Christian,If I give an win32 executable that can download textures from Virtual Earth by Long/Lat in real time, would you give everyone here the link from FSX? Please PM me if you are interested.Wai

Sorry, that would be outright a breach of terms of service of MSN Virtual Earth. So I would not dare to publish an unauthorized virtual earth client.Unauthorized client software might work fine for a few weeks until their administrators take notice - and simply lock the software out by setting a few filter rules on their web servers. So we'd end up with an arms rate of mutual updates until finally they shut me down with a legal threat. Since I do not live in a banana republic where it's easy to hide, such litigation could easily ruin me financially. Let's not go down that road.I am considering to offer a free NASA World Wind version of my project, but even that would require permission from NASA's project administrators - as a few thousand flightsimmers could possibly bring down and overload their servers.I intend to talk to Microsoft really soon - and should I apply for a job there, my personal mission statement would be to bring that graphical realism and beauty to the mainstream in one of the future simulator releases.Oh on a final note: a WIN32 executable would be a problem. My software hack builds on Mac and Linux and runs on an external computer or in a virtual machine, but not currently natively on Windows ;)

"Sorry, that would be outright a breach of terms of service of MSN Virtual Earth"How so? MS released Virtual Earth SDK to the public and they encourage client development. As a matter fact, the way to do this is documented on the map control, and it only takes a few lines code (downloadable from MS) to get it done. So my question to you is, is it still a breach of terms of service if Virtual Earth is view from a brower called FSX? As far as I can remember, the Virtual Earth terms of serivce didn't say I have use IE.

I have no idea what is possible with what you are doing cbuchner1 but understand that with different seasons and textures for them as well as lighting for the times of days, well there are a few challenges to overcome ahead...but, would it be possible to offer in FS (maybe not X or 11 but just in theory) to choose between loading a flight in the default texture files and loading a flight using your method? That way the end user could choose which way they want to sim for their flight in the event where they want to fly works well with the real textures like your Grand Canyon example.Also another thing I was thinking of was since in Missions you can not change the weather or time of year etc, then your way could work for missions could it not?

Oh, you're using a browser? Well that sounds more legal then. ;) I'd be interested to see how exactly your method works.

My method would download the same tiles for all seasons. However if the mission only makes sense with lots of snow on the ground, then loading a summer landscape would kind of spoil the fun. Imagine dense snowflakes rendered by FSX, and the ground shows green grass.... Ouch!

Now we are talking. What can you do for everyone here?

So you would have control of what seasonal textures are loaded using your way and there are becoming more seasonal textures for the same areas...is that what I'm getting?Your comments are kind of conflicting, because if you can determine what textures load then the missions thing would be set, but if you could not determine what seasonal textures load then your statement of downloading the same tiles for all season is confusing. Or am I missing something.I mean in Google you get one sat image and if its a summer image then a summer mission would work, however if google updates that area with a different seasonal tile then you have your winter with green grass example you outlined. But from what I'm getting is that you could have different tiles for the different seasons of the same area and if so then the missions thing wouldn't be much of a conflict.

The fact is that all those web services only provide ONE season, and a lot of times you can see half a texture is taken in the summer and the other half is taken in the winter. The sad part is, there is not a thing we can do about it. One thing I still don't understand is. If those textures are handled the same way as photo real texture, doesn't the entire area have to be downloaded first before FS can use them? Christian, can you enlighten us how is this done in real time? I mean if you start FS with no photo real texture at all, how do you trick FS into thinks the whole world is photo real?

The online mapping server only offers one season, but the file names as requested by the Flight Simulator for different seasons are like follows:....SU.BMP....WI.BMP....SP.BMP....AU.BMP....HW.BMP (hard winter)....LM.BMP (light map for night)so yes, I could distinguish seasons and even night texture but no mapping service offers seasonal data at present.Even if this information was not contained in the filename, I could report it to my software through the SimConnect SDK by means of reporting time and data and even current weather.

Yes, but only tiles close to the aircraft get loaded at maximum resolution, the rest is downloaded from lower zoom levels of the mapping service and saved as a very small BMP file. That is why it relatively fast to load the initial vista around the plane before takeoff (just a few minutes)

Want some cookies? ;-)

I just want to thank you....I have written in these forums for this approch several times..here is a part of my first post on the subject....from November 14th..under "IT SEEMS SO OBVIOUS"---------First Post.... but I follow the forums close since FSX came out....I had the same thought...what about goggle earth...or virtual earth....One day. I was running FSX with my 360 controller..(before I got all the flightsim specific controllers) .and switched to GE and GE was running off of the 360 controller...don

Bulls "ramble":http://bullsworld.blogspot.com/2006/12/nasa-google-deal.html(Open source: http://www.worldwindcentral.com/wiki/Main_Page)The community is not really happy:http://forum.worldwindcentral.com/showthread.php?t=7672Nice do see these data (hack) in WW:http://www.viavirtualearth.com/VVE/Articles/WorldWind.ashx(reproject!)GeoEye-1 is shedueld for launch in early 2007:http://www.geoeye.com/products/imagery/geoeye1/default.htmYes, this resolution (LIDAR) can be shown in FS10:Only one of many companies (I searched only for LIDAR):http://www.toposys.com/FSX terrain documantation:http://www.fsinsider.com/Community/Develop...t+Simulator.htmWill Microsoft close there servers for a Flightsimulator approach?I do not know!You can show and use currently GIS data

http://www.viavirtualearth.com/VVE/Articles/WorldWind.ashxNow THAT looks like a useful resource. Thanks for posting - it should be of great help for prototyping something workable.