2 hours ago, cobalt said:

I beg to differ.

No idea why.

2 hours ago, cobalt said:

You said that " XP12 with SimHeaven and Global Forest is good enough for a satisfying sim".

Yes, with those products it is.

2 hours ago, cobalt said:

What I'm saying is that MS2024 (and MS2020) real-world streamed scenery is WAY beyond -- no-comparison beyond -- XP12.

Which I also agree with. Default XP12 scenery does not compare to MSFS.

2 hours ago, cobalt said:

2020/2024 affords us an entirely new experience that no fake scenery, however well-drawn, can come close to matching.

No disagreement there.

2 hours ago, cobalt said:

When I fly over my hometown in XP-12 or FSX I see buildings and streets that look nice but bear no relation whatever to the real community.

I don't completely agree with that. Roads are in the same place as are buildings, rivers, villages, towns and cities etc. 

2 hours ago, cobalt said:

My neighborhood is nowhere to be seen, and for me this is no longer satisfying. Simming is in a new era.

Default XP12 is somewhat satisfying to me, but with SimHeaven and Global forests I find it a satisfying sim.  However I fly 2024 most of the times for the reasons you mention, plus the super upgrades over 2020.

No longer being satisfying for you or anybody else is completely understandable.

4 hours ago, cobalt said:

No estoy de acuerdo. Has dicho que "  XP12 con SimHeaven y Global Forest es lo suficientemente bueno para una simulación satisfactoria". Lo que digo es que los escenarios reales transmitidos por streaming de MS2024 (y MS2020) superan MUCHO, no hay comparación, a XP12. No se trata de un juicio subjetivo; 2020/2024 nos ofrece una experiencia completamente nueva que ningún escenario falso, por bien dibujado que esté, puede acercarse a igualar. Cuando vuelo sobre mi ciudad natal en XP-12 o FSX, veo edificios y calles que se ven bien, pero que no tienen relación alguna con la comunidad real. Mi vecindario no se ve por ningún lado, y para mí esto ya no es satisfactorio. La simulación está en una nueva era.

I don't recognize my neighborhood and my house because my city was invaded by a jungle of giant trees, I live in a 11-storey building in Alicante and I am not able to see it in MFS.

And seriously if you like to fly very low and enjoy the views MFS has no rival. But if you like to simulate real flights and procedures with XP 12  Sim Heaven and auto ortho/ortho4xp from 5k feet you will not notice big differences between the scenery of one simulator and the other.

Each person can do what I want to do, I have clear that I don't have to choose simulator because I can enjoy both equally but before giving your opinion you should try things for yourselves, Simheaven apart from using Open Street Map data uses MFS data.  Streets are there,  buildings are there and most neighborhoods and cities are perfectly recognizable. 

23 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Cobalt said: When I fly over my hometown in XP-12 or FSX I see buildings and streets that look nice but bear no relation whatever to the real community.

      MrBitsFlyer said: I don't completely agree with that. Roads are in the same place as are buildings, rivers, villages, towns and cities etc. 

 

In FSX and all other pre-2020 sims, the only places where this is true (excepting rivers and other geographical features) are the select hand-crafted cities, so I assume you live in one of those. In the other 99+ % of the world, in older flightsims, the buildings are autogen, their locations and footprints are at best only a rough approximation of the real world (more often, not even close), and true-life street grids are absent. But thanks, it seems you and I are in agreement overall about MSFS2024. 

Edited December 27, 20241 yr by cobalt

1 hour ago, cobalt said:

In FSX and all other pre-2020 sims, the only places where this is true (excepting rivers and other geographical features) are the select hand-crafted cities, so I assume you live in one of those.

Couldn't be further from the truth - I live on a canal narrowboat for away from a city 😁

1 hour ago, cobalt said:

In the other 99+ % of the world, in older flightsims, the buildings are autogen, their locations and footprints are at best only a rough approximation of the real world (more often, not even close),

This is again, far from the truth.  XPlane with SimHeaven uses many building footprints from MSFS data.  It must also be remembered most of the buildings in MSFS are also autogen.  I think you are WAY out of date with your knowledge of what is possible in XPlane.

After saying that, I still spend 95% of my time in MSFS2024 as it is a fantastic advancement over 2020 (which itself remains a fantastic sim).

1 hour ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Couldn't be further from the truth - I live on a canal narrowboat for away from a city 😁

This is again, far from the truth.  XPlane with SimHeaven uses many building footprints from MSFS data.  It must also be remembered most of the buildings in MSFS are also autogen.  I think you are WAY out of date with your knowledge of what is possible in XPlane.

After saying that, I still spend 95% of my time in MSFS2024 as it is a fantastic advancement over 2020 (which itself remains a fantastic sim).

SimHeaven provides, at a price, third-party real-life scenery for Xplane. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, with products such as this, sections of the earth's surface are rendered in XP with real-life accuracy. But this and other such third-party products are (a) expensive and (b) in total, cover only a portion of the earth's surface -- a small portion at that, because the data required for a complete real-life modeling of the earth amounts to thousands of terabytes, far beyond the capacity of any PC imaginable today. 

As for autogen structures being used in MS2020 and 2024, you are correct, but this autogen uses satellite data to render buildings in their correct locations and footprints -- very different from the autogen in earlier sims.

What I do know about X-plane is that while it is remarkable in many respects, it does not as a basic product, employ satellite-streamed scenery. While it may remain somewhat competitive for a time using add-ons to partially compensate, in my opinion this leaves XP well behind its competition in the long term (some would say, even now). May I assume that since you spend no more than 5% of your time on any sim other than MS2024, you basically agree?

 

 

Edited December 27, 20241 yr by cobalt

Gee, for a second, I thought I had joined the XP forum by mistake. 😉

46 minutes ago, cobalt said:

May I assume that since you spend no more than 5% of your time on any sim other than MS2024, you basically agree?

No I don't agree, because your facts are incorrect.  You say SimHeaven is expensive - really?  You seem to have ignored my point that SimHeaven uses MSFS building footprints in its data, thus better accurate than you state.   You are correct that XPlane does not have streamed satellite imagery, so I agree most will go with MSFS (as I mostly do).  However, Xplane remains a very good a competent sim.

57 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

No I don't agree, because your facts are incorrect.  You say SimHeaven is expensive - really?  You seem to have ignored my point that SimHeaven uses MSFS building footprints in its data, thus better accurate than you state.   You are correct that XPlane does not have streamed satellite imagery, so I agree most will go with MSFS (as I mostly do).  However, Xplane remains a very good a competent sim.

Yet is worth using no more than 1/20th of your flying time, at most? I said nothing about the accuracy of SimHeaven. In fact I noted that it provides real-world quality scenery for XP users, though its full coverage falls well short of the earth's land area. Its cost, especially if one were to install all of the available add-on scenery files, represents a substantial increase beyond the basic price of XP-12. Just a factor to consider in making comparisons. 

30 minutes ago, cobalt said:

Its cost, especially if one were to install all of the available add-on scenery files, represents a substantial increase beyond the basic price of XP-12

...and that price is?

5 hours ago, cobalt said:

Yet is worth using no more than 1/20th of your flying time, at most? I said nothing about the accuracy of SimHeaven. In fact I noted that it provides real-world quality scenery for XP users, though its full coverage falls well short of the earth's land area. Its cost, especially if one were to install all of the available add-on scenery files, represents a substantial increase beyond the basic price of XP-12. Just a factor to consider in making comparisons. 

Simheaven is a free product... Ortho4xp and auto ortho.... are also free...

Please, I insist, use the simulator you like the most but stop with the false information.

 

9 hours ago, Aglos77 said:

Simheaven is a free product... Ortho4xp and auto ortho.... are also free...

Please, I insist, use the simulator you like the most but stop with the false information.

 

OK, I concede that SimHeaven is offered as freeware but it clearly depends on donations to keep going. Are there folks who would download every scenery file without donating? Aside from the cost issue, I believe everything I have said about XP and SimHeaven in this thread is accurate. 

3 hours ago, cobalt said:

OK, I concede that SimHeaven is offered as freeware but it clearly depends on donations to keep going.

No, it doesn't DEPEND clearly on donations. I know the guy behind Simheaven personally (he lives 20 km away from me). Of course he is happy to receive donations, but he does not DEPEND on them. It's a hobby for him and (some) people invest time and money in their hobby. Whereas others ...

3 hours ago, cobalt said:

Are there folks who would download every scenery file without donating?

Oohh yes!! Lots of ... And some of them - when the scenery doesn't work immediately, because they have installed it wrong - they insult him, even though the whole thing is free. How do I know?
I know the guy behind Simheaven personally, yadda yadda yadda - and he told me that. And BTW ... this phenomenon with the insulting people got worse since around 3 years.

Edited December 28, 20241 yr by uwespeed

Austin stated in one of his presentations that one of the goals of the next generation scenery was not to put ortho into the simulator directly, but use it as a seed to "feed" the plausible world that is X-Plane. Super-accurate building and terrain type data used in conjunction with higher resolution generic texturing and more nimble structuring of the scenery tile system will be much more effective than bitmap imagery used by ortho, allowing for more efficient VRAM usage and subsequently increased performance across multiple machines rendering the same scene (which is what X-Plane does very well in its commercial offerings).

Laminar have never wanted to go down the ortho route - people seem to think they're limiting themselves by not doing so but forget there are many things X-Plane can do performance and hardware wise (like cross-network machine sync) that MSFS cannot, including not being dependent on a map provider to give their customers a premium experience. Remove the satellite imagery from MSFS and see how pretty it is...

Bit too much XP discussion in this thread…?

2 hours ago, uwespeed said:

No, it doesn't DEPEND clearly on donations. I know the guy behind Simheaven personally (he lives 20 km away from me). Of course he is happy to receive donations, but he does not DEPEND on them. It's a hobby for him and (some) people invest time and money in their hobby. Whereas others ...

Oohh yes!! Lots of ... And some of them - when the scenery doesn't work immediately, because they have installed it wrong - they insult him, even though the whole thing is free. How do I know?
I know the guy behind Simheaven personally, yadda yadda yadda - and he told me that.

 

2 hours ago, uwespeed said:

No, it doesn't DEPEND clearly on donations. I know the guy behind Simheaven personally (he lives 20 km away from me). Of course he is happy to receive donations, but he does not DEPEND on them. It's a hobby for him and (some) people invest time and money in their hobby. Whereas others ...

Oohh yes!! Lots of ... And some of them - when the scenery doesn't work immediately, because they have installed it wrong - they insult him, even though the whole thing is free. How do I know?
I know the guy behind Simheaven personally, yadda yadda yadda - and he told me that.

Thanks, very interesting. The champion in this regard is probably Alexander Barthel, the creator of LittleNavMap. Has there ever been a more valuable, or widely used, flightsim freebie?