New Map Enhancement tool

[Alec 370]

High resolution seems to be locked for PRO license only $.

I tried the free version which allows up to medium res, and the textures looked very blurry for flights below cruise. Its a pass for me, something feels off about this whole addon.

[Aglos77 170]

2 hours ago, fluffyflops said:

I also have it in ms2020 , it's quite good with the hybrid version of various maps.

For my use with x-plane it is giving me better results than auto ortho at the moment so I have even paid for the pro.

[Mike_CFII_MEL 789]

5 hours ago, Alec said:

High resolution seems to be locked for PRO license only $.

I tried the free version which allows up to medium res, and the textures looked very blurry for flights below cruise. Its a pass for me, something feels off about this whole addon.

Yeah, I was finally able to get all three computers running with the map tool, but nothing but blurry tiles. My internet speed and ping are excellent. 

[MrBitstFlyer 3,880]

9 hours ago, Alec said:

High resolution seems to be locked for PRO license only $.

I tried the free version which allows up to medium res, and the textures looked very blurry for flights below cruise. Its a pass for me, something feels off about this whole addon.

I have been using it MSFS successfully since its release in that sim.  You can purchase the pro version for just $5 for a months licence to see if you like it.  If you do, it is just $30 for the whole year which is great value.

[brinx 276]

2 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

it is just $30 for the whole year

The fact that they are charging for this and that users are willing to pay for it leaves me stunned. $30/year to violate the Terms of Service, plus there are free alternatives. Get 2k-3k people to sign up and that is a nice recurring amount of $60-90k each year, with virtually 0 overhead for them because the data is not coming from their server.  

Why wouldn't other developers adopt this subscription model for their utilities such as those for weather, camera etc? Everyone should just charge a recurring fee because it is a great value.

Edited April 9 by brinx

[MrBitstFlyer 3,880]

1 hour ago, brinx said:

The fact that they are charging for this and that users are willing to pay for it leaves me stunned.

About as stunned as I am with the improved ground textures.

[fluffyflops 1,858]

On 4/9/2024 at 10:22 PM, brinx said:

The fact that they are charging for this and that users are willing to pay for it leaves me stunned. $30/year to violate the Terms of Service, plus there are free alternatives. Get 2k-3k people to sign up and that is a nice recurring amount of $60-90k each year, with virtually 0 overhead for them because the data is not coming from their server.  

Why wouldn't other developers adopt this subscription model for their utilities such as those for weather, camera etc? Everyone should just charge a recurring fee because it is a great value.

he does up date the app quite often mind you.  No developers are angels.  Theres people on over on the ms2020 forums  supporting asobo, and wt for a 787 with a backwards rear door,  some 4 years down the line , which would take less than a day to fix.

theres people on here that support flight factor when they abandoned the a320 and a350 and left both a pile of junk,

theres 2 people on here that will defend LR to the hilt  for not fixing the night light issue, the shimmering, an leaving us an unfinished 330,  and a fullscreen issue, but will spend all day making topics called "could xp12 get any better" 

again there is no great developer on any of the platforms, they are all sub standard in my opinion

Edited April 11 by fluffyflops

[tonywob 4,770]

Developers pretty much have the freedom to do what they like and set their prices as they see fit. If people keep buying their stuff and subscribing to it, they'll keep doing what they're doing. It seems most people don't mind this and will pay it.

Getting your hands on aerial imagery legally in many countries is incredibly expensive and difficult. I remember shelling out thousands just to cover small areas around airports. In places like the UK and Norway, some providers wouldn't even sell it to you without taking a large cut out of every sale. Some other developers at the time took the easy way out and just stole the imagery from Google (some even left the watermarks on!).

Maybe this developer found some legal loophole or is just hoping that Google, Apple, and Microsoft won't care. But I'd have a hard time sleeping at night, thinking I might wake up to a lawsuit. Messing with their imagery, tweaking it in any way (like changing colours or contrast), and charging for it, that's asking for trouble. Good luck to him though. 

[Sethos 4,364]

3 hours ago, tonywob said:

Maybe this developer found some legal loophole or is just hoping that Google, Apple, and Microsoft won't care. But I'd have a hard time sleeping at night, thinking I might wake up to a lawsuit. Messing with their imagery, tweaking it in any way (like changing colours or contrast), and charging for it, that's asking for trouble. Good luck to him though. 

He's Chinese, so they pretty much can't touch him, as that is a legal world of its own. That's his 'loophole'. What I do question is, especially on Avsim where you can barely discuss the license details of your P3D version without getting a thread shut down and any sort of piracy or stolen asset talk is cracked down upon immediately; why is he getting a free pass on doing some extremely questionable and also making money off of it? Seems like he's getting a very generous free pass for some very shady business.

[tonywob 4,770]

On 4/9/2024 at 11:24 AM, Alec said:

I tried the free version which allows up to medium res, and the textures looked very blurry for flights below cruise. Its a pass for me, something feels off about this whole addon.

What's interesting is that anyone with some coding experience could probably put together a small python script that picks up the requests it sends and redirects the requests to somewhere else, e.g. legal imagery sources such as NAIP WMS for the USA or remap the Bing tile requests to Google or Apple and even recolour/touches up the images in the process. This is exactly what the original tool did for MFS.

Even better, just use autoortho which can be pointed to sources users are allowed to actually use and is open-sourced.

27 minutes ago, Sethos said:

why is he getting a free pass on doing some extremely questionable and also making money off of it? Seems like he's getting a very generous free pass for some very shady business.

He's not the one advertising it here. Initially it was free (hence this post) and users are free to make up their own minds on whether they want to support this product or not.

[Sethos 4,364]

2 minutes ago, tonywob said:

What's interesting is that anyone with some coding experience could probably put together a small python script that picks up the requests it sends and redirects the requests to somewhere else, e.g. legal imagery sources such as NAIP WMS for the USA or remap the Bing tile requests to Google or Apple and even recolour/touches up the images in the process. This is exactly what the original tool did for MFS.

Even better, just use autoortho which can be pointed to sources users are allowed to actually use and is open-sourced.

He's not the one advertising it here. Initially it was free (hence this post) and users are free to make up their own minds on whether they want to support this product or not.

I'm not asking for the user's opinion on the program but the legality concern of using data that isn't allowed to be used or monetized in this manner per the map providers own user agreements. But I can feel we're just letting this one slide. Though it will be an interesting case to point to next time Avsim starts pointing any fingers when members don't adhere to EULAs or other product agreements.

[Aglos77 170]

Me temo que no tengo una base legal para discutir estas cosas, así que no lo haré. El problema que tuve con el auto ortho es que tengo que pagar una VPN para que funcione a medias, tampoco usa caché y los tiempos de carga son infinitos.

Con esta aplicación puedo prescindir de la VPN (lo que me ahorra dinero por este servicio) y la carga en alta resolución lleva mucho menos tiempo.

Supongo que esto sólo funciona para vfr, que es lo que hago normalmente. He pagado mucho más por complementos que no funcionan y no se han molestado en arreglarlos.

 

Edited April 12 by Aglos77

[brinx 276]

7 hours ago, tonywob said:

Developers pretty much have the freedom to do what they like and set their prices as they see fit.

Not correct. If this were 100% true, we would still have services like napster, limewire and kazaa. Napster settled for $26 million and Kazaa ended with a $100 million dollar settlement.

Now we have legal music services like Spotify that allows users to pay for music or to access the music for free with a free account under their terms of service. If I were to develop a software that downloaded the music from Spotify to the user's computer, and charged a $30 yearly fee; Would it be acceptable for me to try to profit that way? Besides not being legal, it would be morally and ethically wrong to try to profit in such a manner. 

This is essentially what this person is doing. He is trying to profit off software, that is accessing the service against the terms of service. Terms of service is a legally binding agreement, and the providers could suspend or permanently block your access to their mapping service at any time. Is he even pointing that out to users when he is about to charge that $30/year subscription. This is just morally wrong, and don't understand why some are justifying it. 

3 hours ago, Sethos said:

I'm not asking for the user's opinion on the program but the legality concern of using data that isn't allowed to be used or monetized in this manner per the map providers own user agreements. But I can feel we're just letting this one slide. Though it will be an interesting case to point to next time Avsim starts pointing any fingers when members don't adhere to EULAs or other product agreements.

I agree with you 100%.

Edited April 12 by brinx

[Mike_CFII_MEL 789]

This is no different than the piracy of a payware product like PMDG for instance. Something like that wouldn't be tolerated here and yet here we are with a map program that does the same thing. Boy times have changed within the flight sim community!!!!!!

[tonywob 4,770]

Since the legality of this tool is questionable, this topic is locked.