due to the above issue combining with the lower res, which contributes to that snow cone blob look of mountains.

Edited August 21, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

1 minute ago, SceneryFX said:

The problem is the textures on steep surfaces are not captured by the camera, it is captured as a shadow or blob due to the angel of the camera taking the aerial photos (that's just one issue). The other issue is when you downscale orthoimagery, the steeper surfaces are the most affected due to the above issue combining with the lower res.

The biggest problem I have is with the low resolution of the mesh leading to the orthoimagery not matching up with the terrain. You can see the ridges that should be there on the flat terrain.

To me mesh has always been the most important factor to recognize a landscape. Especially back in the days of LC scenery. The resolution of the ground image can be as low as possible as long as the actual terrain elevation model has a high resolution.

6 minutes ago, Farlis said:

The biggest problem I have is with the low resolution of the mesh leading to the orthoimagery not matching up with the terrain. You can see the ridges that should be there on the flat terrain.

To me mesh has always been the most important factor to recognize a landscape. Especially back in the days of LC scenery. The resolution of the ground image can be as low as possible as long as the actual terrain elevation model has a high resolution.

Having experimented with this many times in FSX BGL compiler, Ortho4XP (Xplane 11) which has a multitude of MESH options you can experiment with, and with multitudes of varying imagery and mesh quality, I can definitely say the orthophoto itself is far more important than the mesh, as long as the mesh isn't incredibly low res. The mesh can have varying importance depending on the shape of the mountain, but in general it is not what makes the scenery look higher res, it is definitely the quality of the textures from the orthophoto.

To see a big difference in the mesh, you have to be really close up generally, unless the mesh was super low res in the first place (that's a separate issue), so the problem is when being that close to the mountain, the main thing you notice is the bad texturing.

The orthophoto actually simulates the terrain even when it's too flat, because the photo itself has a rippling effect to the ground texture to make the mesh look more detailed even if the mesh is too flat. High res ortho with a low res mesh almost always looks better than a high res mesh with a low res ortho, in most cases, there are rare exceptions.

Edited August 21, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

21 hours ago, mtr75 said:

You uninstalled it? Good for you. Nobody cares.

Have a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea.  You'll feel better.  (cheddar)

Edited August 21, 20205 yr by ErichB

Just missing my beloved PMDG DC6.