2 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

you still talk right past it

Not at all. In fact if you look beyond the cherry-picked regions of focus in those pics, you'll see that the distant structures are literally as I described them: cubes on top of a texture. That last Iraq pic: the walled structure on that little hill rise? It's just planted into the texture. The roads are literally "lifted" from xp12 land. The sea floor looks potentially interesting but I bet that's also just a texture. XP can already do that.

So they have grass in some places now? And their artists have spent a ton of time on objects in and around the points of interest. That's not scenery engine. That's all current-xp12-level. The Marianas map is easy to load up with objects without a performance hit because it's 90% water. I see nothing particularly special here.

 

9 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

i'm sure it'll be much improved over what's available now.

Zero doubt from me there.

4 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

the cherry-picked regions of focus in those pics,

Having frequently flown over the areas myself, these aren't hero shots - this stuff is all over the place.

But okay - you must be right. 

So come back now with some other random thing so you can have the last world. Go ahead - i'll let you have it. 😁

19 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

these aren't hero shots

I mean they are... they came from a marketing department. Looking in the foreground and backgrounds of all of them I see more and more of what I was describing. Where's the engine here?

Random?? Hmmm... you know who has an advanced scenery engine? Asobo.

1 hour ago, blingthinger said:

I have no reason to think that that will be the default mode. Folks misunderstand "streaming" as network only. The streaming bit is simply talking about how the sim pulls data off of the hard drive.  No huge dsf load-ins every so often. They'll be able to gradually piecemeal the bits and pieces as you move around. I'll be surprised if the hooks are not there to do a network mode, but it's not as if you'll be stuck constantly downloading scenery data from LR servers. My prediction is that network streaming will be a secondary mode if it's in there at all.

 

How much do you see? Ping times to whatever servers you happen to be joining.

three years ago it was often 50-60ms.  Now though it is mostly low 20's.  Just did a speed test - 313MBps and latency of 22.

4 hours ago, blingthinger said:

I mean they are... they came from a marketing department. Looking in the foreground and backgrounds of all of them I see more and more of what I was describing. Where's the engine here?

Random?? Hmmm... you know who has an advanced scenery engine? Asobo.

You can’t see what you don’t want to see, obviously. 

the sim is a free download, and includes the best P-51 Mustang available aside from maybe A2A’s. 

Take a flight over the Marianas (both Modern and WWII and tell me how they stack up to the same in XP.

None of what you’re describing is true. Sorry, mate  

 

It's in my steam library already. Even runs in linux. Is their scenery aesthetically better than it was a couple years ago? Yes. I didn't say it wasn't. Are they actively improving it? Obviously yes. Is it better than xp12? Nope. Looks the same as what you can get in xp12. Nothing awe inspiring that would draw in hordes of new users who weren't there already for the combat-focused simulation. Do they have a streaming data engine? I doubt it. I can't tell that bit with certainty.

2 hours ago, blingthinger said:

It's in my steam library already. Even runs in linux. Is their scenery aesthetically better than it was a couple years ago? Yes. I didn't say it wasn't. Are they actively improving it? Obviously yes. Is it better than xp12? Nope. Looks the same as what you can get in xp12. Nothing awe inspiring that would draw in hordes of new users who weren't there already for the combat-focused simulation. Do they have a streaming data engine? I doubt it. I can't tell that bit with certainty.

One of their ongoing projects AFAIK is a Global Earth model, instead of regions.

I just prchased their C130J which will, for sure, be the best among all sims, just as their other ED / Belsimtek / ... products.

Scenery is now improved, for sure. Look for youtube DCS World vids in any of the most recent maps, including the cold war Germany.

DCS: Cold War Germany - Double flight over Tegel Airport  (check the Ugra Media Official channel there).

 

Edited December 11, 2025Dec 11 by jcomm

7 hours ago, blingthinger said:

Is it better than xp12? Nope. Looks the same as what you can get in xp12.

See, you just can’t admit what your eyes must plainly see, and thus you expose your mendacity. 

these sceneries are genuinely in the same league as Orbx TrueEarth. Which means they are absolutely better than current XP Default scenery. 

If you’d rather sit around generating your own ortho and pretending that SimHeaven is state of the art, by all means continue on with your delusions. 

Most of the rest of us can hardly wait to see what LR have in store. 

18 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

so you can have the last world

For posterity's sake.

Also, you're sounding awfully similar to a Dr Steve Brule skit up there, but you clearly need to let this all out.

Has ED ever announced a redo of a past scenery? Not a WWII version; I mean a full rehash of an existing FSX-like map with their current techniques. Has Wags ever explicitly stated in interview or blog post that they'd be on the edge of bankruptcy if they didn't put in higher res textures and a few more smaller architectural cubes on the existing cube buildings?

 

3 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Most of the rest of us can hardly wait to see what LR have in store

I'm not convinced you fit in this group, as much as you try to squeeze yourself into the subway car. You've made it very clear in the past that you think LR is in a deep world of hurt if they don't stream free-and-easy ortho right into your open mouth. They've announced that isn't going to happen. You get hot and bothered when someone posts those links reminding you of those statements. I have no doubt that you'll be extremely disappointed with what you see, simply because you'll have to continue churning a "delusional" tool like ortho4xp.

11 hours ago, jcomm said:

Scenery is now improved, for sure. Look for youtube DCS World vids in any of the most recent maps, including the cold war Germany.

DCS: Cold War Germany - Double flight over Tegel Airport  (check the Ugra Media Official channel there).

Seeing that trailer, I was like "Uh huh, I'll get that map and nitpick the sh## out of it. God help the devs if my house ain't in there!".

After this trailer, I can't wait to defend the state of peaceful workers and peasants from imperialist aggression. But God help the devs if [point of interest] is misrepresented or missing or not in the state it was in in the 1980s...

In all seriousness, while I wish that Next Gen Scenery has this level of detail, it'd asking a bit too much of Laminar. The main thing is that there is an easy way to add custom objects or local modifications without having to compile a 100 x 100 km terrain tile.

 

- Edit: Found the first major issue on the DCS map! In the background of this video, there is a class 155 loco pulling flatcars loaded with Leopard 1s through West Berlin! Class 155s were east german and West Berlin was militarily off limits for anything non-US, non-British or non-French. The devs should be absolutely ashamed for letting something so significant slip by! [Starts angrily typing up a 50,000 word e-mail to the studio]

- Edit 2: Found the next historical in accuracy in a clip from near Leipzig. Buckle up, Ugra-Media, this is going to be a loooooong e-mail!

Edited December 11, 2025Dec 11 by Bjoern

37 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

In all seriousness, while I wish that Next Gen Scenery has this level of detail, it'd asking a bit too much of Laminar.

100%, and I've said as much on several occasions.

Almost all the DCSW scenery is payware with many hand-modeled assets, and it's at least as expensive as Orbx TrueEarth. There's some mitigating factors like needing to dev destructible assets (2-3x the work) and other things related to being both an air and ground programmable combat sim (it's not as good at sea combat, but the aircraft carriers work pretty well 😉 ). Oh, and DCSW the sim, itself, is totally free.

OTOH, as you rightly point out, Laminar has the unenviable task of modeling most of the planet in some sort of convincing manner that won't entail an army of 3D modelers, or very expensive contracts with the likes of BlackShark.ai, or the various govts/corps who control the use of satellite imagery, or a few petabytes of hard drive space even if all that were to come together.

And it's quite telling that they hired MisterX6, not only a well know airport dev, but also the dev of SFD Global - his original attempt at making XP global scenery more believable while using only autogen.

Based on that, as well as Ben's post that @mSparks shared, and the video demonstrating a similar idea, it seems like they might have a decent "middle of the road" scenery solution in the works.

Given what they've accomplished so far with the First Principles initiative(s), as well as so many of the new scenery assets like trees, airport assets, and other stuff, it's clear they're serious about delivering a high degree of visual fidelity to go along with the as-ever high degree of physics fidelity.

oh, and ETA p.s.: very funny! 😁👍

Edited December 11, 2025Dec 11 by UrgentSiesta

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

On 12/10/2025 at 3:45 PM, UrgentSiesta said:

so you can have the last world

For posterity's sake.

😂 Spoken like a true Paranoid - are you sure you're okay? 😂

 

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

Has ED ever announced a redo of a past scenery? Not a WWII version; I mean a full rehash of an existing FSX-like map with their current techniques. 

Holy Cherry-Picked Red-Herrings, Batman...!

Let's entertain some of these nuggets o'wisdom:

The only scenery that might be reminiscent of FSX is the original Caucasus Map. Which has been updated several times over the years, and in fact just got a touched upped a month or so ago. While it's indeed not up to current spec, my understanding is that due to the interactive nature of the map (in stark contrast to civ flight sim), and the resulting dependencies of many hundreds of missions, tutorials, and campaigns, they're not really in any hurry to re-build it. Seems reasonable to me, as I've seen quite a few civ sim addons that are tied to previous version mechanics, etc.

And it's really only this old-tech Caucasus map that is comparable to current XP scenery - many of the same shortcomings, as well as a seemingly similar approach to incremental improvements.

What's happening instead is that each successive map is significantly better than the last, and several of the more recent ones have received substantial mesh updates and ground texture resolution enhancements, along with other visual/animation enhancements.

 

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

Has Wags ever explicitly stated in interview or blog post that they'd be on the edge of bankruptcy if they didn't put in higher res textures and a few more smaller architectural cubes on the existing cube buildings?

Well, let me ask you this instead: Has Austin ever stated in interview or blog post that they'd be on the edge of bankruptcy if they didn't put in higher res textures and a few more smaller architectural cubes on the existing cube buildings?

I don't believe either company has (or would) make any such statement. But BOTH surely are acting like it, right...? 😁 I remember reading somewhere that Laminar staff has grown by an enormous percentage in the last couple of years, and that the majority of those hires has been directly related to improving visual fidelity. 

Seems like both companies are being responsive to market demands instead of depending on a few customers who think the scenery is good enough as-is.

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

8 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Most of the rest of us can hardly wait to see what LR have in store

I'm not convinced you fit in this group, as much as you try to squeeze yourself into the subway car. 

Hmmm...let me see...

As I quickly think of my personal holiday-sale flight sim expenditures, I can confidently state that around 75% of them were X-Plane addons. Does that sound like someone who isn't really a fan of or "invested" in X-Plane...? By the same token, I can tell you I've made exactly ZERO purchases for Prepar3D in the last several years...

 

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

You've made it very clear in the past that you think LR is in a deep world of hurt if they don't stream free-and-easy ortho right into your open mouth. They've announced that isn't going to happen.

What I "think" doesn't really matter. What I observe, however, is what's happening in the overall flight sim market, where all the customers have gone, where all the growth has been, the utter implosion of the previous market leading flight sim, it's recent re-birth with a completely re-worked scenery system, and a host of other related/complementary, - and irrefutable - facts.

And the really satisfying thing is that Austin must really agree with "what I think", because it's blatantly obvious that rapidly increasing visual fidelity is clearly a top priority for LR. But I'm not narcissistic enough to think that I'm the reason he's doing it. I just realize that he's reacting to a majority of his current customers, making the same industry observations (with, i'm sure, much deeper data), and coming to the same conclusion: XP has to get significantly prettier in order to remain competitive and growing.

In sum, He's got no intention of watching X-Plane go the way of Prepar3D.

 

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

You get hot and bothered when someone posts those links reminding you of those statements.

Nope. What I get "hot and bothered" by is close-minded "Cants" who are more interested in why things won't change than in figuring out ways they can be improved - even if that means some out-of-the-box thinking. Thank god Laminar isn't filled with Cants, like some other companies seem to be. 🙏

 

5 hours ago, blingthinger said:

I have no doubt that you'll be extremely disappointed with what you see, simply because you'll have to continue churning a "delusional" tool like ortho4xp.

Such utter certainty! Such rock solid conviction! Impressive - kinda like an old steam locomotive.

Nah - because you see, while I'm happy to express my preferences, I'm also happy to take in new info and adjust my outlook when I get good feedback rather than the kind of "helpful" info you share. Not to mention all the straight up incorrect "facts" you throw around. 

p.s.: it's not ortho4xp that's delusional, but rather YOU. 🙂

 

 

 

Edited December 12, 2025Dec 12 by UrgentSiesta

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Let's entertain

Yes, you do seem to do that for yourself.

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

substantial mesh updates and ground texture resolution enhancements, along with other visual/animation enhancements

So really not much. Interesting. And the customers continue buying these still-inferior maps.

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

close-minded "Cants"

I'm sure Deltawho is thrilled to know what category you put them into for posting legally-sound reasons for not jumping!

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Austin must really agree

You must have missed the days just after 12 was released and he was repeatedly declaring that ortho was a waste of time... 

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

delusional, but rather YOU

You're just...you're just going to leave us in suspense? HOW am I delusional? Save me!!

Time to Close 

1 hour ago, mjrhealth said:

Time to Close 

Agreed. 4 pages of 'Blingthinger' and 'UrgentSiesta'.