55 minutes ago, tweekz said:

The shot proves that there are ways to solve these things. The AI needs to get better to detect problems. But in general this approach is superior in terms of realism.

I prefer a few ugly spots and therefore being able to recognize the world, instead of filling it with fantasy textures.

"Fantasy" ...

Go to bing or any other ortho site, change layers, look at the data.

This data has, roads, buildings, forests, rivers, larger water bodies, obstacles, beaches, farmlands and everything that orthos has baked on it.

All of this can be done without a single ground texture.

ex: Forests are lots of 3d tree objects, why do i need an ugly low res forest ground texture baked under the 3d forest...? The shape of the forest exists in the data too as a polygon. 

So orthos are useful only for areas where no available data is present. Like the middle of a huge desert. So how do we fix that..? How do we know if a random location should have sand or farmlands, with no specific data?? How do we know if the wild grass should be yellow-dry or green field?

This is called climatic data, and seasons. Another unavilable tech in the so called next gen msfs..

 

 

So..orthos are actually accurate in 1 situation only, where the season and the clock in the simlator are matching the season and the time in which this ortho was taken.. and even then, it's probably a dated ground under you, like ~5 years dated...

Edited September 24, 20205 yr by mtaxp

34 minutes ago, mtaxp said:

This data has, roads, buildings, forests, rivers, larger water bodies, obstacles, beaches, farmlands and everything that orthos has baked on it.

MSFS has that data as well + satellite imagery.

In offline mode it uses map data only. You know there is a field. But every field looks slightly different. What color? Is it a cornfield, sunflowers, dry land, distinctive patterns, etc.? Draw me a field and most certainly it will look nothing like the real one. So yeah -> fantasy interpretation of the actual field. Plausible, but not realistic.

Besides, OSM is far from complete. Lot of buildings and infos are missing. For example, check Trapani in Sicilia. So it's good to have the satellite image as source in general.

The benefit of MSFS: They can easily generate and push updated scenery via Azure.

Edited September 24, 20205 yr by tweekz

Back to the OP, unfortunately with the Steam edition of FS20 I can't even play XP11 or FSX(SE) as Steam thinks I'm playing it not downloading the wretched thing at 500KB/s after 1.8.30 wrecked my install.

1 hour ago, robert young said:

so apologies

No problem at all Robert, and perhaps I was a bit terse, even childish, in my original post, but, you can see what it sparked, and is continuing to do, which becomes very tedious. I don't have to read it though, but, we have had many-many of these sort of threads.

 

1 hour ago, robert young said:

I don't see any harm in comparisons provided they are mindful of allowable teething problems that need to be ironed out.

I agree completely, if that is the sentiment they are being posted under, then it's all good.

1 hour ago, mtr75 said:

For the love of God, are these threads EVER going to stop?

Not until we as consumers stop buying unfinished pay to beta prouducts no

The problem is, the majority are civil people, but like football fans it's that small minority that spoil it. 

They come in here spit at people that enjoy MSFS and want to belittle them because there sim is "THE One" "yours is just a scenery game" My team is better than yours with no respect at all. Just like asking Manchester United fans hooligans to show any Liverpool fans any respect. It's childish and pathetic.

The majority can except MSFS short coming as the sim is so young and see its huge potential. Also with be happy to use more than one sim, like I will use P3D v5.1, DCS and MSFS. Each sim has its strengths and does things the others simply cannot do. Enjoy and use all of them. If Xplane is your P3D, great, enjoy it. Happy for you. But do you really need to try and kick MSFS users in the teeth for enjoying there sim?

I just wish the narrow minded minority would just clear off to there own forums and put down MSFS in there own forums as they do and enjoy doing so, like little girls giggling to themselves.

 

Edited September 24, 20205 yr by Nyxx

3 hours ago, mtaxp said:

Not easy, but even a sole engineer can make scaleable good clouds.

Sorry, you'll need to elaborate more about this "little" chance, what knowledge do you have in this other than quoting empty words from Asobo?

This "no way to be accomplished" tech has been out there, for Years.

 

 

Lol, your tech demo videos prove my point. XP and P3D haven't been able to implement these techniques even after these techniques have been available for years.

Same for DCS. It's clearly not easy based on evidence so far from other sims 

I don't like to get tangled up in heated debates, but I will just leave this here. My local area in suburban Melbourne (15km from the Melbourne CBD) here in the state of Victoria, Australia, compared to the "real world" in Google Earth (some of you might've already seen it from another thread that has since been buried by the plethora of new threads...). Never before has suburban Melbourne been covered by ORBX region, True Earth or any other quality treatment before I don't think (and probably never will be), so this is the first time it looks so good out of the box if you ask me. And all of this is AI generated, not photogrammetry (for better or for worse...). Please bear in mind that my settings are all in the low-medium range so it would look even better in high or ultra on a more powerful rig. Plus I'm getting 25-35 FPS in 1920x1080 on my measly GTX 960 2GB which is not bad at all. Looks pretty much like the real world ain't it. 😉

MSFS:

(fun fact, that tall building in the middle of the image is actually there in the real world and not even Google has it in yet)

Google Earth:

 

I'd say it's a good time to be a flight simmer that's for sure, and everyone should just enjoy their sim of choice as long as they're enjoying it. 🙂 Ok I will take my leave...

2 hours ago, mtaxp said:

"Fantasy" ...

Go to bing or any other ortho site, change layers, look at the data.

This data has, roads, buildings, forests, rivers, larger water bodies, obstacles, beaches, farmlands and everything that orthos has baked on it.

All of this can be done without a single ground texture.

ex: Forests are lots of 3d tree objects, why do i need an ugly low res forest ground texture baked under the 3d forest...? The shape of the forest exists in the data too as a polygon. 

So orthos are useful only for areas where no available data is present. Like the middle of a huge desert. So how do we fix that..? How do we know if a random location should have sand or farmlands, with no specific data?? How do we know if the wild grass should be yellow-dry or green field?

This is called climatic data, and seasons. Another unavilable tech in the so called next gen msfs..

 

 

So..orthos are actually accurate in 1 situation only, where the season and the clock in the simlator are matching the season and the time in which this ortho was taken.. and even then, it's probably a dated ground under you, like ~5 years dated...

If you want simple field and the like textures, sure, you can generate things procedurally using available data. But there are so many small variations in the real world that you just can't get. Just how do you propose doing this;

Super high resolution elevation data into houdini to generate flow maps? Then automated texture creation in substance? That sort of thing is possible and is being done right now... but why go through all that trouble for the whole world when starting off with satellite data will be easier and give you much results that are 1:1 with the real world.

1 hour ago, Slides said:

Lol, your tech demo videos prove my point. XP and P3D haven't been able to implement these techniques even after these techniques have been available for years.

Same for DCS. It's clearly not easy based on evidence so far from other sims 

Listen, i dont mean to offend but im tired of trying to explain tech stuff in this regard.

Your answer is here (start from 23:00),

https://fselite.net/tag/ben-supnik/

I recommend to listen to this interview, sums up lots of stuff discussed here.

6 hours ago, Nyxx said:

Yer that's bad Roi, it's your bottle neck, mine is 75mb/s.

The weird thing is that when flying you barely see it using 2mb/s

40 minutes ago, mtaxp said:

Listen, i dont mean to offend but im tired of trying to explain tech stuff in this regard.

Your answer is here (start from 23:00),

https://fselite.net/tag/ben-supnik/

I recommend to listen to this interview, sums up lots of stuff discussed here.

You don't have to explain anything. We have evidence in front of us that only MSFS currently has clouds that are a generation ahead of any other sim.

2 hours ago, mtr75 said:

It's not a discussion, it's 9 pages of incessant arguing, the same nonsense we've seen rehashed over and over and over again. It's tiring and serves no purpose. And thanks for your suggestion, but I'll voice my opinion. 

mtr75.  You are incessantly arguing about a topic that you claim is nothing but incessant arguing! 😄

I think it all gets a bit too intense sometimes.  I have learned a life lesson on this forum.  Let someone have their say, and if you disagree, give your counterpoint.  If you think a thread is useless incessant arguing, just duck out, don't read it, and don't waste your time on it.

As long as it doesn't become offensive, I for one find these discussions amusing to a degree, and some people do try to add a bit of humour.  The more serious and problem solving threads aren't pushed out by it, they are still there! 👍

7 hours ago, mtaxp said:

"Fantasy" ...

Go to bing or any other ortho site, change layers, look at the data.

This data has, roads, buildings, forests, rivers, larger water bodies, obstacles, beaches, farmlands and everything that orthos has baked on it.

All of this can be done without a single ground texture.

ex: Forests are lots of 3d tree objects, why do i need an ugly low res forest ground texture baked under the 3d forest...? The shape of the forest exists in the data too as a polygon. 

So orthos are useful only for areas where no available data is present. Like the middle of a huge desert. So how do we fix that..? How do we know if a random location should have sand or farmlands, with no specific data?? How do we know if the wild grass should be yellow-dry or green field?

This is called climatic data, and seasons. Another unavilable tech in the so called next gen msfs..

 

 

So..orthos are actually accurate in 1 situation only, where the season and the clock in the simlator are matching the season and the time in which this ortho was taken.. and even then, it's probably a dated ground under you, like ~5 years dated...

These videos do a pretty fantastic job (ironically) demonstrating all of the things MSFS has done to up the game of flight sim scenery generation.  The current engine is using orthos as a base, but the trees, grass, water, clouds are all procedurally generated.  This fact, combined with the very well done atmospheric scattering makes for a virtual representation of the earth that is as close to photography as I have seen yet.  Compare that to xp - grass and trees are still objects that are stochastically placed within a polygon, but they are still fixed cards with texture maps.  MSFS trees are dynamically created with detail that adjusts in a fluid dynamic way with distance.  Grass is also spawned algorithmically based on analysis of the terrain and surface texture.  That's why you have it everywhere without the need of a scenery designer.  Grass in XP exists as transparency mapped cards in specific places IF a scenery designer decides to add it.  Same can be said by the clouds and water - both are already procedural and look better in MSFS than in these demos.

Procedural planet generation is fun tech.  I've used Terragen for visual effects elements in films before.  Its great when you want something to look natural and it doesnt have to resemble anything specific.  In this case, however, we want the real world.  It is much harder to represent the things we want to see with a purely procedural approach - this is why autogen is only marginally satisfying.  It can be helped somewhat with a tool like World2XP that at least bases the procedural generation on street map data.  But I have to tell you, when I fired up MSFS for the first time and flew over New Haven, CT.. an area that I had worked on for months in XP to try to properly represent the downtown area and Yale University, I was blown away to see EVERY building looking exactly as it should and recognizing the signs to the car park at the University Hospital for example.  This was out of the box.  I backed up and removed XP from my hard drive that day.

In my opinion, the best is to do what MSFS is doing - start with satellite data and add procedural components to it.  AI does its thing to help with the short comings like color matching and clouds etc.  Bing/Google/etc do spend resources over time trying to clean up those things on their end as well, so when that happens MSFS would reap the benefit.  You also point out the inability to do seasons as an orhto shortcoming.  That's actually something thats already on its way to being solved in MSFS if you study how they are handling snow.  Since the trees are procedural and the grass as well, both are modified by the shader to look wintery and snow-covered.  In addition, (while I dont have the code to confirm) by studying what happens to scenery I am working on when snow is turned on, they seem to be using some of the same analysis that determines grass placement to build up snow accumulation on the ground as well.  Jorg Nuemann mentions their work on seasons in their latest podcast so this is on their radar.  I suspect they will use similar techniques to facsimilate spring & fall.

Say what you want about what sim needs to do what to improve, for me MSFS is already well along the right path for me.  The scenery is amazing, performance is great and I dont see a lot of evidence that the work needed to correct the avionics is a show stopper especially considering the resources on hand to get it done. 

I'm guess that while I'm happy for others to like their sim of choice, I just get annoyed with the hyberbolic bashing (not talking about constructive criticism here).  Its like finding a great new series on tv, watching a few episodes, then having your kid say it sucks.  You still love the show, but it does knock a bit of fun off the top.

2 hours ago, Honnli said:

(fun fact, that tall building in the middle of the image is actually there in the real world and not even Google has it in yet)

I saw a theory that if a building doesn't have any height data in OSM, the sim (or maybe the blackshark AI) just assigns it one, dunno based on what factors though.

Edited September 24, 20205 yr by Tuskin38