6 hours ago, tonywob said:

They've already done that with that tool that charges people to download from Google, Apple etc, and people are paying a subscription to use it.

Subscription grey ethics aside, they do create a cache which is essentially O4XP. I was referring to being forced into full-time streaming of the imagery. I'd be willing to bet that's one of the 'waffles' Delta just alluded to.

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

I bet that decetor is an AI and they're in cahoots.

It’s like some tools that we can use to check the probability of an image being AI. Of course based on AI too😅

@mSparks I just tried to enter « what to expect from xp12 next gen scenery? »

Here the result 🙂

« X-Plane 12's next-gen scenery is shaping up to be quite impressive! The new X-WORLD series continues the high-quality scenery from X-Plane 11, incorporating 3D vegetation and improved realism. The scenery is designed to be more immersive, with objects placed based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and Microsoft building footprints, rather than generic autogen rules.

Additionally, Living Scenery Technology is introducing advanced animation for scenery objects, allowing for more dynamic environments with realistic traffic flows and effects.

If you're looking for a complete overhaul, there are discussions about upcoming scenery improvements, but some skepticism exists regarding AI-generated content »

3 hours ago, Franz007 said:

@mSparks I just tried to enter « what to expect from xp12 next gen scenery? »

Here the result 🙂

« X-Plane 12's next-gen scenery is shaping up to be quite impressive! The new X-WORLD series continues the high-quality scenery from X-Plane 11, incorporating 3D vegetation and improved realism. The scenery is designed to be more immersive, with objects placed based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and Microsoft building footprints, rather than generic autogen rules.

Additionally, Living Scenery Technology is introducing advanced animation for scenery objects, allowing for more dynamic environments with realistic traffic flows and effects.

If you're looking for a complete overhaul, there are discussions about upcoming scenery improvements, but some skepticism exists regarding AI-generated content »

give

write X-Plane 12 World Scenery Overhaul: What to Expect from the Next-Gen Raster-Based System as a blog post

A try 😛

6 hours ago, mSparks said:

give

write X-Plane 12 World Scenery Overhaul: What to Expect from the Next-Gen Raster-Based System as a blog post

A try 😛

I am only using Bing Copilot AI. The result is very different from the content in the article 😉

Why we think this is written with the help of AI?

First he left his prompt in, second a lot of unnecessary words are used to make a point, third the repetitions when he starts a new paragraph, in a way humans wouldn’t do.

Yeah, he probably used a different prompt than what we hypothesized, hence the different results, but it's been written by AI, no doubt. Everything smells too much like it.

Anyway, it's great that we humans are still able to detect AI more than AI is able itself!

Just for fun, and as prove that we can indeed detect AI better than AI itself, I counted six times:

  X-Plane 12 World scenery overhaul

in this article. No human would do that, if not because it is too long to type 🙂. But of course for an AI this is not a problem.

 

1 hour ago, soaring_penguin said:

Just for fun, and as prove that we can indeed detect AI better than AI itself, I counted six times:

  X-Plane 12 World scenery overhaul

in this article. No human would do that, if not because it is too long to type 🙂. But of course for an AI this is not a problem.

 

Don't get to confident, it's not that easy:

Quote

you are ben supnick from laminar research and I am interviewing you

how did you come to work at Laminar?

Back in the early 2000s, I was working in software development with a background in both computer science and a strong interest in aviation. I’d been into flight simulators for a long time, even as a kid—X-Plane stood out to me because of how it modeled flight physics using blade element theory rather than lookup tables. That level of fidelity really appealed to both the pilot and the engineer in me.

I started getting involved with the X-Plane community, writing plugins and tools. Eventually, I connected directly with Austin Meyer, the founder of Laminar Research. At the time, the team was small—Austin was looking for developers who could contribute to both the core sim and its growing ecosystem.

My first major contributions were around scenery and rendering systems. From there, things evolved quickly. I ended up becoming one of the lead developers and eventually the architect for much of the sim’s platform and graphics engine, including X-Plane 10, 11, and 12.

what is left to do with the next gen scenery update and when can we expect it?

The next-gen scenery update is a massive, multi-phase project, and there’s a lot we’re tackling under the hood.

What’s left to do? Quite a bit, actually

We're rebuilding how the world is populated—moving from a tile-based approach with autogen to a more flexible, procedural system that can blend real-world data (like OSM and terrain datasets) into a much more cohesive and varied environment. That means better city layouts, smarter road placement, and more realistic urban/rural transitions. This is still in progress.

We’re overhauling how forests, grasslands, and other biomes are represented. This includes new tech for 3D vegetation, better seasonal transitions (like dynamic snow coverage), and smarter blending with terrain. These assets are partially in place in XP12, but we're pushing to get biome diversity and procedural variation up to a much higher standard.

We’re still working on higher resolution mesh and landclass data that can be streamed or loaded more efficiently. The challenge here is balancing visual fidelity with performance and disk footprint. Vulkan/Metal gives us some breathing room, but there’s still a lot of optimization and pipeline work ahead.

We aim to unify and expand global coverage, especially in underdeveloped areas—Africa, Asia, and South America. These regions need better data and tuning for autogen and terrain. That’s ongoing.

We're also upgrading the tools used internally and by the community—WED, Scenery Gateway, and the scenery export pipelines—to be compatible with the new system. That has to come together with the scenery itself so the ecosystem can contribute to and build on the new foundation.

Timeline?

We’re not putting a public date on it yet, and I know that’s frustrating. But we’re doing it right rather than rushing it. The scenery update is being built alongside regular XP12 updates and experimental features. Expect to see it phased in—some of it will appear in incremental 12.x releases, and other elements may come as part of the next major version of X-Plane (whatever number that ends up being).

When it’s ready, you’ll know—it’ll be hard to miss.

 

It does a much better job at guessing than most of the X-Plane community.

The weird thing is that some AI-detectors said human-score 99%, another AI by 3% probability then another said >95% AI…

Can AI know which the most reliable source is? 😃