Hello folks,I'm trully amazed by the potential of this technology/idea. I've been virtually flying since 91. Since that time, I've never even dreamed of flying over... my house!This brings me even closer to a lifetime dream of actually flying a real airplane, which will come true some years from now, once I'll manage to save enough money to plunge (or takeoff). In the meantime, with the contribution of the ACES team which has put together a true solid Flight Simulator (thanks guys) and of Christian, it'll be less difficult for me to wait for that day to come.So I'd like to officialy thanks Christian for putting together TileProxy, on his time, for free, for the benefit of all of us. In the history of Flight Simulator, there will be a "before TileProxy", and an "after TileProxy". (Yeah, I know it looks that I'm flawning on sb, but I'm really amazed by this stuff.)Happy flyin' everyone.Louie.

YeppersAnd if MS could buy a license on a "full" set of detailed tiles (less those truly sentitive areas like AVSIM headquarters, etc...) and make it available by url for an annual fee or somethhing like that...an make a new FS11 engine to get it incorporated without a stitch in time...Then I would refer Christian to the the Christian Pope for cannonisation (spelling?) :-bigangelal

The real "thank you" should go to Google for being the first to make available global satellite images to anyone over the Internet. And then of course to MSN for following suit ;)I think my project has only just begun to pick up some steam. There is a lot more potential behind the idea - and behind its implementation. Think of online sharing of addon scenery (manually placed autogen, 3D buildings and objects) and sharing of scenic flying locations as part of the program's User Interface. Some community website could be displayed in the kneeboard panel and an additional panel or gauge in the cockpit could show a moving map, including the terrain loading status of TileProxy. Online Flight plan sharing would allow anyone to publish flight plans for scenic areas. Or how about a "where's everyone flying" server where the positions of thousands of virtual aircraft world wide are shown on the globe? (participation is of course voluntary, as it's a bit of a privacy issue to send data to a central server).Just a few ideas I had in the last few days. But every single one of these is probably more difficult to implement than the tileproxy itself.I just hope ACES won't drop the feature for the FS2002/2004 phototerrain tile loader that I am making use of. It would be a pity if FS11 switched to the new BGL format for texture exclusively.

Christian,You deserve a medal for this one. Absolutely incredible, I

I am not just the author of this hack, but also a user. I sometimes spend more time flying than developing. So I have to thank myself for this lovely experience. Only real flying can beat this. Som side by side comparisons in the screenshots forum do show that TileProxy is still a far cry from the real thing. But then there's occasional screen shots that would make a wonderful post card and it's hard to tell at first sight if this is real or CG.

"But then there's occasional screen shots that would make a wonderful post card and it's hard to tell at first sight if this is real or CG."You are right about it being hard to tell if it

>Som side by side comparisons in the screenshots forum do show that >TileProxy is still a far cry from the real thingTrue. But, yesterday, after I finally got TileProxy to work properly (not that difficult after all), I was able to fly in the area where I live, and pinpoint everything I saw : "there is this small restaurant by the road where they make good hamburgers, oh, and that's the daycare center where my children go". This is exactly what I would do once airborn in a real airplane : look around, enjoy the view, make a couple of passes over my house, etc. We're getting closer, and closer. Oh, and I agree with you: TileProxy first needed 1)Flight Simulator and 2) Google. My considerations also go to these folks. One of the greatest thing about this, is its potential : we are only at the beginning and the results are astonishing. BTW, I was wondering if Google, beeing informed about this, would somehow pull the plug. Hope not though. Any idea?Louie.

>BTW, I was wondering if Google, beeing informed about this,>would somehow pull the plug. Hope not though. Any idea?Would make great PR eh?What they might do is increase the coverage area of highly-detailed areas for an extra premium subscription while leaving the present tile set as free as is; being they are in it for the buck but dont want to make bad PR.al

I find in most cases is it very close to the real thing. Certainly light years above anything else that has been done.Thanks from me also-I was already getting bored a little with fsx-now I can see I will be interested for quite a while.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

> BTW, I was wondering if Google, beeing informed about this, would >somehow pull the plug. Hope not though. Any idea?That's why I would like to see this project NOT appearing in any news bullettins and newstickers like the open sourced Gaia project did. A week later it was gone.So keep it under the radar please. First rule of Flight Club: Don't talk about Google.

>First rule of Flight Club: Don't talk about Google.About who ? ;)

Is there anyway to have best of both worlds? As a low and slow flyer, lack of autogen kills it for me. As I posted this link in the screen shot forum, I will post it here also. Can you imagin these beautiful shots and scenes without autogen?http://forums.flightsim.com/dc/dcboard.php...d=470500&page=6

Please add me to the heap thanking Mr. Buchner as well as the ummm.....sources......You know, if you think about all the rooftops you see out the window of an aircraft when landing at any major airport, and the possible advertising space and revenue available on those rooftops, that might be at least some small way for the image providers to squeeze their name into the scenery. All they'd have to do is a bit of image recognition to identify some large buildings (big white space) and slap their names or logos on the rooftops. Kinda like the old days when tobacco and soft-drink companies painted their logos on the side of roadside barns prior to billboards.As long as it doesn't happen to countryside and mountaintops.....would be a total bummer to see "Brought to you by GE and Pepsi" painted on the side of Mt. Everest.....

My machine would totally bog down with autogen enabled. The AGP 4x bus didn't cut it.I agree these shots are marvellous and Autogen adds a great deal of flair to the pictures.The only solution I see to the lack of autogen on satellite scenery is to either add it manually (by annotating the ground tiles using some tool or editor) or to add it based on a shape recognition algorithm that factors in vegetation zone, altitude, population density etc... I could see myself working on this, after the more pressing issues (lack of a GUI, loading performance) are addressed.That recognition algorithm could try to match the rectangular shapes of houses for example, adding an AutoGen house wherever it found a house on the ground tile. But it probably couldn't run in realtime - this would be an offline solution to be run on your downloaded tiles after the fact. A day later you would then enjoy AutoGen on photoreal scenery.The autogen annotations could be shared, just like how Seti@home distributed workload across many PCs and sent results back to a central server where they were later made public.

take off on the Northeastern airport of Oahu, Hawaii (Dillingham Airport) and have a close look into the water. You'll find imprints with the name Google all over it ( so called watermarks ). They are probably also on land areas - but harder to spot. ;)