tonywob

Done, I've pinned the topic, so please add any interesting links/videos to the thread.

No, not at all... They have some opensource code for their tools such as WorldEditor and the toolset used to build the native scenery as well as some libraries to use to develop plugins, but the sim itself is closed source

If someone wants to create a thread with the links, I'm happy to sticky the topic if people will find it useful

I enjoy the Thranda (and their JustFlight pipers) and experimental vSkyLabs aircraft. Most are being updated to XP12, with the vSkyLabs aircraft being particularly enjoyable and performant

Superb variety of locations

Just two quick shots of the great improvement in lighting and clouds in XP12.06b4 on a flight heading from Poznań, Poland to Prague in my newly purchase C337 from Thranda Addons Used: Custom WIP Poland scenery, Thranda Cessna 337

I reported this around 3 days ago and they fixed it really quickly. Had no idea it was caused by shadows, but rather thought it was something Mac OS related.

No, sadly not. The new lighting can make the default scenery look ok, but it's still just that, the old default scenery

No, a scenery I'm working on, both orthos and overlay.

Ignoring the cockpit and just looking at the view out the window, they're nailed it to me, it looks super realistic now with the clouds and lighting. Here is one from me flying around the lakes in Poland :)

It's looks like Laminar Research have nailed the lighting and sky colours in the latest beta, it looks incredibly to me :-)

Orthos generated by Ortho4XP 1.30 are lacking the seasonal information present in the mesh that the default tiles have, hence the default forests don't work correctly. I wrote a command-line tool that patches these orthos so they work correctly and I keep meaning to post it up on X-Plane.org for others to run. I'll get round to doing it one day

Orthos can be much simpler to render than the default scenery textures as they're simply single images wrapped on a 3D model. However, the default scenery has different layers and blending to give the different terrain effects with various textures blended together, overlayed etc. so it actually can be more work than just using ZL16/17 orthos and thus what you may be experiencing.

You'd be surprised, Poland is one of the few countries in Europe that has a large amount of consistent geographic open data available for everyone, for free. These include laser scanned town/cities (photogrammetry), high resolution LiDAR, aerial imagery, detailed map data, etc... I was amazed to find this out, as it wasn't at all what I would have expected ;) I don't really like how Poland looks in MFS, the aerial imagery quality isn't great and it's absolutely covered in trees everywhere where there shouldn't be trees, so it could really do with a makeover, but agreed that likely there is either not much activity in this region, and it's probably of limited interest to people in other areas.

No Poland Oh well, I'm patient

Topic locked.. this was never going to end well

Back in 2019/2020 I started using the building footprints for my XP sceneries and seeing the AI errors I had a look at commercial providers, one was asking for $0.25 per building.. so if I wanted to do this commercially using the 3rd party provider, I'd have needed several million for a single US state, it was actually cheaper to hire people to clean the data by hand. So, MS doing this for free and publishing for the community (mostly OpenStreetMap) is a really generous move from them and nice give-back to the OSM community whose data they have used as well.

This is what I'm saying... the only way to resolve this issue is mostly just to clean it up by hand or use some algorithms to check for potential conflicting buildings. Considering the amount of buildings and the size of the world, it's not really feasible to do this by hand so there needs to be some leeway. Using the Microsoft building footprint gives far more benefit than it would not using them. P.S. The same issues can and do happen in MFS which uses the same data.

Yes, this is exactly what is happening. I used the same building footprints to fill in missing data when I made the TrueEarth USA series, and we had to spend a lot of time cleaning up bad data. AI is very very good, but it can certainly detect things as buildings that clearly aren't, e.g. lakes, boats, etc. This one could be a fairly easy fix (Remove buildings colliding with roads) so I'll chat with Armin at Simheaven about it for perhaps the next version of xWorld

I'm on a Macbook M2 Max and for me the performance of X-Plane is fantastic, but this was the top-of-the-range device at the time (I think it still is). My only gripe is that I can't run much else, there isn't exactly a large library of compatible games and running Windows games is mostly impossible now (Can't use bootcamp due to the different CPU architecture)

Yep, these are now being used to great effect inside Simheaven's latest sceneries. The v3 ones even include the recently added height information from Bing. I believe this is the same footprint data used inside MFS

I've hidden a few posts. For some reason even discussing colours in the sim is causing people to take offence and attack each other. Please stay on topic otherwise thread will be locked.

Well that escalated quickly and I fail to even comprehend why.. can we move on?

Yep, sadly I agree with this. Whenever I went to download an airport and seeing it needed 6000 different libraries, I'd just give up, which is a pity. OpenSceneryX which forced the use of an installer, and broken links to other libraries :/ The major issue was that most of these libraries didn't allow airport designers to just take the object out they wanted and include it in the scenery, which would have made life so much easier for the end-users.

He's not wrong, a lot of developers (freeware and payware) moved to MFS, including some big names. In terms of scenery gateway airports, as mSparks said, a lot of them are already fairly decent, so there is less activity on them these days but it is still on-going.