56 minutes ago, Daube said:

However, it might be doing so only at short distances or low altitude ?

Streaming thing imho, it has to download them, 17/18 is simply huge file sizes, but 16 is fairly manageable. I kinda knew this, that is why I was never that excited for streaming, but I wouldn't have expected them to go less than 16.

53 minutes ago, Daube said:

This is nice.

wed and its xp library are nice, just find, drag and job what you want, on a scale of 1 to 10 my art ability is on a negative scale.

Just started flight testing the 744, this is what it looks like from a bit of distance (the fun VFR game, that always reminds me of "where's wally", find it 🤣)

Edited October 15, 20223 yr by mSparks

7 hours ago, Murmur said:

I think MSFS uses some technique to increase the apparent detail of the ground at low altitude (e.g. to "create" grass and hay, in your screenshot above)

It turned a lake overgrown with reeds into a very green field. Looks to me like they are "baking" 2D autogen into the orthophoto.

Deleted.  Let people spread whatever information they like... 

Edited October 15, 20223 yr by psolk
Not worth arguing

4 hours ago, mSparks said:

Streaming thing imho, it has to download them, 17/18 is simply huge file sizes, but 16 is fairly manageable. I kinda knew this, that is why I was never that excited for streaming, but I wouldn't have expected them to go less than 16.

Well, it makes sense: they stream any resolution from zoom 16 or less, to zoom 17-18 and maybe more, depending on how far you are. It would be problematic if it could only stream at zoom 16, but clearly this is not the case. 

My screenshot is showing a texture resolution that is probably zoom 17 or zoom 18, but the same area would have been streamed at zoom 16 or less if I were flying at 35.000 feet above. 

 

Edited October 15, 20223 yr by Daube

37 minutes ago, psolk said:

It does also support 1M/pixel but delivering that globally would require a quantum computer LOL.

well according to

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Zoom_levels

level 16 is 2.3 meters per pixel

level 18 is 60cm per pixel.

Which I think means "can see features bigger than". - This is also why I prefer level 16 for the underlying texture - features smaller than 2.3 meters radius should be fully 3D to work well imho...

37 minutes ago, psolk said:

PG

Photogrammetry looks good (often amazing) from the distance it was taken from afaict, but even then - something like google street view isn't exactly phenomenal... we (couple of ppl on the 744 discord) actually brought in some PG into XP11 when it was first being talked about (exported as a 3D XP object) - some Greek ruin

I'd say its probably the future, especially when you see things like

But also, it was obvious from that exercise, - a pretty distant future for large scale with any kind of consistent decent quality.

 

37 minutes ago, psolk said:

Hence why I think we should focus on XP12's strengths.

People get touchy over MSFS, but its only one of many rendering engines we can look to. It's mildly amusing, because by far the best I have seen, by a long stretch is still unigine:

Back in February 2020 I had

running on my (linux!) machine, Its VR is still the best visuals I have seen to date.

XPs strength is not just how good it is now, its also how good its going to be after another 10 years of development....

Edited October 15, 20223 yr by mSparks

19 minutes ago, mSparks said:

well according to

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Zoom_levels

level 16 is 2.3 meters per pixel

level 18 is 60cm per pixel.

I did the whole of Europe and NE USA at ZL17 with 'high_zl_airports' set to true, 'cover_extent' 2.5 & 'cover_zl' 18.  Everything looks great of course, but FPS can drop to the mid 20's at times. 

I have read this thread with interest, so decided to do 10 tiles in the USA at ZL16 everywhere.  I was very surprised to see 50fps maintained in most areas.  Of course the extra smoothness in the aircrafts response was great.  The ground sharpness seems ok above 3-4,000ft which is most of the time in cruise anyway.

12 hours ago, Murmur said:

That's another thing that would be nice to have in XP.

EDIT: Here's how it looks in FlightGear (additional ground detail enabled on the right half).

AFAIK, Flightgear's procedural grass also reacts to rotor downwash.

3 hours ago, mSparks said:

XPs strength is not just how good it is now, its also how good its going to be after another 10 years of development....

This is indeed the most interesting part. Especially now that XP finally received some nicer lighting and clouds that meet my VR requirements (contrary to XPlane11). The clouds are probably the most interesting area for me.

I'm also thinking the devs (or 3rd parties, who knows?) would pretty soon get able to add some "small things that change a lot of the experience", I think the example of the autogen trees color changing based on the underlying ground texture is a good one, I would really like to see that in XP12, especially now that we got some nice 3D trees everywhere.

2 hours ago, Daube said:

I'm also thinking the devs (or 3rd parties, who knows?) would pretty soon get able to add some "small things that change a lot of the experience", I think the example of the autogen trees color changing based on the underlying ground texture is a good one, I would really like to see that in XP12, especially now that we got some nice 3D trees everywhere.

Yes, please get started on that 😁

https://github.com/X-Plane/XPlaneForExporter

I really need some farmland "forest" so I can do a better job of the field in

half hearted jokes aside, if you haven't used WED

https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/

I highly recommend it if you ever fancied making a train set, its like a train set making simulator on steroids (that you can then fly around in XP)

On 10/15/2022 at 2:53 PM, MrBitstFlyer said:

so decided to do 10 tiles in the USA at ZL16 everywhere. 

I decided on lvl16 like 2 or 3 years ago. I just decided to give 17 a chance again. Think I'm gonna move up, maybe buy a bigger disk so I can have more of this:

Edited October 19, 20223 yr by mSparks

Looks great mSparks !

Have to give it a try for LPMN, my home base 🙂

Amendoeira - LPMN - CAVOK.pt

 

I did yet another thing!

Downloaded two ww2 warbirds from the .Org, both very good quality, and specially the Hurricanes ( Mark I and II ) so well designed in terms of flight characteristics that I can only compare it to IL-2 Hurricanes !

Supermarine Spitfire Mk1 - Military Aircraft XP12 - X-Plane.Org Forum

Hawker Hurricane Mk.I Mk.II V12 Update - Military Aircraft XP12 - X-Plane.Org Forum

Just noticed a New one:

"Chance Vought" Red Tag F4U-1 Corsair - Military Aircraft XP12 - X-Plane.Org Forum

There are a few more at that .Org downloads section. Give them a try !

There's simply no way to find such reproductions of the flight / performance for such aircraft in that other sim ( yet... maybe in the future, but surely no yet ...)

I made a mistake - I fly GA most of the time so I tried level 18 everywhere on a couple of tiles.  I just ordered a 24TB drive it looked so good!

I did a different thing

 

Add a bit of voice acting and a wide variety of soviet bloc hardware for the front end of the Tomcat and you can basically have a modern iterarion of this: