tonywob

I gave it a go (I don't like just running random exes from the internet without any source-code, but I took one for the team) It's fairly hacky at best, but a decent proof of concept. The major problem is that it can't remove the mesh underneath, so it slightly raises the elevation essentially having one world floating on top of the other. It also converts in raw format, so the sceneries will be extremely heavy. This is not the fault of the tool, it's just a currently limitation of the X-Plane DSF format.

It's not streaming it in, it's downloading the data from Google beforehand and creates a scenery package. You need to select the area you want, generate it and drop it into the sim.

As someone who uses this airport several times a year in real-life, it looks really accurate and instantly brings back the pain of waiting in long queues at the Ryanair checkin desks

I have their Cessna 172s, and for such a basic aircraft, it's extremely heavy on the framerates (although very nice). I can't even begin to imagine how heavy a full-blown 737-Max is going to be.

Be careful with this script, it decompiles the mesh and recompiles it losing height accuracy and causes artifacts and issues at some payware airports. It also won't do much with this scenery since it uses the old style X-Plane 11 trees and water masks.

Sorry, but I'm not sure what you mean? You'll have to give examples. If you've lost any custom scenery it probably means your scenery order has reset and incorrect.

You can get them down to 1/4 the size if opting for 2m/px imagery (ZL16), which I found is absolutely fine above 1500ft or so. I have the Canaries at 60cm (ZL18), but honestly I don't see the benefit too much unless on approach/departure.

The northern coast looks really nice, one of the nicest areas to fly in

The issue is not just limited to disk space, it's to do with the slow loading times and memory requirements, since all that data has to be loaded in large areas due to the legacy 1x1 tile system. If anyone has used TE Florida as an example, then they'll have experienced the super slow loading times caused by this. Whilst it looks good, this scenery is even more detailed than that, so for most users it's just not practical at present, especially for those who just fly liners. There are also lots of hacks I have to do to make features that work in the other sim, e.g. Having matching roof colours and shapes, tree colours matching ortho, etc that X-Plane simply doesn't support easily. IMO, people would just end up disappointed, especially if they can't run the scenery smoothly, even if it does look good. I'm not a fan either, so it would have to support both for those that don't mind the storage requirements.

Since MFS was released a few years ago, interest for such products has hit a brick wall. Since such scenery is essentially free and worldwide in the other sim, it's difficult to compete with that and actually make any money despite some people still wanting to see new and updated regions. Either way, I have most of Europe and large chunks of the US generated, but I'm waiting for the new scenery system before deciding what to do next and how to release this for people to use. The most important factor is being able to reduce the size of the scenery downloads and the regions, i.e. Either by streaming it in or allowing users to only grab the areas they want.

I've been using Macs for years (Since 2003), but I was looking at finally replacing my Macbook with a laptop running Linux (Dual-booting for Windows games, and Linux for work and X-Plane) and this might be the push I need to go for it. I was looking at these custom build laptops that are well supported on Linux https://frame.work/pl/en/laptop16. Sadly, it seems 32GB is the max RAM I can top out at (I currently have 96GB which I make good use of in Photoshop), which considering the price of RAM these days might be a downgrade somewhat.

Yep, I remember needing to clean this up extensively when using the same MS building footprint data to make the TrueEarth US regions. Likely the same thing, i.e. OSM + MS Building data. The effort and bandwidth costs involved to generate and host these files inevitably led to them wanting to charge for it. So this doesn't surprise me, it was going to happen eventually

I've seen a substantial increase in FPS from the scenery changes in this, especially on large scenery areas.

It's been an interesting topic with some nice info, but time to close as it's been taken over by bickering

Yes, despite their limitations such as fixed seasons and baked-in shadows, I still think orthos combined with autogen are the best we currently have. While they can look rough at ground level, the scenery becomes quite convincing from a thousand feet up, especially with good lighting. The long-standing drawback of ortho imagery is that it’s not truly orthographic, building and bridge roofs are often displaced from their actual positions, and large shadows are permanently baked into mountainous terrain. You can suspend disbelief to a point, but the issues can become obvious, e.g., a mountainside covered with trees while the underlying ortho shows the ground completely black due to a shadow stands out like a sore thumb.