Could anyone tell me why, over the past few months there have been so many download files for "Photorealistic Chile"? I am rather curious, because from memory these files have been rather large and I thought that they could almost have covered the entire globe.

I dedicated simmer has decided to upload every single square foot of Chile using photorealistic backgrounds - replacing the default landclass in FSX.It's quite tedious work, and for those simmers who hail from Chile (or like to fly there), I would imagine it is fantastic being able to see the real countryside.Oh ... if only an East Coast US simmer was so dedicated!

I thought that they could almost have covered the entire globeNope - no where near the entire globe. People don't realize how big the texture files would have to be to produce photorealistic coverage of the entire globe - even if such photos existed - which they don't for a large part of the world.Each 1 degree by 1 degree square takes 16 downloads - about 35 MB each zipped. They each include 2 files - an elevation file - about 1.7MB and a texture file - about 40MBThe world is 360 degrees x 180 degrees and that is 64,800 1x1 degree squares.Now according to Answers.com 29.2% of the earth surface is land.So:64,800 x 16 = 1,036,800 x 29.2% = 302,746That right - 302,746 downloads necessary to cover the world.@ 42MB per download = 12.715 Terabytes, or 12,715.3 GB file space needed to cover the land mass of the whole world.Yes I know due to the smaller distances of each degree near the poles - the exact numbers would be a little smaller - but not enough to make much difference.

Chile willie!

Thanks for doing the math, Reggie. Amazing numbers.