tonywob

You can't.... the mesh and ortho are the same thing and can't be seperated. I think you're confusing mesh with the overlay (roads and autogen) which isn't the same thing You should be able to point the updated tool at the ortho folder and it will regenerate the mesh (but it won't redownload all the orthos)

Let people who want to actually talk about what Murmur posted, talk about it. Anyone who starts bickering and insulting again will be taking a prolonged vacation from Avsim.

Topic cleaned up, let's start again and this time without the bickering, trolling and pointless posts. (Sorry @Murmur, hopefully one day someone can post something without it turning into an MFS vs XP war )

At least in my case... often when I go to land a heli, I'll land about 1000 metres away, and pretend that is actually where I intended

The Arabian peninsular has some amazing scenery to fly over... picked some places at random and the scenery in parts in really breathtaking

First shot looks amazing, the haze and lighting adds a lot to the realism

Does any sim do this out of curiosity? I've never noticed. It would be cool

All due respect that Simheaven are still pushing out these sceneries regularly after quite a few years

Recently purchased an iPad Pro. Got to admit, XP mobile looks pretty decent on it and runs well. Good for a few minutes of easing boredom, but definitely a good thing of bringing more people into the hobby

A pet peeve of mine is that every utility, mod or cloud tweak prefixes with "x" as well... reminds me of the mid 2000s with Mac OS apps and the craze of beginning everything with "i", or the recent fad of small developers naming their software "studios" after aviation terms

There's a name we haven't seen in a while

Topic closed... has gone off on a tangent again

I think you're asking for the impossible here. I don't believe there is any way to make the ATC interactions realistic and it'll always feel predictable, robotic and not very true to life. Whilst some improvement would be welcome, I think you can only go so far. I know it's said a lot, but absolutely the best way in my opinion is to use a service such as PilotEdge or Vatsim. Not only will you have a real person to deal with, but also other users of the network which is about as close as you'll get to real-life ATC.

Disagree with this. If it wasn't for this small team of enthusiastic developers who constantly try to improve the product, I can imagine it would have gone the same way as many sims before it. Whilst Austin isn't to everyone's taste, you can't deny listening to him just how enthusiastic and knowledgable he is about what he is doing, and to lose that would be terrible in my opinion. LR clearly enjoy aviation and realism and it shows in their product and the direction it is going in.

Another deep-dive folks, enjoy :-)

Such behaviour is everywhere on the Internet, from video-games down to arguing about which expensive overpriced phone is the best. Companies really do have many of us wrapped around their little fingers in this regard, essentially making us walking adverts for their products. It's important to remember that a lot of the product information we see, articles, posts, videos, etc.. are all designed to sway consumers to buy a particular product. 3rd party developers who are making products for MFS and not X-Plane (and vice versa) also will offer very biased opinions because it's in their interest to do so. Everyone has and is entitled to their own opinion and what they find particularly good about one sim vs the other, the issue comes when that person can't accept somebody else may not agree with their view and what they consider important. e.g. Someone may believe seeing their own house in the sim is super important vs having the plane react to the airflow interruption disturbed by nearby mosquitoes etc....Quite why it gets so heated and personal though is beyond me, they're just games at the end of the day Just some common-sense here, if anyone is looking for an opinion about MFS on an X-Plane forum, expect a heavily-biased review and vice versa.

I'm now taking bets on how long the sim lasts on @jcomm the uninstaller's desktop.... I'm starting with 5 days

Another video up, this time talking about the new ATC in XP12

I do enjoy listening to Ben... great enthusiasm and knowledge and easier to follow for me than Austin

I think you know the answer to this already and how it will look.. One trick that works with these large scale packages and similar is to disable any tiles you're not using.. e.g. If your VFR flight is restricted to just one or two tiles, disable all the rest.. You'll get faster loading times and better memory usage. I believe something like xOrganiser can do this as well. I'm hoping XP12 will improve this loading process eventually.

They said similar in MFS, but 3rd parties soon found things they could do improve on. . Although I'm looking forward to seeing what devs manage to do with the sim, I'm personally happy that I don't need to install piles of addons and hacks that begin with "x" to give half-decent looking skies. Either way, it's a massive improvement over XP11 and very welcomed at that. I had given up hope with xEnviro, so to have decent weather built-in to the sim is a real bonus and it's great just how much decent lighting and atmospherics can improve the appearance of the entire sim.

I dislike the heavy saturation in MFS/Bing as well, but you can fix it by using the tool that swaps them out for Google imagery.. looks way better in places and more realistic.

My understanding of how this works is that they will use OSM buildings if there, otherwise they use Bing/AI... You can clearly see this with things like the Melbourne megalith (a building incorrectly tagged in OSM as 1000m tall), I also see that they have used it to determine the types of buildings (industrial, etc). Also, on a side note, Bing/Microsoft have offered their aerial imagery to OSM mappers for a few years now, and even have provided several opensource datasets of AI mapped buildings ready to import back to OSM (Australia, Canada, USA and some areas of Africa and South America). Microsoft have supported and helped the OSM movement over the years, and without the bing imagery layer they provide, it wouldn't have progressed as it had. The type 2 facades basically allow you to model some walls (e.g. Walls on a highrise block with balconies etc) or a 3d fence and the engine will use it to wrap around a polygon rather than a simple texture sheet. It has various rules where developers can choose different walls under different circumstances, but it's clear to me after having worked with them extensively for the Orbx TrueEarth regions, they're simply not suitable for modelling large areas due to the huge performance hit (There are some ways I've tried to optimise, e.g. Having several variants available for different heights of buildings). They also are fairly limited and are nowhere near the building/autogen tech we see in MFS in terms of the power and performance they have. This is old tech now in need of an upgrade, but I'm not so sure LR intend to use the facades engine in the way I've wanted to use it (rather they use it for airports and simple industrial buildings) LR's preference is to use pre-made 3D models that can use hardware instancing and this is how X-Plane's default autogen manages to perform really well, as it's the same repeating objects rather than unique per building models that fit specific footprints

I find this discussion absolutely crazy. I like X-Plane, but credit where credit is due, the MFS default scenery is leaps and bounds ahead of what we have in X-Plane. Microsoft have huge resources, access to TBs of data, etc, so it's absolutely no surprise they can do this and this is not to knock the brilliant work LR do on other aspects of the simulation. X-Plane can have decent scenery addons, but as of yet, nobody has done it on a large scale using AI. Nearest you'll get are the Simheaven, W2XP or Orbx TrueEarth sceneries, and these mostly rely on the availability of free data, so they'll never be able to cover the world, or even entire countries consistently or at a cheap cost, and let's not even mention the storage space required to hold this data. The facade tech in X-Plane is nothing like the tech you see in MFS. Facades are fairly limited in what they can do, and basically just have sections of walls with perhaps 3D objects attached to them. Use these in any amount, e.g. to cover a city, and the sim will really struggle. Facades can't make anything more than basic block buildings (no gabled roofs), and are unsuitable for placing millions of houses. The MFS facades are very clever in how they are built up, even trying to match the general roof shape of the footprint, colour and also style for the region or data. Whilst yes, they look fairly odd at ground level, they do the trick, and on a global scale work really well. I think if anyone is expecting XP12 to have similar global scenery and to be able to see their own house, they'll be disappointed and should probably stick with MFS. What you'll get instead is an improved version of XP11 with better lighting, clouds, ATC, water, default aircraft etc... and 3rd parties will be able to build on-top of the sim as a base (and anyone who does this right should make good money, since all the competition moved to MFS to try to earn their dollars :))

Congrats... Hope you enjoy it