In another post I asked rehtorically if FSX could get any better, and today I saw this... Looks like the bar is getting raised once again! http://www.flightsimworld.com/forums/index...howtopic=140377

Well, what shall I say... I think the bar has been raised with FTX: this doesn't raise anything for me. Those groundtextures look great, I certainly won't deny that, but the problem is they only look great when flying in one single direction. These kind of textures are always shown in the right direction: flying over it coming from the other side would make things look extremely awfull. That is exactly why I LOVE FTX: it looks awesome from ALL directions and that's one reason why it looks so (photo!)realistic: FSX default and also other addon textures have way too much er... perspective in their textures, making them look good from one side only.Also leaving out autogen is a no go for me since I have FTX: again, this is what makes it look real! Peter Wilding says his textures will look great when flying low: well, the lower you will fly, the more you will miss autogen with these kind of textures. And the more you will have to fly into the right direction too. Another thing: those screenshots aren't made from that high perspective (looking almost straight down) for nothing: when you fly low over that kind of scenery using a NORMAL view (being the VC) things look flat and weird all the way. Who ever flies his plane with a view like that?!? I certainly don't.I'd really like to see some shots from the VC, flying low (300 ft, as Peter says) from the other direction.

Well, what shall I say... I think the bar has been raised with FTX: this doesn't raise anything for me. Those groundtextures look great, I certainly won't deny that, but the problem is they only look great when flying in one single direction. These kind of textures are always shown in the right direction: flying over it coming from the other side would make things look extremely awfull.What do you mean flying in a single direction???? Also I agree about autogen! If not for what's seen from the air but what's on the ground, while your taxiing. Without Autogen it would be very flat indeed! Peter does say the product will include Autogen, but how good it is remains to be seen, as it doesn't appear to be a primary focus!!

> What do you mean flying in a single direction????I mean that the kind of textures Peter Wilding is making look good only from ONE side. Take a look at the first pictures he posted: they look inredibly real. But if he would have panned the camera 180 degrees, things would have look awfull, as if the world was turned upside down. These kind of textures only look good when you are flying in the right direction, so that the perspective you see in the photograph on the ground is correct and good and matches your point of view: as soon as you turn the plane the inbuild perspective will look awfully wrong. Further down the topic is a picture with autogen: it looks awfull because the perspective of the autogen is almost the opposite of the perspective in the textures: everything down there looks distorted and upside down.Autogen is not only important while taxing but also when flying high: FTX's perfectly placed autogen makes it look good from every angle you look at it. Without the autogen houses would only look good from one single angle. Thanks to the autogen and thanks to the fact the FTX textures contain hardly any perspective, things look realistic all around. When I look out of my VC and see a farm it looks splendid. I can fly around it and it will look great all the time. Just as in real life. When you fly above Peter's textures and see a house it will only look real from ONE single specific point in space: looking at it from ALL other angles will make it look weird.

The clouds look nice. :-sun1

I have to agree here - but would encourage the develpers to continue their work.The current batch of available satellite photography that I've seen integrated into FSX (mostly by Christian) suffers a lot of problems, perspective being just the first one. (In some of Peter's screenshots, there are multiple perspectives in the same shot.)There are other problems that don't really become evident when the developers rely on static screenshots to excite their fans. Lighting conditions can vary significantly from tile to tile (although with tweaking, this can be minimized); seasons cannot be represented very well so far; and the resolution from tile to tile is still fairly inconsistent at this point. Not to mention cars (and people) which don't move.The problem with photoscenery is that photos don't move. But the world and everything in it does move. It's a "living world" as they say.I think the technology has long-term consumer potential - say 5-10 years out, but the real money isn't in your average simmer application at this point. It's in commercial potential. There are probably many applications for this technology, but the main ones so far seem all to point to DOD applications.