4 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

it's the state of Real weather clouds  in B14 as of today NOV26 1950z.

XP12 clouds do indeed need work, but as I posted above, there are situations where XP12 clouds are impressive - as there are plenty of impressive skies to be had in MSFS.

Edited November 26, 20223 yr by MrBitstFlyer

32 minutes ago, SAS443 said:

you still have to download terrabytes of data for adequate ground coverage

I download it once at a higher quality than MSFS, but you download the same data many times.  

24 TB's...wow!  That's going to be a lot more than most people will ever run.

I think we can agree it's the only option if your internet connection is poor.  The convenience of streaming is something I can't turn away from (because my internet connection is reasonable (300 Mbps).  

So to reiterate, MSFS using offline mode looks awful but so does xp12 without Ortho.  Additionally to generate the Ortho takes quite some time even if a person were to do their home country.  Clouds can go either way for me.  Sometimes in msfs it's very realistic sometimes in xp12 I've found it to be better.

We're just back at the start hehe....choose a sim that works best for your needs!  Great discussion though - no one has gotten too nasty yet haha!

2 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

24 TB's...wow!  That's going to be a lot more than most people will ever run.

I think we can agree it's the only option if your internet connection is poor.  The convenience of streaming is something I can't turn away from (because my internet connection is reasonable (300 Mbps).  

So to reiterate, MSFS using offline mode looks awful but so does xp12 without Ortho.  Additionally to generate the Ortho takes quite some time even if a person were to do their home country.  Clouds can go either way for me.  Sometimes in msfs it's very realistic sometimes in xp12 I've found it to be better.

We're just back at the start hehe....choose a sim that works best for your needs!  Great discussion though - no one has gotten too nasty yet haha!

Actually, it's not that hard to setup using external drives. This 5TB WD model is on $100 on Amazon. And they also have this impressive sounding unit for only $109 with supposedly 16TB of SSD (though there are no reviews, so I question it, and it's also much slower transfer speed). $500 for 25 terabytes doesn't really sound too bad to me, honestly.

1 hour ago, kananesgi said:

Actually, it's not that hard to setup using external drives. This 5TB WD model is on $100 on Amazon. And they also have this impressive sounding unit for only $109 with supposedly 16TB of SSD (though there are no reviews, so I question it, and it's also much slower transfer speed). $500 for 25 terabytes doesn't really sound too bad to me, honestly.

Oh I mean to get the Ortho all setup.  Maybe it's changed but I recall having to download the tiles. Then convert them to something.  Then if there were a lot of water there was a mask or something I had to do.  I only did about 8 tiles or so total.  

But again if it's your only option you'll find it easier because you have to do it hehe.

4 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

Oh I mean to get the Ortho all setup.  Maybe it's changed but I recall having to download the tiles. Then convert them to something.  Then if there were a lot of water there was a mask or something I had to do.  I only did about 8 tiles or so total.  

But again if it's your only option you'll find it easier because you have to do it hehe.

This is my first experience with Ortho4XP, but it's all automated to some extent. It is a somewhat tedious process to select the image and map out where you want higher ZLs, and then you have to wait for it all to download. Downloading is the longest part for me, but not too bad. I just downloaded a full tile at ZL16 and it took just less than two hours. Of course, ZL16 is pretty low quality and is the bare minimum, but better than default in XP11. 

All of the conversion and masking, etc, is done automatically by Ortho4XP though. I'm not completely happy with some of the masks, a few lakes are strange looking, but I'm going to play around with it a little more. Maybe need to do some higher ZL spots around some lakes here and there.

4 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

24 TB's...wow!  That's going to be a lot more than most people will ever run.

I think we can agree it's the only option if your internet connection is poor.  The convenience of streaming is something I can't turn away from (because my internet connection is reasonable (300 Mbps).  

So to reiterate, MSFS using offline mode looks awful but so does xp12 without Ortho.  Additionally to generate the Ortho takes quite some time even if a person were to do their home country.  Clouds can go either way for me.  Sometimes in msfs it's very realistic sometimes in xp12 I've found it to be better.

We're just back at the start hehe....choose a sim that works best for your needs!  Great discussion though - no one has gotten too nasty yet haha!

Just to be clear, 24TB's is not just ortho it is everything I have on my system - X-Plane 11/12, MSFS, Microsoft Office, loads of Steam games etc 😁

You are so right - choose a sim that best fits your needs or run both!

2 hours ago, kananesgi said:

This is my first experience with Ortho4XP, but it's all automated to some extent. It is a somewhat tedious process to select the image and map out where you want higher ZLs, and then you have to wait for it all to download. Downloading is the longest part for me, but not too bad. I just downloaded a full tile at ZL16 and it took just less than two hours. Of course, ZL16 is pretty low quality and is the bare minimum, but better than default in XP11. 

All of the conversion and masking, etc, is done automatically by Ortho4XP though. I'm not completely happy with some of the masks, a few lakes are strange looking, but I'm going to play around with it a little more. Maybe need to do some higher ZL spots around some lakes here and there.

ZL16 was the same for me - OK at altitude but too soft for GA flying.  I use ZL17 as a base then use higher ZL18 around airports for extra detail on departure / arrival.  Use the 'ICAO' option, so ZL18 is not downloaded for every small farm strip!

I rarely go into each tile and manually select areas at different ZL's, as you say very tedious. I have only done that either for very special areas like ones home town, or to choose areas from a different map provider for those areas discoloured.

I found the default 'masks_width' of 100 to be too wide for inland water, so I changed that to 50.

Edited November 27, 20223 yr by MrBitstFlyer

11 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

ZL16 was the same for me - OK at altitude but too soft for GA flying.  I use ZL17 as a base then use higher ZL18 around airports for extra detail on departure / arrival.  Use the 'ICAO' option, so ZL18 is not downloaded for every small farm strip!

I rarely go into each tile and manually select areas at different ZL's, as you say very tedious. I have only done that either for very special areas like ones home town, or to choose areas from a different map provider for those areas discoloured.

I found the default 'masks_width' of 100 to be too wide for inland water, so I changed that to 50.

Ah, cool. I didn't know about the high_zl option there. I'll look into that. I think I've already got the mask width set to 50, but it might have reverted on my. A number of settings did when I ran it the second time, even though I had saved the previous config. It's a learning process.

10 hours ago, ryanbatc said:

Oh I mean to get the Ortho all setup.  Maybe it's changed but I recall having to download the tiles. Then convert them to something.  Then if there were a lot of water there was a mask or something I had to do.  I only did about 8 tiles or so total.  

But again if it's your only option you'll find it easier because you have to do it hehe.

Maybe you wasn't using the latest version as it sounds more automated than you describe?  

I make the mask width smaller than the default width of 100, so inland water masks are more realistic. I select use-masks-for-inland to true

I set a higher zoom level of 18 around ICAO airports so the terrain remains sharp at lower levels during take-off and landing.

i shift-click the tiles to be downloaded - the solid yellow are downloaded tiles. The hatched tiles are those selected for download.

All that's left to do is select what to process - I don't need to extract overlays because they are included with SimHeaven and Global Forests.

The tiles are now ready to use.  Order of the tiles in scenerypacks.ini is automatically sorted out by xOrganizer

Whole continents and in ZL17 are easily in the Terabytes.

In ZL17, each tile is around 10 GB. Tiles can be seen in the screenshot in the comment above.

On 11/27/2022 at 4:35 AM, rka said:

Whole continents and in ZL17 are easily in the Terabytes.

In ZL17, each tile is around 10 GB. Tiles can be seen in the screenshot in the comment above.

Perhaps a little smaller, but it probably depends on the area being mapped. So far on mine (XP11, mind you) each tile at ZL17 is around 7GB, though one is only 4.5 for some reason and one that is just over 5G, and I don't know why. These are all flatland Midwest farm country, so more heavily urban or mountainous areas might get bigger and ultimately average out to that 10GB.

I know I'll have to remake these when I get XP12 later, but at least I won't have to download all the orthophotos again, and that's what takes so long for me. Each tile at ZL17/18 takes around 8.5 hours to download, but I think it's definitely worth the extra time over the ZL16 stuff. I don't know why it's taken me this long to upgrade XP's visuals. It's like a whole new sim! Can't wait until I can financially justify upgrading to 12. Maybe in a couple of weeks.

I'm curious, are trees counted in the overlays? The only real complaint I have so far with my results using @MrBitstFlyer's suggestions is there aren't enough trees being drawn. It may well just be a nod to better performance (obviously rendering all those trees isn't free of course), but I'm seeing vast swaths of terrain in the ortho that are obviously forested but no trees are being rendered in those areas. Some urban areas look better, but again, there are large areas like parks that have quite a few trees but none are being rendered. I'm wondering if I were to extract the overlays using Ortho4XP if it might remedy this. Curious if O4XP can interpret what a forested area looks like and basically "draw" a polygon in that area for trees to be rendered, or maybe that's not how any of this works. I'm pretty happy with the results, but it would be nice to see more trees. Would it be possible to run both SimHeaven and O4XP generated overlays at the same time (I'm betting not)?