tonywob

Since the legality of this tool is questionable, this topic is locked.

What's interesting is that anyone with some coding experience could probably put together a small python script that picks up the requests it sends and redirects the requests to somewhere else, e.g. legal imagery sources such as NAIP WMS for the USA or remap the Bing tile requests to Google or Apple and even recolour/touches up the images in the process. This is exactly what the original tool did for MFS. Even better, just use autoortho which can be pointed to sources users are allowed to actually use and is open-sourced. He's not the one advertising it here. Initially it was free (hence this post) and users are free to make up their own minds on whether they want to support this product or not.

Developers pretty much have the freedom to do what they like and set their prices as they see fit. If people keep buying their stuff and subscribing to it, they'll keep doing what they're doing. It seems most people don't mind this and will pay it. Getting your hands on aerial imagery legally in many countries is incredibly expensive and difficult. I remember shelling out thousands just to cover small areas around airports. In places like the UK and Norway, some providers wouldn't even sell it to you without taking a large cut out of every sale. Some other developers at the time took the easy way out and just stole the imagery from Google (some even left the watermarks on!). Maybe this developer found some legal loophole or is just hoping that Google, Apple, and Microsoft won't care. But I'd have a hard time sleeping at night, thinking I might wake up to a lawsuit. Messing with their imagery, tweaking it in any way (like changing colours or contrast), and charging for it, that's asking for trouble. Good luck to him though.

@jcomm, it's the other sim, but it looks like there was a watch party there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R88PK7cd8nw

I only recently discovered what actual HDR is on my Mac display after seeing it come up on a Youtube video and I can't go back now .

Thread locked. I suggest this is taken to PM.

The orthos do change colour somewhat (e.g. Snow in winter, and more brown colours in autumn), the sim has done this for a while now.

Topic closed.. this went way off-topic.

Whilst it's great there are options, what is this doing differently or better than AutoOrtho already does, it seems pretty much an identical solution? Is it easier to use? I've not used either solution since neither work on Mac OS.

Default MFS uses rasters for some features (vegetation, water, elevation etc)... and that looks really good. I see this as a positive step, as long as we can fall back to vectors if we need to for really tight detail that rasters can't encode.

I'm probably one of the few who liked it and thought it got rid of the "flying on rails" experience :D

Also doesn't work for us Apple Mac luddites... hence any graphical improvements are a bonus

Looking forward to synthetic vision, although it appears that one is coming a bit later than this version.

That's an impressive list of changes and it's great to see the graphics finally getting some love.

It is indeed, one of the best areas to fly in the sim Tried that, there was nothing satisfactory that could do it without needing a lot of processing per tile and if I kept the grouping as 1 metre/species, it still produced a LOT of polygons and X-Plane's point fill tree coverage in polygons was too sparse for the results to be as pleasing. I tried decreasing the grouping size to larger units, but it starts to lose the realistic and varied look. In addition, the points no longer exactly match where there are real trees. Either way, I already have the output as images for MFS as well, so once XP is updated to support rasters, I'll be able to use them as well. I did this with the TrueEarth series BTW for Orbx to keep the file sizes down, but had to sacrifice some accuracy Performance was never an issue and the legacy DSF format could handle it, it was simply the size of the files that becomes an issue. Yes, generally it works on black/white images and looks for noise and patterns using a sliding window. As long as the imagery is taken in mid summer and not blasted out by sunlight, I found it worked fine. If you also combine it with NIR imagery, it's pretty accurate. It actually failed in the Concrete area in my screenshot because the mountains are all in a dark black shadow, so I had to use other techniques to detect the trees

I agree. I purchased an addon a few months ago on X-Plane.org that was said it was supported on Mac OS. It didn't work unless it was emulated using Rosetta which slows the sim down. The developer has gone awol and hasn't responded to any support requests from anyone in months, and IMO the product should be removed from the store. Hopefully a properly curated store will listen to user feedback and remove products like this, or the ratings will be unbiased

In MFS, it's basically a raster image for each bing tile. Each pixel dictates the height and species of the tree, it can be efficiently stored in a grayscale image. Developers could even use photoshop filters to extract their own trees from aerial imagery, or use AI (e.g. https://github.com/martibosch/detectree) In my own projects, I have tree level accurate scenery (with each tree having a height from lidar data), and I'm storing this per point in the DSF which explodes out the size to over 100-200mb per DSF. With rasters, this would be significantly easier to store, manipulate and load (it would be attached to the base ortho texture instead of stored as point data) e.g. This shot below, each tree is stored as a single point (lon, lat, height) in the DSF. There are millions of them. If I could instead just store it as an image with the different values representing heights and species it would still give a similar realistic appearance/distribution, but would use significantly less space

This one is a good logical step. I'd requested the ability to define tree/vegetation coverage using rasters as it's much easier and space efficient to do this (it's also how MFS does it) and Ben had already mentioned he is well ahead on this. Especially in this new world of AI detection, AI could be used to classify vegetation areas on aerial imagery and then that could be fed straight to X-Plane rather than trying to store it as points or polygons.

https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP/tree/master/src/Unused/C Marked as unused, so probably some project that was never finished

Just a warning... I tried to update a few tiles I have, but it's fairly buggy. One tile ended up trying to generate 45 million triangles and crashing X-Plane (Tile +48-124)

I think autoortho just uses Ortho4XP for the base mesh files (but skips the texture part). So it should just work However, I'd wait for a little bit, this is still alpha and a work-in-progress, and I'm sure the base mesh tiles will be updated shortly

Just a heads up, the new update for Ortho4XP is now on github https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP This does X-Plane 12 compatible meshes (with season support, bathymetry, etc). Oscar indicates that some of the water features might not look too good until 12.1.0 is out. Happy tile compiling!

I've been using macs exclusively since OS X came out years ago (and Windows 2000 was new). I hear this a lot as well with people shocked or calling me an idiot for spending that amount of money on a computer that can't run most games. It's never been a problem for me and I'm hugely more productive on a mac than I am on a cheaper Windows machine. The first Intel-chip Macbook (that replaced the powerbooks) is now being used by my mother-in-law, and that amazes me it's still going and the battery works after almost 12 years. My M2 Macbook Pro was very expensive, but it also has saved me so much time in terms of how fast it works, that it's paid for itself. For me, the difference between a serious simmer and casual-simmer/gamer is a relatively simple and not dependent on the hardware they use. A serious simmer goes through checklists to start up a Cessna 172 and plans a flight, the other hits Ctrl+E and flies around for a bit and quits without even landing (I switch between both depending on the mood I'm in)

I was about to comment on the developer's name and wondered how you can have $0 payware... but it's actually free and looks better than a lot of payware, hence the developer's name

I'll accept no less ;-)