MSFS competition from Google?

[RobbieHe 0]

I saw this and thought it was interesting. http://marco-za.blogspot.com/2007/08/googl...-simulator.htmlIt might not be long. MSFS needs some competition to give our hobby a kick in the pants! What do you think?RH

[jrhoads 6]

Ahh yes... a little competiton is good for the soul. :-)

[Highmike 68]

They've got some catching up to do, but it just goes to show that streaming satelite imagery is definitely on the horizon.Mike.

[Guest Elthium]

I never could get Tile Proxy to work, so my first flight in this blew me away. Now if only the FSX devs could incorporate something like this into FSX itself in a future patch it would be truly amazing.The people that should be worried are the after market "photoreal" scenery providers. After seeing the graphic splendor that I did a few minutes ago it'll be hard to pay good money for payware stuff from now on.

[Mace 1,902]

I'm going to be Oscar the Grouch :)It won't impress me until they get the photo textures to blend for time-of-day and season.But I bet that day will come...RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

[JSkorna 137]

Hi All,How does this look when the snow falls? Oh, that's right, one season only.What happens in areas where the Google textures are black and white? Oh, that's right, just have to wait for Google.How is the night lighting? Oh, that's right, noon lighting only.Wonder how to get boat and carrier traffic in this.Sorry all, no competition here. Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/banners/hifi-community-sigbanner.jpghttp://www.hifisim.com/

[Orlaam 306]

Don't forget being bound to an Internet connection. I've had fast Cable for years, but I still hate relying on live downloads for large things.

[victorwest2 0]

>I saw this and thought it was interesting. >>http://marco-za.blogspot.com/2007/08/googl...-simulator.html>>It might not be long. MSFS needs some competition to give our>hobby a kick in the pants! What do you think?>>RH>Threads on this have already been done. :-) http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=413170&page=http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=32609&page=

[RobbieHe 0]

Not really, I asked a question. RH

[Geofa 108]

Seems like all those things and effects would be quite easy to overlay and add eventually, and applying coloring shading effects directly on the fly to the scenery. At some point the images will probably be from all four seasons, and the world will be complete. Building databases that represent real buildings placed in correct locations are already here. Night lighting and all the effects you mention can be added-but lost will be the overhead of loading thousands of textures, landclass databases etc. which load the computer down ,leads to poor performance, and just never quite matches reality. Kind of reminds me when the ibm pc had 8 colors and no sound-and some of my friend at the time put me down when I bought an amiga with 4000 colors and built in sound. Their argument at the time was that there wasn't any software for the amiga-therefore the ibm pc was superior. It was true, and amiga didn't make it-but it was the future as we now know. Same with vector database charts in airplanes vs. real charts like all the efb software has now. I think this is the future for flight simming-the older scenery technologies is just the way it has been done the last 20 years-and of course some will want to hold on to the old way-but imho this technology is outdated and endlessly limited as it still is (correct shorelines/lakes/roads/buildings/vegetation..)Even now with its today present limitations-as a pilot-I'd rather simulate over terrain that matches reality rather than artistic hand drawn tiles that try to represent reality following landclass databases which can't really match. That is of course my choice and opinion but I think there are a surprisingly lot that feel the same way.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Holger 0]

Hi there,"... but lost will be the overhead of loading thousands of textures, landclass databases etc. which load the computer down ,leads to poor performance, and just never quite matches reality."Hmmm. How does replacing one source of data with another lead to less "overhead"? In fact, using photoreal ground textures and custom buildings means you need to load *more* data than FS currently does because all those data are site specific. The whole point of using generic textures and objects is to save on HD space and computing requirements.There are obvious reasons for using photoreal textures (and lots for not using them; after all, it's a choice of one approximation of reality over another) but being easier on resource use is not one of those reasons.Cheers, Holger

[Geofa 108]

Well when I use photoreal scenery such as tileproxy or megascenery in fsx my performance goes way up. I would assume that consulting tables of landclass to determine what tile and autogen to call-vegetation and buildings-using that landclass to calculate which texture to load, road placements that are placed over the tiles, would be more processor intensive that simply calling a numbered tile that already contains the scenery, vegetation, roads within the tile e.g. creating all the reality piece by piece from a database vs. having it already included in a single source?Since these tiles are being streamed from Google there is no hard drive issue-only internet connection.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Guest Len]

Competition? Obviously not intended to be. But nice start and something to build on.

[Holger 0]

Hi there,I'd say your performance goes up primarily because you don't have millions of autogen objects to place. Megascenery autogen, where it exists, is very sparse compared to the generic autogen. TP doesn't place any autogen. In other words, a fair comparison would have to exclude or minimize generic FS autogen. You do have a point though about dense road and railroad data; those obviously wouldn't be required for photoreal textures unless you want to provide road traffic or vector flattening. Another factor involves blending of generic tiles and slope-dependent class switching, which is something else photoreal textures don't need. As for harddrive space: every single tile that GE or TP loads gets stored on your HD. You can clean it out after each flight but few people do so, I'd think. Even if there was an auto-clean there would be lots of HD activity involved and the accompanying fragmentation.Cheers, Holger

[Guest]

First thing I noticed were the blurries... :s :(