tonywob

They are/will, apparently, not sure when though.

It could be the "Auto-tune recommended frequencies" option in the ATC window.

Berlin is pretty decent.. I also agree about most of Florida, it's really good detail.

It was VFR... I was approaching an airport (I think it was Bellingham in Washington), and asked to land. I was vectored away from the airport over the water and told to climb to 8000ft... 30 minutes later after a huge pointless detour, I was finally on a very long visual approach to the runway. There was same terrain around the airport, but I wasn't vectored towards that.

If anyone has bought this, please let us know how it works for you in terms of performance. I'm definitely wanting to buy this, but have been burned in the past with larger airports

There is no need to get personal, what is minor/trivial for one person is a deal breaker for another. e.g. There are things I have wanted in the scenery system for years that are pushed further and further down the road. The actual 12.1.0 features looks pretty exciting to me, I like and welcome the visual improvements coming, but also I'm very interested to see things like synthetic vision added to the G1000 which are planned further down the road. I've given up with ATC as it still does strange things, e.g. Flying in a C172 and it asks me to climb up to 8000ft on approach and fly 10NM away from the airport for no apparent reason, only to take me on massive detour for a visual approach. It seems to this point, nobody has managed to create anything that even comes close to real ATC, and PilotEdge is too limited in its coverage area for me.

The photogrammetry data they licensed wasn't particularly good (Bluesky I think), hence they didn't have much to go off to start with, but it looks very much like you have a connection problem, as even on my relatively slow internet it at least looks way better than this. Photogrammetry has always been hit & miss for me, sometimes it looks great, other times blocky and not great.

If it's not released yet and not particularly well advertised or generally available, how can they actually judge usage statistics, or am I missing something?

It does to some degree, a lot of the models are directly out of the default autogen scenery, but just lack the detail around the objects.

I've seen this also, but it believe it to just be part of the default plane's textures and you have the right lighting conditions at that moment to see it well (There are different liveries that are dirtier than others). Although some of the payware aircraft I have contain options to add dirt/scratches to the paintwork

Thanks. It's Washington TrueEarth, but I replaced the trees with more accurate XP12 versions.

This region of the America has to be some of the most scenic for flying low-and-slow and two of the airports KORS (Orcas Island) and KHQM (Bowerman) are two of my favourites from the FSX days. Here is one of my favourite flights done inside X-Plane in a Cessna 172 and it's still as scenic as I remember :)

Indeed... I loved this and nothing has really compared since.. :(

Just saw this popup... it's for MFS, but same addon. Should give a good overview of what the product is trying to do:

Yes.. if you want to read more in depth about the various techniques used, one example is here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0924271616301939 there has been a lot of work on this over the years

The reviews on reddit for it seem positive. The cost is apparently to cover the costs of using ChatGPT... is there anything that thing can't do? :P

Yep, I remember this. I was one who also reported it, it was crazy, the grass would reach the windows of the plane. I hope they also hire some lumberjacks as well for MS2024.

It's the masks that are in MFS (compiled into the CGL files as rasters)... it would be pretty much impossible to detect individual trees in a forest to any degree of accuracy without additional data (LiDAR, etc), and this shows pretty well in the sim that it's not the case, with lots of false positives or misses (e.g. Detecting crops on fields as trees, etc). I think that statement was just some sort of marketing stunt personally, but it doesn't matter either way, it's still a great achievement and adds a lot to the sim. Grass is done by shaders and colour, and saying AI detected every single blade of grass is ridiculous. etc.. I think this will be taken to the next extreme in 2024, with more detected, rocks etc (but that's just me guessing). Edit: I see the grass post was a joke....

Subscription based :(... but it looks like it somehow makes use of ChatGPT. I'm certainly after a good ATC plugin, but all have failed so far, so will be interesting to see the reviews of this. Although, if the subscription is 15-20$ range, it's not something I can justify paying for.

From what I know, there is OSM data in there (and it's listed in the credits), they have used them to get building heights and types (and imported some problems with buggy data as well). Microsoft also donated the AI detected building data back to the community to be imported into OSM. As for the vegetation, they used the Bing aerial imagery with some sort of AI model running on AzureAI to detect vegetation areas. I have used in the past a much simpler process that would simply run a sliding window over each aerial tile and look at things like colour, noise, proximity, etc and then score the likelihood the small window was vegetation, and if it passes a threshold it would tag it as such. The AI will do a much better job than this simple method, but it's a similar idea. The vegetation it produces is basically a mask matching each bing tile saying where it thinks trees are and aren't, and I'm sure there is a bit more to it (e.g. Detecting species, heights, etc). There are a lot of false positives though, I remember after launch it detected large parts of the desert as forests, but it seems to have gotten better over the years. That being said, it definitely needs to be turned down a bit in some areas

You probably already know, but there is a tool out there that replaces it with Google imagery that I use, it does improve and remove the oversaturation in many parts as Google's imagery just seems to have more realistic/natural colours.

I'm only referring to the scenery, and more correctly, the credit quite rightly should go to Blackshark and also Jorg (for having the idea in the first place to merge Bing, photogrammetry etc into a new sim). But, yes, having access to vast amounts of Bing data at your fingertips and resources really is what makes this possible and plays a huge role. Anyway, since you seem to want to argue and come up with strange points regarding Blackberry vs Apple, I'll leave it there, as clearly this will go nowhere.

I agree and I think it's amazing that it has this scenery out of the box, what I have a problem with is that I can't replace it with something else (and I have asked Asobo many times for ways to do this). Some people enjoy doing this sort of thing, and I want to have better coloured terrain, more correct vegetation and buildings. For those that just want a good-looking scenery out of the box in the sim, there is no competition.

Yes it is, in terms of the TrueEarth GB regions.. the building footprints were heighted, as was every single tree (something MFS doesn't do yet). Many of those building footprints did not come from OSM either, but were from AI generated data with some data coming from OSM as well to determine building types (Which is exactly what MS seem to do as well). There was already tech around at the time that traced buildings and heighted them from shadows, etc. What you are correct about is the cost... it cost a lot of money to get this data, and as such it made no business sense in many cases to continue, hence my comment about MS having vast resources to do this on a massive scale. I personally don't find their representation of the UK very good, it has far too many very tall trees and the terrain colours are too saturated, but without any provided way in the SDK to replace the tree data, autogen or roads, we're stuck with it as is (For most people it's probably fine). My point was in response to David Mills's comment that we were trying to copy MS, which is simply not true and also pretty insulting for reasons I've already given. You could probably say I was one of the first victims of being replaced by AI.. but I moved on and now work on MFS products as well.

Yep correct, I was working on TrueEarth Washington at the time the first MFS trailer was shown... TrueEarth GB was out a year before, and Ortho+Trees+BuildingFootprints have been around since even the XP9 days. I wrote my own tool World2XPlane in 2014 if I remember to replace an even older tool. So, I was never trying to make my sim and products look like MFS... because there wasn't an MFS. The idea was nothing new.. the only thing that is new is that they have vast resources (Bing) and money.