With my old machine, an AMD Athlon, FSX was dormant. Then Christian created Tileproxy. I use it a lot now. What is the future of this concept? Will the Acme Map services and Microsoft allow this to continue as a feature or capability woven into FSX officially? I get the impression from reading a bunch of posts Christian, that you are heavily involved in working with the powers that be on this. I am just curious about what the future holds with the concept of Tileproxy.

I am convinced that a paid for online subscription service to "high end" flight simulator scenery is the way to go in the future (say 2-3 years from now). It allows a level of detail that simply wouldn't fit on a DVD (or even a HD-DVD). It allows for continuous scenery updates and for user shared content.The simulator could ship with a standard scenery similar to what is available now and those with a broadband Internet connection (like what, 50-60% of all users?) would get the most realistic flying experience.I'd love to work on that vision, but I doubt I'll get the chance.

>I am convinced that a paid for online subscription service to>"high end" flight simulator scenery is the way to go in the>future (say 2-3 years from now). It allows a level of detail>that simply wouldn't fit on a DVD (or even a HD-DVD). It>allows for continuous scenery updates and for user shared>content.>>The simulator could ship with a standard scenery similar to>what is available now and those with a broadband Internet>connection (like what, 50-60% of all users?) would get the>most realistic flying experience.>>I'd love to work on that vision, but I doubt I'll get the>chance.>>Yes, that makes sense to me too. Surely the players involved must see this as the future...but alas, as I know from personal experience, large organizations are often fettered from adapting to new visions.

And then came Beta 2. Published on sourceforge, as the stated policy of avsim.com file library is to not confuse people with too many updates in a short timeframe. Therefore only the final version will be posted on avsim, whereas beta updates go onto sourceforge.nethttp://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=195231This is mostly an installer update and provides an uninstallation feature, it enables experimental Vista 64 bit support and it makes some different configuration options the default (including the FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION of 2.0, but this can be overridden in the installer).No changes to the program or the source code at this time. Still collecting feedback and deciding how to proceed.Christian

Christian, it sounds like those of us not running 64-bit OS and who also are comfortable with how to change/uninstall TP won't need this then?Absolutely LOVE this concept and for future feedback, I'd say some kind of control panel which could include a Enable/Disable TP button would be great (like VOZ in a way). There are times one wants to revert temporarily to stock textures and settings for various reasons. I've worked that out on my own and can do so easily and quickly now, and it's very very handy.

The new installer will upgrade/change your TileProxy folder structure such that FSX starts faster.You don't necessarily need it, unless your FSX takes 10 minutes to launch up and you're royally fed up with how this takes so long. ;)PS: Some kind of control panel is envisioned, but GUI design is an awful lot of work. I am thinking whether a FSX panel or gauge could become Tileproxy's GUI. But it wouldn't show up during load.

Instead of waiting for the future-how about a "database" of the areas (tiles) of the world that are done well now vs. the areas that are not.The end user merely selects the area they want to fly-if a high res area is available via tile proxy it is loaded-if not the sim runs the defaults. As the user fly's to and from such areas it is transparently loaded if available, and isn't if it is not.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

Ahhh. Well it sounds like it's worth doing then just for the sake of keeping up and whatever load time improvement there is....my own system load times aren't terrible, but an improvement is an improvement.If I were better and more current in MFC and Visual C++ or C# I'd love to help, but unfortunately I'm an old UNIX/C hack dinosaur and Windows GUI stuff isn't my forte' at all, sorry to say, and I don't believe I have anythign to offer that would be equivalent with the quality of the project and skill set you have. Much thanks for how far you've taken this already!

One option that I'd like to see (and which I may have a go at myself if I can somehow find the time between work and family commitments) is an offline mode. Rather than wait for ages for scenery to load before I can start flying, and then have to either keep below 80kts or pause frequently, I'd like to create a flight plan before I go to work and leave TileProxy to download the scenery so that it's all there on the HD by the time I'm ready to fly.Christian, any ideas on how difficult it would be to do this?

The flight plan thing would require another thread pulling in tiles. Or in other words: I would have to make proxyUser and the entire tile API thread safe. That is an awful lot of work as I currently have no clue about the Win32 primitives for thread synchronization.Pulling in tiles based on a flight plan file and based on distance to the legs of the flight would be another week of work (at most).But I see some problems as now the simulator effectively becomes a "web spider" or "robot". And now you might want to study the terms of service of that Acme Globe Service again ;)

A user-editable database for specific services would be cool to correct for the "flaws" of the service.I am thinking about image enhancement like adjusting the brightness, contrast, gamme curve (R,G,:( such that the patchiness of various services can be reduced. Of course this is such a huge undertaking that it would require hundreds and thousands of users to submit their corrections. But it would require a GUI tool for editing the parameters for the image processing and to get a preview of the result. And again that is a lot of work to design.

Any uninstalling needed or just install over the existing?

Install-over is fine. I added a lovely upgrade path to the installer that keeps your exisiting caches and World folder and you don't even have to reconfigure the program.

>>Install-over is fine. I added a lovely upgrade path to the>installer that keeps your exisiting caches and World folder>and you don't even have to reconfigure the program.>That is very nice. Thanks so much for that.

Top man works great; faster sharper and no hasslewhat can I say your my hero lolRich