MUST SEE. Grand Canyon geological survey in FSX.

[Guest The Wizard of Oz]

Just adding a few more thoughts. I think ultimately it

[Guest cbuchner1]

Thank you for commenting - I think all of your concerns are valid.1) Satellites don"t get parked during winter time. It is just a matter of licensing different seasonal data sets. Google Earth seems to have mixed shots taken during different seasons. One guy was complaining in this forum that his house was shot during the Winter time...2) Downloading times can be optimized by parallelizing requests to the server and good caching strategies. Also better codecs than JPG can be used server-side (e.g. the same progressive wavelet-like image codec that is used in the FSX SDK resample tool). Of course the decompressor should be very fast. libjpeg which I currently use is pretty good at that I think but compression efficiency of JPG is no longer state of the art.3) Synchronizing autogen with phototerrain tiles is not trivial, but it can be done - a commercial FSX 1m photoscenery for parts of Great Britain with that capability is in the works I heard. Autogen itself runs in the simulator thread, no offloading possible I think. Metadata about where to place trees and houses should be stored server-side. The commercial terrain provider would have to generate that metadata, not the flight simulator PC. So no offloading required here.4) I found MSN virtual earth to be very consistent across the United States. I did a high resolution "flyover"/scroll from west to east coast in their web app and I found no noticeable seams between different datasets. So there are definitely quality data sets available for parts of the world. Just a matter of licensing the right stuff. ;)When I get a chance to present this work to the MS guys, I will discuss all these points with them, I suppose.

[MillKa 0]

Hi Christian,i dont know if youre already aware of it, but Adam Szofran (who gave the tip to apply for a job) is the "scenery guy" at MS Aces - you cant get any closer to the core ...

[Mochi 82]

Amazing work, good luck to you Christian - you're pushing the envelope so to speak!

[Guest wyoming]

one can get real real-weather as well...http://environment.newscientist.com/articl...imate-data.html

[JSkorna 137]

Starting in April!Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/Active Sky V6 Development Team Active Sky V6 Proud SupporterHiFi Beta TeamRadar Contact Supporter: http://www.jdtllc.com/AirSource Member: http://www.air-source.us/FSEconomy Member:http://www.fseconomy.com/

[Guest wyoming]

Does that mean that clouds will be generated following zones of pressure/density/temperature rather than following local report?

[Guest 4watties]

A couple things...1) As some others have stated...I would really recommend trying to get something similar accomplished using MS Virtual Earth 3D (Beta). Hopefully they also have similar API's/SDK's to interface with their environment.2) Don't be so sure the ACES team has attempted something like this. It is really a small team as teams go within MS. Given the schedules and timelines required to meet the FSX deadlines, I suspect something like this would have been shelved for future study or at best listed as a nice to have with zero work done on it due to lowered priority.3) My concern with a system like this is the overhead required to operate the server systems, etc. I would imagine this might require a new purchase system...perhaps something similar to the massively online role playing games...where users of this technology do so via an ongoing monthly/yearly subscription fee.All in all...great work! I know many in the community have hoped to see something like this. Great job!

[Guest koorby]

Christian, simply superb work and the results speak for themselves. If I had enough funding, I'd hire you to come for me tomorrow, no question.Now, this is NOT a negative, so no flames please :) There is a downside to this goodness. 1. Google Earth (or MS Live, or ) has a limited 1m/pixel coverage of the earth, leaning more towards the USA and some parts of Europe, versus the rest of the world. That limits the appeal of this approach somewhat.2. A minimum requirement of 2MB ADSL does not sound like a lot, but would probably exclude a large portion of FS enthusiasts worldwide (again, the USA and parts of Asia are spoilt by huge pipes) - but streaming is not a mainstream option for the majority. It's a pity, because the whole world deserves fat pipes!!!But in my mind, it's stunning scenery and you've certainly opened everyone's eyes to the potential of real-time data streaming in future FS versions, and by the time broadband is in everyone's homes it will most definitely be the default way to truly get amazing results.Another compromise of course is to have "areas of interest" where the coverage does exist, and not neccesarily cover the whole planet.

[Guest wyoming]

Me too....

[Guest tmilton]

This is just stunning! Great work, this has opened a lot of eyes. I hope this can continue to be explored and further expanded. The possibilities are there just waiting to be developed!

[Guest Langeveldt]

Wow, breathtaking stuff and I want it to become a reality for all of us now :)Just a question, but will those of us too cheap to buy the deluxe version of FSX miss out on all of this if it gains momentum? I've been experimenting with Google Earth and FSX and unfortunatly require SDK to continue converting the KML files to the format recognised by the sim... Really regretting not spending the extra 100 rand!