tonywob

Probably time to close this one, it seems to have gone completely off sideways

This depends on what users enjoy doing in the simulator. For flying in non-VFR conditions or cruising at high altitudes in jets across the Atlantic, it works perfectly well. Even when it comes to approach and landing, unless you’re flying a small GA aircraft, most of the action takes place in the cockpit, with the FMC and other instruments.

It has been confirmed that this will be fixed. In version 12.2, they are focusing on lighting, which is the major change in this update. The exact outcome of these changes is uncertain at the moment, but it’s likely that the beta period will be lengthy, giving plenty of time to report any issues and offer feedback. I haven’t personally experienced this issue (as I mostly fly slow GA and don’t notice it to that extent), but I’m not dismissing it—it’s clearly a problem, as many others have reported. My concerns are more about things like the uniform colors of trees, the darkness of the scenery, and the lack of sunlight on the terrain. However, these have been improving over the years, and based on the screenshots, I expect 12.2.0 to bring even more improvements. I don't personally believe I'm a blindfolded "fan", but I do believe the sim needs MORE visual enhancements—better lighting and overall eye-candy, not less. That said, I agree that these improvements shouldn’t come at the cost of the overall experience and should be optional or toggle-able whenever feasibly possible. I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at here. If FS9 already meets your needs and you’re happy with it, why is this such a big issue for you? I’m not dismissing the dark cockpit problem, but if you’re expecting LR or even MS to downgrade the sim’s visuals to address it, you’re likely to be disappointed. If I have a piece of software that works just fine for me, I'll happily stick with it and not upgrade unless the newer version actually offers something I want. Please just calm down and stop with the aggressive attitude towards others who don't agree with you, it's not helping your cause and it's not the way to get a message across

You might be surprised to learn that most people, myself included, want the simulator to look good and are willing to invest in achieving that. Visual effects enhance realism and enjoyment, even if they are purely aesthetic. If a simulator doesn’t look good, people won’t buy it, developers won’t create add-ons, and ultimately, there wouldn’t be a simulator at all. LR are addressing issues such as the dark cockpit, so what is the issue here? By your logic, you might as well stick to an older simulator with a 2D popup cockpit, such as FS9 or FlightGear, since those would align perfectly with your expectations.

Yes, it's in the view menu View > G-Loaded Camera… or Hand-Held Camera… I barely notice the difference either.

I'm hoping also for the G1000 update with synthetic vision.

Merged both running topics together

Sadly, Windows only , I guess this is because it still requires the use of the Garmin trainer?

Apple Maps, Bing and Here maps are all identical in lots of areas (Especially where I live), both apply different saturation settings, but it's the same provider. They put out an update beginning of this year that replaced a lot of very decent aerial imagery with low quality cloudy satellite imagery. They also have an annoying habit of blurring out all the airports and military areas excessively (which is completely senseless since any would-be spy could go to Google or government providers and get it :)) That being said, satellite imagery, whilst lower resolution is often much more consistent in colour and perfectly acceptable for 3-4000ft and higher

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

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. 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.

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.

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.

It looks good to me for default autogen, they seem to have reduced the amount of trees as the last time I tried to fly around this area it looked unrecognisable due to the size and over coverage of trees. None, it's all scripted once I feed it the correct datasources as it would be impossible to hand edit this at the scale I'm doing it, i.e. entire countries. I'm not directly converting the LiDAR data to buildings, but rather I'm using it to help protrude a model of the buildings from footprints and getting the roof and building height correct, the roof colour is used from the Ortho4XP tile textures (or downloaded if not found). If there is no LiDAR data then it's a best guess based on information about the building, but it's an automated process which builds tiles of scenery. The hope is that I my workflow/toolset can be adapted to the new format when it's ready.

I can't remember the exact location, but it's somewhere here: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/50.13325/18.67671 near to Katowice/Rybnik.. that's the A1 motorway which should be easily visible in the sim. I was flying from Wrocław to Bielsko-Biała along the A1