The screenshots I posted were using a mod to reduce the size of the autogen trees, I forgot to mention it.

Here is how the autogen looks like in MSFS2024, with no mods at all: https://ibb.co/fVTBr6CV

As expected, the buildings models are a bit more detailled than in MSFS2020, but it's still not matching the level of details of the XPlane12 autogen.

1 hour ago, blingthinger said:

Why is this a limitation for distribution? Just zip it up?

Few want to download and store 100s of GBs these days (even zipped up, a European country size region such as Germany would be really big). This was a big dilemna I had when making TrueEarth, the sizes were simply too large for a lot of people, and MFS have made it not really commercially viable to distribute in this format. 

Once it's possible to store some of this as raster (i.e. Not a prebaked mesh, tree points etc), sizes and ease of distribution should be greatly simplified, whether streaming or downloading.

 

11 minutes ago, Daube said:

Here is how the autogen looks like in MSFS2024, with no mods at all: https://ibb.co/fVTBr6CV

Perfectly acceptable in my opinion, whilst it might lack some accuracy in the styles and shapes of the buildings, for AI generated (plus some OSM) it's incredibly impressive, and it covers most of the world. It's come a long way since the early 2020 days.

1 hour ago, tonywob said:

Perfectly acceptable in my opinion

Not sure I would go that far, big improvement over 2020, but still almost as unacceptable as default XP11 scenery.

But what I did just realise from looking at these scenery screenshots, is why my cross country flight training prohibited the use of gps.

I used to think it was because "gps can fail", but I now realise its more than that, if you have gps to fall back on while you are learning, you dont develop the basic skills needed to orient and locate yourself purely from what you can see out of the window, it took me a long time to get that in XP11, and it's waaaayyy cheaper and easier getting lost in the sim than it is in real life.

So a recommendation to anyone looking for a different challenge in their flight sim.

Print off some openstreetmap maps, plan a 100nm trip or so - then fly it with the gps off, using only airspeed/time for distance travelled and magnetic compass for direction (dead reckoning ), correcting based on what you can locate on the map (junctions, rivers, powercables, bridges, forest shapes, railroads, vors/ndbs etc).

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

Why is this a limitation for distribution? Just zip it up?

Zip doesn't help with any of the orthophoto/raster scenery in terms of reducing the size, which is the largest part of these 3rd party sceneries.

IoW, the reason Orbx TrueEarth GB South is 127GB installed is precisely because of the parts that make it so generally appealing: the "pictures" of the ground textures etc. Those can't be readily compressed and delivered in a zip file (or even multiples). You still have to fetch the very large raster/image data whether it's in a zip file or not. 

Orbx do a pretty good job with distributing their sceneries because they make you use their desktop app, and that takes quite a bit of the drudgery out of it, but you still have to wait for that entire package to download, then get processed & installed before you can fire up the simulator and use it.

MS have delivered on the streaming side and done a really good job within the limitations of LIVE streaming hi-res scenery, but we've seen "the dark side" of a streaming architecture in the botched v2024 release.

It's rather a Pick Your Poison situation with many pros and cons on either side of each option.

3 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

reducing the size

I'll be the word stickler here: Size wasn't what Tony said was the problem. His words were referring to file count.

He did clarify that size is his bigger concern though. 

 

6 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

"the dark side" of a streaming architecture

"A" dark side. It's not the streaming architecture being Darth Vader. It's the delivery mechanism feeding the architecture: off-site servers are/were the evil there. Something something canary something coal-mine something something.

4 hours ago, tonywob said:

Few want to download and store 100s of GBs these days (even zipped up, a European country size region such as Germany would be really big). This was a big dilemna I had when making TrueEarth, the sizes were simply too large for a lot of people, and MFS have made it not really commercially viable to distribute in this format. 

Once it's possible to store some of this as raster (i.e. Not a prebaked mesh, tree points etc), sizes and ease of distribution should be greatly simplified, whether streaming or downloading.

Eh...I think it has more to do with the extra cost and inconvenience than the downloading and storing.

You buy X-Plane for $80, and if you want scenery that looks as good as ToS, then you have to pay extra for it. Or become aware of and teach yourself how to get/convert/install photoreal scenery. And top quality regional payware scenery adds up to quite a bit of money (ask me how I know 😉). And even then, there are large portions of the Earth, particularly 2nd and 3rd World Countries, that have never been well represented from a scenery standpoint. Not a question of value at all, BtW.

Whereas with ToS, you buy your sim for $70, and BAM: you're done as far a scenery goes (well, as long as your internet is solid...).

Both sims, though, for anyone who's into lots of aircraft and scenery enhancements, end up sucking up a huge amount of storage space, all of which have to be downloaded sooner or later.

It's just a matter of how transparent, cheap and easy the process can be made to be.

And when your all finished looking for and installing all that scenery, and flown over it a few times, youll get bored and start looking for more things to add. I have no addon scenery one flightsim, and im content. Must be the odd one.

I’m more than happy to download and store lots of scenery … I don’t get where some of you are going with this?  Sure, only 44% of the globe have Fiber, but that’s still 44% of the globe …why not download many TB of scenery?  I do and it looks and works extremely well.  Local storage is dirt cheap these days, be it M.2 or HDDs … heck 44TB HDDs next year.

I still haven’t flown over 80% of the scenery I have installed, good to know it’s there and I don’t have to be subject to stuttering on-the-fly scenery downloads from a source I have no control over and at their mercy of availability and throttled performance based on user count.

Edited February 19, 20251 yr by CO2Neutral

I use "Map Enhancement Pro" 1 yr subscription, previously used AutoOrtho, and I can't see a huge amount of data being downloaded, at least not more than I see when flying for the first time into new regions of the World in MSFS 2024.

I surely have on both a very decent scenery, like I never had before.

Ortho4XP I used it too over limited regions, just to try it, but was not as simple to install & go as either AutoOrtho and even more Map Enhancement and it was slower than the streamed scenery in MSFS or XP12.  I get no stutters in either sim.

Scenery detail and closeness to reality is better in MSFS, while I sometimes prefer the colours and lighting in X-Plane 12.

Why should I bother if they're closing it ( ASOBO and MS ) or LR decides to migrate to Mars in an Elon shuttle to gather data for the next version of XP and will not return until the next Century? Meanwhile I will profit from what I have, and more will come in the future.

 

 

Edited February 19, 20251 yr by jcomm

9 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

IoW, the reason Orbx TrueEarth GB South is 127GB installed is precisely because of the parts that make it so generally appealing: the "pictures" of the ground textures etc. Those can't be readily compressed and delivered in a zip file (or even multiples). You still have to fetch the very large raster/image data whether it's in a zip file or not. 

With Orbx, we initially decided to distribute imagery as JPEGs, which were then converted to DDS during installation via Orbx Central. This approach significantly reduced download sizes; however, once converted and uncompressed, the imagery required the same amount of disk space. Additionally, the installation process was frustrating for customers, as it took a long time, and if a single JPEG failed to convert, fixing the issue was a major hassle.

I also believed there wasn’t a significant difference between 2m/px (ZL16) and 1m/px (ZL17) imagery above 1,000 feet, as the visual difference was barely noticeable. However, there was considerable pushback on this, leading to the decision to offer both HD and SD sceneries. SD sceneries occupied only a quarter of the disk space with minimal loss in perceived quality, performed better, and loaded much faster—which is why I personally use them most of the time.

In P3D and FSX, aerial imagery was heavily compressed within BGL files, making photo-based sceneries much smaller. However, this compression often led to the infamous “blurries” issue, as the simulator struggled to keep up. X-Plane, on the other hand, uses fixed-size DDS textures with multiple mipmaps, which tend to be larger. While PNG images can be distributed with X-Plane, they are converted upon loading by the sim.

7 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

And when your all finished looking for and installing all that scenery, and flown over it a few times, youll get bored and start looking for more things to add.

Yes, absolutely. Even if you only wanted to fly over a small part of the scenery occasionally, you still had to keep the entire installation. Streaming only the areas users want to fly over, when they want, is a much better solution in my opinion. However, this shouldn’t exclude the option to cache or download large areas in advance for offline use.

Mjrhealth - not the only one! I confess to SimHeaven and Global Forests and quite a packet of little airports - I am a sucker for weird out of the places but other than that nothing. 

Mr Sparks raises a good point about VFR navigation and map reading and using the sim. I am lazy so done it the easy way IFR with navaids and here I will confess having a spent a lot of my real world aviation navigating in sparse out of the way places pre GPS where there were no navaids. I could never use a map to navigate in the sim because the view outside did not match the maps or in a way that I could relate to or was used to (WAC charts) but I do agree that XP is not bad in that regard. On the other side of the coin - for basic navigation skill development it is the only way to learn the 1 in 60 rule!

The merits or otherwise of streaming is interesting but I live in a first world country with third world communication networks so I am part of the 60% without fibre-optic cabling and huge download capacity so XP fits the bill nicely because I can handle the minor loads for a bit of real time weather but nothing else and that will be the way it is for a long time in my part of the world and as good as it gets. 

I did try MS 2020 but it took 3 days to download chewed through my yearly data allowance and then proceeded to fall over with regular monotony and be unuseable with the Telco's throttling my downloads due to other user demands on limited bandwith systems. The witching hours are particularly bad - that is from when the kiddies come home and go to bed and are all on their phones - you get the picture!

Edited February 19, 20251 yr by coastaldriver

19 minutes ago, coastaldriver said:

Mr Sparks raises a good point about VFR navigation and map reading and using the sim. I am lazy so done it the easy way IFR with navaids and here I will confess having a spent a lot of my real world aviation navigating in sparse out of the way places pre GPS where there were no navaids. I could never use a map to navigate in the sim because the view outside did not match the maps or in a way that I could relate to or was used to (WAC charts) but I do agree that XP is not bad in that regard. On the other side of the coin - for basic navigation skill development it is the only way to learn the 1 in 60 rule!

I also find it much more rewarding. Using real-world charts and navigating by landmarks, rivers, and roads feels more immersive and gives somewhat of a challenge to it. Even with default scenery, it’s possible to navigate using the shapes of towns and villages. Relying solely on GPS and autopilot takes away a lot of that experience for me, which is why I don’t really bother with faster aircraft and jets.

Back in the FSX days, I remember using this book (https://amzn.eu/d/cRLZ69I): Flight Simulator X for Pilots: Real World Training. Even with default scenery, it included various VFR flights planned out using sectional charts, taking into consideration wind, speed etc, making it absolutely possible to practice real-world navigation. We definitely needed some imagination back then to believe the scenery was realistic! We absolutely have it better these days

 

5 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

The merits or otherwise of streaming is interesting but I live in a first world country with third world communication networks so I am part of the 60% without fibre-optic

Ouch … would think NWS has to be better than Poland 😉.  

I’m very impressed with what such a small development team as LM can do and have done for XPlane all these years.  Their commitment is pretty staggering and rare.

Here is a interesting video, not very long, of a stunning scenery in Alaska featuring of NorthernSky Studio Sitka PASI. Although the presenter use a number of addon like Global Forest and with Ortho's the view looks so breathtaking and I bet in more flying in VR. A lot of detail putting into to this small scenery package.    

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQSMo8wsFqM

Edited February 19, 20251 yr by BobFS88