After 27 pages of roughly the same discussion, isn’t anyone starting to think there isn’t really a worthwhile end-point...?

Life is short. Go sim!

There almost never is in opinionated forum threads, so then there is never a point!

 

14 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

Then you were flying it in Vanilla, considering the higher res photoscenery is even easier to see the VFR landmarks, plus there are many more correct landmarks in Xplane, especially if using addons like TE Great Britain.

 

I have orbs installed for XP with a lot of floating house and generic houses . No it’s not going cut it. If people see Walmart it should be Walmart not generic residential houses . That is why Orbx with all it’s beauty can’t cut it in XP

17 hours ago, tonywob said:

As for lime/neon green aerial imagery, this is a common problem with aerial imagery (I've edited enough to have seen it a LOT). I noticed that if you head south from Seattle which looks incredible towards KOLM, it turns a rather bright lime greenish colour and some of my favourite PNW areas also suffer this. I think the sim did its best to cover over these areas with trees and autogen, but it does stand out, especially when you compare it to how other areas look. My major concern with the streaming imagery approach is that when areas get updated, they don't necessarily get updated for the better (Up-to-date yes, pretty, no). It's certainly not a show-stopper, but it is noticeable.

The first thing I did when I got the sim was check out my home country of Poland and I had very high expectations and was a little disappointed. Bing quality is not great here, and everything is covered in trees where they don't exist, making the country look like an alpine forest. I did eventually find my house, but my town was totally unrecognisable and it made IFR (I follow roads) navigation really difficult as you couldn't make out anything because of the excessive trees. Given the resources Asobo/Blackshark AI had to work with, I think they really did a good job from bad imagery, and for anyone who doesn't live there or know the area, it's perfectly acceptable and I can't really fault the effort Asobo did with it (especially if you compare how bad it looked in default X-Plane and P3D). I had similar feelings looking at parts of Australia, NZ and the UK, but in other areas I don't know too well I was more than happy with it, especially in the US.

It made it hard for me to read comments such as "This sim won't need third-parties" and far less polite comments wishing the death of third-parties. I immediately thought the opposite, and I'd personally pay for better representations of the areas I know and airports etc... As the now famous line says "The world is a big place" 🙂

 

Third parties aren't required to get a good looking global experience "out of the box", with no extra expenditure.  Of course the Bing coverage isn't perfect and high-res across the entire planet, and we are no doubt going to have people uncovering autogen/AI glitches for years in random corners of the planet.  That just comes with the territory of their approach to generating a "believable" planet to fly around in, where a handmade approach just isn't feasible on a remotely realistic timeline.

Having spent a lot of time in the sim myself, I can safely say that I think about 80% of the time it looks tremendous, and the lighting and AI-assisted autogen goes a long way to making things look nice even when the basic ortho resolution might leave a bit to be desired.  I've seen some oddities - the lime green terrain you mention, weird physics-bending "mounds" of water where the AI clearly misinterpreted what it was "seeing", broken seams, and trees occasionally placed where they very much don't belong.  Or more infamous ones like the Buckingham office block, and the 212 story Melbourne Burj Khalifa.

While it IS actually possible for users to "fix" some of this stuff, and share their fixes, I know Asobo have also said they are constantly refining their tools and algorithms to get better at analyzing the data streams it looks at, and that's constantly going to be updated.  And we also know Bing's own imagery gets updated in rolling waves, which then are going to filter back into the sim - all just as part of that base experience.

In some areas handmade OrbX scenery payware is going to look better than what satellite images and AI can create - and I think that payware will be further enhanced by the modern lighting and rendering techniques in MSFS.  I can see things like "landmark packs" very much becoming a lucrative business, to fill in the custom buildings Asobo did not.  Third parties will continue to have a role for people who want the highest possible fidelity experience, and I never personally doubted that.

What Asobo have created with Bing et al. is the foundation, and it's a really great one.  Now companies like OrbX can get to work filling in stuff that needs a handmade touch, while Asobo refine the macro-level terrain with more and better data, and bugfixes.

In summation, I'll just say MSFS provides some truly gobsmacking views of the world that are straight--up impossible in any other sim.  That's not even a dig at those products - it's a recognition of what getting to build on new technology, with an exponentially bigger team, brings.  I can't wait to see where it is in six months, let alone a couple of years down the road.

On the technical side of things, I think it came in too hot and needed a few more months - especially to iron out the installation issues, and do some more work on the jetliners at minimum.  But for GA VFR, I already think it's a pretty remarkable package.

 

 

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by Scottoest

5 minutes ago, sd_flyer said:

I have orbs installed for XP with a lot of floating house and generic houses . No it’s not going cut it. If people see Walmart it should be Walmart not generic residential houses . That is why Orbx with all it’s beauty can’t cut it in XP

I use Orbx in some areas, not all. I use a mix of stuff, but I don't care too much about accurate labels on buildings, even in VFR you don't usually fly low enough over cities in real life to read signs, unless they are like billboards or giant McDonalds arch or something.

Plus the image recognition overlay in this is far from perfect, so it's not like it gets it right even most of the time, other than in the full blown photogrammetry areas.

Orbx did a great job in TE Great Britain, but I mostly use custom high-res Ortho with custom city purchases overlayed. Yes, the downtown areas are not as spectacular, but everything is way more consistent looking than MSFS looks, and all the weird issue at small to medium sized airport (which is mostly what I fly out of).

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

8 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

In summation, I'll just say MSFS provides some truly gobsmacking views of the world that are straight--up impossible in any other sim.  That's not even a dig at those products - it's a recognition of what getting to build on new technology, with an exponentially bigger team, brings.  I can't wait to see where it is in six months, let alone a couple of years down the road.

The problem is I'm looking at the SDK and it's a total mess, it's very hard to fix anything. You cannot edit the airports, you have to start from scratch. You also cannot edit the Orthoimagery, you have to replace it with static which means blending a custom ortho into their orthos even in places you might not want to have to do the work. Unless you were an insider like Orbx, the documentation is just too sparse and the utilities are too limiting.

Why do you think there are so few products out right now, it's because the SDK is ultra-complicated. Also, no more standard WGS or geodetic formats, now its quad converting to a Bing format and a bunch of stuff that even GDAL WARP isn't going to have built-in natively.

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

Just now, SceneryFX said:

The problem is I'm looking at the SDK and it's a total mess, it's very hard to fix anything. You cannot edit the airports, you have to start from scratch. You also cannot edit the Orthoimagery, you have to replace it with static which means blending a custom ortho into their orthos even in places you might not want to have to do the work. Unless you were an insider like Orbx, the documentation is just too sparse and the utilities are too limiting.

 

I messed around with the SDK yesterday, It was the same when FSX was released. We had to wait a couple months before we got an updated SDK and GMAX stuff. 

3 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

The problem is I'm looking at the SDK and it's a total mess, it's very hard to fix anything. You cannot edit the airports, you have to start from scratch. You also cannot edit the Orthoimagery, you have to replace it with static which means blending a custom ortho into their orthos even in places you might not want to have to do the work. Unless you were an insider like Orbx, the documentation is just too sparse and the utilities are too limiting.

Why do you think there are so few products out right now, it's because the SDK is ultra-complicated. Also, no more standard WGS or geodetic formats, now its quad converting to a Bing format and a bunch of stuff that even GDAL WARP isn't going to have built-in natively.

I suspect you already know this, but the SDK has already been acknowledged as a work in progress, and even companies like PMDG who are very much on-board with MSFS for their future, acknowledge that they don't yet have all of the things they need to even bring over a study level complex airliner.  But they also go on to state that Asobo is very receptive and talkative with them, and making sure they have the tools they will need.

A complete and fully-documented SDK right on the 18th (or earlier) would've been great.  But I think it's also disingenuous to pretend like what is in devs' hands right now is a finished product.

1 hour ago, cx777 said:

lol let me feed the xplane trolls here,
I'm sorry but MSFS2020 is what peak SIM looks like.
Inb4 the Xplane tools bUt MSfS iS noT A tRUe sim iTS jusT a GaME.🤣

Don't drag the conversation down to that level. This isn't "my sim is better than yours."

There are some interesting points being made here about the older sims and the new kid on the block. I'm flying both the new and the old... well I have to, until there are helicopters and a few of my favorite vintage radial engine planes in MSFS. I find worthwhile things in each sim. That's worth discussion.

I don't think it helps the Avsim community to get Balkanized into opposing camps. We all love flight sims here.

It’s not difficult  to conclude that MSFS is a gift, if you take an objective approach. As hardware improves so will so will the sim’s performance. The simulator will be molded to near perfection but this will take some time.
 

P3D and Xplane, I hate to have to say this, will become irrelevant platforms. They were fun but it’s time to move on. The tide of technological progress is unstoppable.

MSFS has invested too much to let it collapse. I think the next generation of hardware combined with an improved MSFS will give us a breadth taking experience. As for the critics, be patient, you will be plenty happy.

One last point - the underlying reality is that visuals is the fundamental and bedrock of any simulation.

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by Huascar

I didn't say it's a finished product, but being a programmer myself and knowing how software works, I just don't have as much confidence in them building out everything that needs to be fixed here, because some of these problems are incredibly complicated because of their image recognition approach to things.

The fact is they couldn't find someone or didn't want to budget for a programmer that knows how to fix the color tone mapping (and this isn't even as hard as some as the image recognition problems they have in their AI). So if they didn't fix that, not so sure they are going to fix all this other stuff, but it's wait and see. I would have preferred a nice default editor, especially given the push they have on third-party stuff. My fear is they are going to keep a lot of stuff very secretive between Orbx and PMDG so that they can squeeze every last penny out of the addon market and make it hard to impossible for small designers to fix their own airports and what not, but again, we shall see...

If that is the path they take, then many of the smaller and mid-sized airports will never be fixed because there will not be enough people working on them for any decent amount of coverage area.

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

10 hours ago, OzWhitey said:

We're only having this conversation because you made (yet another) overblown claim about the new sim - that is was "indisputably" more "believable" than P3D and X-Plane.

 

It's not an overblown claim when you have people literally making videos of the sim vs real life and it's often hard to tell which one is the sim. You can't do that with XP and P3D.

I don't need to own P3D to know what it looks like. Enough videos of it on the internet. It's not even a debate about which sim is more life like and believable. MSFS wins hands down. I think you're too stubborn to admit that so I will leave it be.

Yes, you can definitely make higher quality videos in Xplane using 30-60cm Orthoimagery than you can using MSFS 1.2m resolution. You cannot get the same exact lighting or clouds, but the clouds are from perfect. Excluding the trees and buildings, but that is all about angles, even the trees are not always perfect here either from certain angles.

You can use the dusk environment in this to hide a lot of the poor artifacts and what not just for making videos, but you can do similar things in other sims.

Also, it's easy in a video to hide the quality of the ortho because of changing camera angles happen fast enough before your eyes really focus on the sore spots.

 

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

@SceneryFX Maybe you should focus your energy on making a real life vs x-plane video that even comes close to the MSFS vs. real life videos. Or keep talking in circles. Either way, have a good day.

We are traversing different topics, not talking in circles, making videos isn't my thing, the videos people make intentionally use camera tricks and various things to hide some of the inadequacies that exist. I do have some videos, but I'm not going to post them since it will just open up another can of worms.

 

Edited August 24, 20205 yr by SceneryFX