MSFS competition from Google?

[Geofa 108]

I thought Sedona was a disaster, Lake Almanor looked good as a generic but didn't match reality, and Mt. Shasta was off since you asked.I've got 6500 more nm. to go-and I think it will be much the same.I used fsx to practice for this trip-and I have to say Sedona took me by surprise. Looking at the Google rendition which is way more accurate it is easy to see why compared to the fsx version!http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Guest wyoming]

Microsoft marketing strategy of making flight simulation a game and a few people here and there who are not satisfied with this and strive for newer and better ways of reproducing the reality of flight. That is not yet a market competition. But it's a philosophical competition. This is entropy at work.Now, market forces probably play into it, because the computing industry seems more sensitive than others to chaotic effects (i.e. small changes in initial conditions causing drastic changes in outcomes), which the big players know full well. This is probably no coincidence that Google hints that way a few months after millions of calls initiated by TileProxy users started to query their servers.So, yes, this is competition. In the making.

[bkeske 0]

>I thought Sedona was a disaster,I'll give you that. But, what is the point comparing the two?The masses using MSFS are not using it for practice for real world flying. But...with good third party folks, some of these get addressed over time, and are pretty darn accurate. I mean, how many airports are there in the world? I don't think the FS platform is too bad all things considered.I bet you can find some pretty butchered/worthless examples from Google's data as well.I guess I'm missing the point here.I believe this could be an asset some day way way in the future, but again, many of the third part guys, and Aces themselves, are using some of this exact data to try and create and improve upon a $50 software package.

[Geofa 108]

The point of comparing the two is one technology is clearly superior to reality and the future to reproducing the real world experience which is what a flight sim is and should be.You are right-I am not concerned with the masses-I just want greater reality in flight simming and have since I started in 1981-and it is by pushing the latest technolgies that we have what we have now. I am not a moderator of this forum because I am anti fs/fsx-but I think it is clear that it is time to move to newer technologies-to sit and stagnate with older technologies is the kiss of death. The masses will embrace anything which adds to their reality too-flying over one's house is usually tops there.The technology is here now and tantalizingly close-not perfect yet-but perhaps more perfect place by place when considering the whole world.If it wasn't for pushing the envelope fs'ers would still be flying 2d terrain, no atc, and 1 generic cockpit...(Pro pilot gave the push for all those things even though at the time it was imperfect)-sadly that type of competition no longer exists. Things simmers take for granted now are based from there-now imho it is Google earth and Tileproxy that is giving the push/competition-along with users-time to get going!.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[bkeske 0]

>The technology is here now and tantalizingly close-not perfect>yet-but perhaps more perfect place by place when considering>the whole world.Well, until we get real weather generation, aircraft the likes of my Eaglesoft/ReaAir/Carenado/MAAM/Digital Aviation Dornier DO, etc collection, virtual cockpits, my ES Avidyne panels, RXP gauges, the use of TrackIR, AI, ATC programs like VOXATC, and 'the rest'.....I'll sit back and wait for someone to put such a package together. I think something like this has a long way to go to implement those things I mentioned above. And if they were able to today, we would probably be screaming how the frame rates dropped severely ;)In the mean time, I'll enjoy what I have, and enjoy it. Warts and all.

[Holger 0]

Hi there,"The point of comparing the two is one technology is clearly superior to reality and the future to reproducing the real world experience which is what a flight sim is and should be."And it's the first part of that sentence where you lose me because your definition of "reality" is too narrow. A realistic representation of a landscape is not possible with just a photograph stretched over a terrain mesh. Landscapes are living, breathing things in four dimensions (i.e., including time). If a photo tile server is more realistic in one aspect - spatial location of landscape elements - it pretty much prohibits realism in most other aspects: seasonality, 3D structures (aside from relatively few landmarks), dynamic shading, water surfaces, etc. Some of these aspects can be added in but usually by "fudging" (e.g., hue adjustments to represent seasons). I'm not saying that FS is superior but it has a lot of untapped potential.FS offers the ability to use either generic tiles or photoreal textures, or a combination of both. Moving to a platform that uses photographs only to me would be a big step back. That's why I hope that at least one company will continue developing flight simulators with an approach similar to ACES.Cheers, HolgerP.S.: aside from all this: Do you guys get blurries-free flight with the GE "flight simulator"? Maybe it's my aging machine but I can't keep the tiles sharp. In "normal" mode they load fine and stay sharp so it's not my cable connection.

[boshar 6]

You are only thinking about competition with our limited usergroup in mind.One of the many things I use FS for is flying above photo sceneries and just enjoying the view. In FS I need to buy FS, buy a scenery add-on or I need to install tile proxy (I can handle that but its not an easy task for a casual user).On the other hand I can install Google Earth. Look up the area I'm intrested in. Press they key combo and I'm flying in a specific area with full photoscenery. This second method doesn't cost me a thing. It's easy to do and its a lot faster than using tileproxy. Over the last days I used google earth to relive my vacantion so I flew over EHTX and toured around Vianden, Luxemburg. This simple photo scenery gives a more realistic view then plain vanilla FS-X and it moves at an unbelievable fast FPS (yes there are blurries but the sense of speed you get with this is impressive).Google Earth is competition for the casual sightseeing 'fly lite' public. The program is free and the service that provides the scenery is improving every day. If they add more fly features to this program they are going to compete with MSFS.MSFS is a large jack of all trades. Programs that concentrate on a small set of key features can compete with it in a specific use or nice. They can concentrate on those few features and make them perfect. Its 'easy' for them they don't need processor cycles for the other things FS does.

[boshar 6]

>P.S.: aside from all this: Do you guys get blurries-free>flight with the GE "flight simulator"? Maybe it's my aging>machine but I can't keep the tiles sharp. In "normal" mode>they load fine and stay sharp so it's not my cable>connection.Its worst then I thought. GE already added the blurries we are used to see. They are after MSFS's market ;-)Some blurries in flightmode here. I think it is buffering more in the general flightpath. It can use some improvement but not bad for a freebee. I heve been using it on my Linux parttition so thgere might be some differences compared to the windows version.

[Guest tmilton]

Is this Google Earth flight sim a serious competitor to MSFS? In my opinion, no, not at this time.While the new Google Earth sim is certainly an impressive development, MSFS has too many useful and essential features that are critically lacking in Google. Seasonal and day/night ground textures, visible aircraft bodies, interior cockpit and panels, variable camera angles, quality 3D modeling (of cities and other structural landmarks) are just a few components lacking in the Google sim.I seriously doubt that Google will present any substantial competition to ACES at this point in time. That being said, this may change in the future. We all know Google is compiling a vast and ever improving database of photorealistic ground images. We know that they have winter images and summer images, their collection is just not complete yet. It's only a matter of time when Google offers you the option of viewing Google Earth images taken in the summer or in the winter. Eventually this will expand to the four seasons.For example in the future, before you spin the Google Earth globe, click on the season you want, and see how Anchorage, Alaska looks in the winter and then switch the season and compare how it looks in the summer. This is a desirable feature, and Google knows this, this will be coming up in the future.As for the other features, 3D modeling of city buildings and other structures is already going on in Google Earth, and this will only improve as time goes on. However, if Google wants to be a serious contender in the flight sim category, they will have to implement visible aircraft models, and the other important features as well. This all depends on how serious they are about this. It's all up to them.I believe this will be good for all flight sim community overall, and even for ACES. Increased publicity and awareness of flight sims is surely to happen, and those current non-sim users wowed by Google's fledging new flight sim might even be enthused enough to pick up a dedicated flight sim which is full of features- MSFS. Ultimately, a little competition will press all contenders to improve their product and the flight sim enthusiast will certainly benefit from this ;-)

[RobbieHe 0]

Maybe Xplane and Google should team up!RH

[Geofa 108]

If I lost you I guess you did not look at my real shot compares then...and I'll be doing more. Look at that shot of Sedona which is the most striking contrast-and then look at the others where perhaps the difference is not so great-but still-there is a difference and a superior one.You speak of "3D structures (aside from relatively few landmarks), dynamic shading, water surfaces".Compare the fs to the google shots-the google has all of those and more. True it doesn't have seasons-yet.The lake almanor shot has tennis courts where they belong,boat docks, sandy beach shores, roads that look like roads, exactly correct houses and locations, perfect shorelines etc. Water for the most part has the subtle shading one sees from the air-not the cartoony look of fs now.Runways look more real (they don't stick out like neon in real life) and they actually can slope. The Mt. Shasta shot shows the subtlies of erosion, and the volcanic terrain-the fs shot does not. The Sedona compare shows fs at its' worst-no need to analyze that one. I have 6500 nm. of countless shots of every imaginable terrain over the United States-I'll be doing more-and true I will probably find a very few where fsx shines more-but I don't expect many.My definition of reality is pretty simple-I go flying for real-come home and see if I get any of that sense doing the same on my home computer.Tileproxy/google have increased that sense 10 fold.I remember when pro pilot first came out with terrain based mesh many of the fs crowd stated they really didn't need that and at that point I ran for Pro Pilot as my sim(scenery for fs was 2d polygon technology at that time). I even did compares as I just did showing the two sims and real shots-with Pro Pilot always coming out superior-I like to think that was helpful in a small way in fs converting eventually as the very next version used this new technology (along with real weather downloads that I also constantly wished for) despite the majority of its users making fun of the Pro Pilot users at the time.Seems kinda ironic that now that type of scenery, along with the other built in features it had (atc, complex aircraft) are now taken for granted in fs. In the same way-this streamed real world scenery will be taken for granted-soon...As for blurries-I get them for a second or two while the data initially streams-then they are gone-vs. the permanent blurries of another product we know.The Microsoft team has always listened to its users (despite what many think). I'll continue to harp and post compare pictures.. :-)http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[acmem 0]

I think in the near future it will be very simple to implement what people want out of their FS. You can practically do that now. In FS you can switch off auto gen and buildings and have a flat none 3D environment minus the mountains and add real satellite photography and Bingo you have the best of both worlds, close to real avionics, panels and the works. I do not think MSFS needs to partner with Google to get that, remember MS has their own version of satellite mapping. I few years ago I was invited to sit in and experience a real flight simulator 737. In my opinion if you were to take away the real cockpit and hydraulics, and just look at the computer generated rendition of the outside world I believe we FS

[Geofa 108]

Exactly! Just as the efb's (electronic flight bags) allow a switch from a vector chart to a live chart at a switch of a button-it should be possible to switch from database based scenery to live scenery via a switch/menu option-maybe even right now!http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgForum Moderatorhttp://geofageofa.spaces.live.com/

[Cruachan 705]

Hi all,This is all very interesting, but currently I'm frustrated by the fact that CTRL+ALT+A doesn't seem to be working. As the instructions tell me, I click on the globe and then press the key combo, but nothing happens :( I have tried running GE under DirectX and OpenGL but makes no difference. What am I missing?GE version: 4.2.0181.2634 (beta)Cheers!MikeBTW, are you all aware of Google Sky? Click the globe icon on the far right of the toolbar. Also pretty impressive stuff.

[bkeske 0]

Agreed, very good post.