10 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Where have you heard that BS?

It was claimed by @DeltaWho in this thread, page 6:

 

21 hours ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

The biggest gangsters in the world are the government, and I have zero empathy for corporate greed.

Well yes, that too, I agree 😁

Yes... Map Enhancement most definitely violates a few copyrights. So does Auto-ortho and arguably Ortho4XP (Although the latter can arguably be placed in a grey area as a tool). Now as the the severity of the punishment... is up for debate. But for someone making a profit off Google, Apple or Bing Imagery... I suspect a lawyer would not differentiate between entities profiting of their stuff... and exult leniancy. As for the consumer, ip banning is not uncommon (and yes I have seen support requests where people have complained that XP has ip blocked them from Google 😅)

 

The really simple concept for this... there is no such thing as free ortho*. Someone has to build the plane, build the satellite, and build the server to produce and maintain them. What you can get is subsidised ortho, which is slightly misleading. But that tends to only work

1. Up to a certain zoom-level (e.g. Sentinal Satellites)
2. If you work in emergency sector (e.g. Maxar... I think)
3. If a government is feeling generous and wants to stimulate growth or support development (e.g. USGS)
4. If a company just so happens to own a mapping service and can cross-collaborate between its own products (e.g. Bing)
5. You happen to own the plane and can take pictures yourself...and process them in-house (and even that is a fuel/man-power cost)

If none of the above apply, then typically you go to subsidised costs (and economies of scale) on the part of the consumer. This is why standalone airport scenery payware can also be expensive (might be $500-2k for 25m2 of base Ortho... depending on how big the coverage area is). Well that's fine for your KJFKs and YSSYs because those packages will sell, but what about the more obscure airports? Maybe @tonywob has more of an insight here as he's worked on far more commercial packages than I have. 

 

I could go on... but it really does scratch the surface. Every decision you make has a cost! (Now go and support your favourite scenery devs... doesn't matter which sim... they are continuously making top-tier content!)

Whenever I've tried to license aerial imagery in the past, it was always insanely expensive. Most wanted royalties or charged so much it wouldn't make commercial sense. e.g. I wanted to do TrueEarth Ireland and the amount of money they wanted and royalties required killed the product dead (Despite it being tax-payer funded). When I did TrueEarth Washington, we had to pay an extortionate amount of money to license imagery for Vancouver island and it wasn't even particularly good quality. When people complained about the costs of these products, they clearly had no idea just how much it actually costed to produce and license. Even with AI traced buildings, one company even wanted to charge us $1 per AI traced building, and clearly the government contracts had no problems paying this 

It's a better situation these days in Europe as most EU countries now release such data as open data. However, you can bet they will make it very awkward and hard to do (e.g. By watermarking it, or having incredibly awkward ways to access it). I couldn't do TrueEarth Netherlands for X-Plane back in the day because the neighbouring countries at the time didn't offer any imagery at a sane cost I could use. Such a product would be possible today however, but probably nobody would buy it.

I've also seen some naughty developers use Google Imagery in their paid products, despite their best efforts to remove the Google watermarks, you can still see it . Nothing surprises me these days though, I even caught the same developer using my textures (that I photographed myself) from one of my airports in a paid product of the same airport and nobody cared.

I wouldn't say AutoOrtho, Ortho4XP etc are technically in breach, but rather it's a grey area. The tools pass the responsibility on to the person using the software, pretty much like a torrent client would do. The fact that the tool charges to download higher resolution imagery is questionable to me, and I personally wouldn't have paid for it and although Google/Bing couldn't shut down the tool for doing so, they may find a way to block it. After all, it's a publicly accessible service (Whether it's WMS, TMS, etc) that didn't require someone to click "I agree" to use.

 

1 hour ago, DeltaWho said:

Well that's fine for your KJFKs

You mean there is more than one? 

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

You mean there is more than one? 

ha

16 hours ago, Franz007 said:

Understandable. However you don’t need to get the paid version. The base version is free and does a good job. I am using the similar free-versiom Autoortho and 95% of my textures are crystal sharp and more than enough. I’ve heard that map enhancement is even better (freeware).

I have the Pro version of the Map Enhancement tool.  I would say the highest resolution tiles are ZL17.  The author says it uses ZL18 around airfields.  The terrain tiles have decals applied for sharpness near the ground, but I have asked if its possible to have an option to generate the tiles without decals, which I prefer.

19 hours ago, blingthinger said:

So to clarify, you made a statement that could be interpreted by a forum rookie as the lack of native ortho being LR's fault or lack of vision, or by a forum regular as a slight/slander against LR given that the regulars know that you know that it's not their fault, and the most intelligent thing you have to say is being unable to chose which palm of mud to throw (binary? linear? is it a talent?  or a curse!!???) so you just throw both? Mix in a healthy dose of shoot-the-messenger and repeatedly zero constructive evidence to support the notion that LR could actually do this legally without bankrupting the company? And I'm the fuddyduddy.... a truly bizarre tantrum....

A. Stop gatekeeping/white knighting.

B. The more you write, the more your "can't" shows. 😉

Microsoft and Google do not own all of their satellite images. Some images are just licensed from providers like Maxar. There is a cost to them for using the images, which is why mapping services require API keys to track the usage. Someone actually brought up the topic of Map Enhancement Tool on the Asobo Stream and was shut down. On the official forum, its discussion is not allowed for obvious reason.

I found that google was the strictest. If you download too much data at once from their servers your IP will get flagged. I've had my IP blocked for downloading a section of the US east coast in the past with Auto4XP. 

I haven't used Map Enhancement in Xplane, however I tested it in MSFS. I promptly deleted it after it messed up my installation. Lots of weird server error in the sim. I deleted the alteration it made to the windows host file and things returned to normal. For my personal reasons, I definitely would NOT pay for Map Enhancement Pro. The author of Map Enhancement Pro is profiting off the tool and could easily face legal action if any of the providers felt it was worth their time.  Think napster or kazaa which were sued out of existence because their software allowed users to download copyrighted content.

 

14 hours ago, Rimshot said:

It was claimed by @DeltaWho in this thread, page 6:

...

Thanks.

 

11 hours ago, DeltaWho said:

Yes... Map Enhancement most definitely violates a few copyrights. So does Auto-ortho and arguably Ortho4XP (Although the latter can arguably be placed in a grey area as a tool).

Again: All of these tools only download imagery to a local cache using the public, official APIs these providers supply and do not redistribute downloaded content in any way. This is exactly what web browsers do when accessing aerial or satellite imagery sites. Heck, even X-Plane's very own World Editor downloads aerial imagery to use as background images. Now would Laminar knowingly offer a utility that violates copyrights in an official capacity?!

 

11 hours ago, DeltaWho said:

The really simple concept for this... there is no such thing as free ortho*.

Yes, there is (for the end user, for local use). If there wasn't, the APIs would be hidden behind a paywall or not exist in the first place.

Edited July 3, 2025Jul 3 by Bjoern

3 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

A. Stop gatekeeping/white knighting.

Awww you were trying to "teach" me a "lesson"?? Hahaha. Good to know that you're willing to trade with proactive and public slander just to scratch a few little itches.

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

X-Plane's very own World Editor

From what source(s)? USGS no? That's a free app (a la ortho4xp) that could easily survive a server shut-down.

 

10 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Again: All of these tools only download imagery to a local cache using the public, official APIs these providers supply and do not redistribute downloaded content in any way. This is exactly what web browsers do when accessing aerial or satellite imagery sites. Heck, even X-Plane's very own World Editor downloads aerial imagery to use as background images. Now would Laminar knowingly offer a utility that violates copyrights in an official capacity?!

• Sure, if we want to go pedantic bar-for-bar. Hence the asterix and placing Ortho4XP into a morally grey area. But you're still "re-distributing." I think Tony explained it pretty well.
• If you're referring to the slippy map, then no. We have a license, nor do we provide any sane way to download the imagery.

Quote

Yes, there is (for the end user, for local use). If there wasn't, the APIs would be hidden behind a paywall or not exist in the first place.

Again we're going into the pedantics of it. We have Google tiles plugins for blender and cesium platforms for Unreal. Just because those tools are free locally, does not mean the final application or output is "free". (That's the attractive allure). This is why you get sites like flightsim.to having to do culls on "photogrammetry mods."

11 hours ago, brinx said:

Microsoft and Google do not own all of their satellite images. Some images are just licensed from providers like Maxar. There is a cost to them for using the images, which is why mapping services require API keys to track the usage. Someone actually brought up the topic of Map Enhancement Tool on the Asobo Stream and was shut down. On the official forum, its discussion is not allowed for obvious reason.

I found that google was the strictest. If you download too much data at once from their servers your IP will get flagged. I've had my IP blocked for downloading a section of the US east coast in the past with Auto4XP. 

I haven't used Map Enhancement in Xplane, however I tested it in MSFS. I promptly deleted it after it messed up my installation. Lots of weird server error in the sim. I deleted the alteration it made to the windows host file and things returned to normal. For my personal reasons, I definitely would NOT pay for Map Enhancement Pro. The author of Map Enhancement Pro is profiting off the tool and could easily face legal action if any of the providers felt it was worth their time.  Think napster or kazaa which were sued out of existence because their software allowed users to download copyrighted content.

 

Couldn't have said it any better. Alot of "free" stuff simmers take for granted, isn't really free 😄

In the grand scheme of things, as an end user, who cares? Not me. I will happily pay for Map Enhancement Pro until such day it gets shut down. It is way better than those awful default terrain textures. I wouldn't even use XP without some ortho. 

(Please don't cry if you are offended by my opinion on this, just scroll on by :-))