kananesgi

Honestly, I think where you are getting hung up here is the idea that paid developers made the airports for MSFS while the XP scenery gateway are more like MODs or similar created by individuals for their own, and others', enjoyment. The thing here is, just because they paid a developer to "hand-craft" the airport doesn't mean it's done to any higher level than I could do sitting at my home computer. I am still hand-crafting the airport, I'm just not paid to do it. The fact that XP then includes a large number of those in the base sim means that the sim ships with a great many more "hand-crafted" airports (wish I could find and actual number here, but not sure where to look) as stock scenery than does MSFS. I don't care who created the airport. I don't have to go scouring file hosting sites looking for a decent representation of my local airport with XP, it's just there by default. Sure MSFS might have as many (though I doubt it myself) available for download somewhere, but you have to go digging through various repositories to find them. In XP, they are already there, and that makes them effectively "stock" airports to me.

I know this might sound like an odd question, but I like realism and I don't like how XP puts streetlights on every single road. I'm flying over the Kansas/Missouri border right now and I know for a fact that the vast majority of the roads in this area are country roads with no lights, save for the odd security light at the end of a driveway or something. There should only be a few lights here and there over people's properties, and only the real major roads, like Interstates, should have lights (and even those typically are only lit in the vicinity of a city. However, in XP11, almost every road is lit up with streetlights making a brilliant gridwork across the land that shouldn't exist. I know it's pretty to look at, but it's not realistic. Is there any way to fix this? This is using Ortho and SimHeaven, plus the mod to increase light draw distance (which was an amazing improvement). I haven't flown nighttime in XP12 yet to see if it's any better, but I'm not expecting it to be.

I'm curious, are trees counted in the overlays? The only real complaint I have so far with my results using @MrBitstFlyer's suggestions is there aren't enough trees being drawn. It may well just be a nod to better performance (obviously rendering all those trees isn't free of course), but I'm seeing vast swaths of terrain in the ortho that are obviously forested but no trees are being rendered in those areas. Some urban areas look better, but again, there are large areas like parks that have quite a few trees but none are being rendered. I'm wondering if I were to extract the overlays using Ortho4XP if it might remedy this. Curious if O4XP can interpret what a forested area looks like and basically "draw" a polygon in that area for trees to be rendered, or maybe that's not how any of this works. I'm pretty happy with the results, but it would be nice to see more trees. Would it be possible to run both SimHeaven and O4XP generated overlays at the same time (I'm betting not)?

Perhaps a little smaller, but it probably depends on the area being mapped. So far on mine (XP11, mind you) each tile at ZL17 is around 7GB, though one is only 4.5 for some reason and one that is just over 5G, and I don't know why. These are all flatland Midwest farm country, so more heavily urban or mountainous areas might get bigger and ultimately average out to that 10GB. I know I'll have to remake these when I get XP12 later, but at least I won't have to download all the orthophotos again, and that's what takes so long for me. Each tile at ZL17/18 takes around 8.5 hours to download, but I think it's definitely worth the extra time over the ZL16 stuff. I don't know why it's taken me this long to upgrade XP's visuals. It's like a whole new sim! Can't wait until I can financially justify upgrading to 12. Maybe in a couple of weeks.

Ah, cool. I didn't know about the high_zl option there. I'll look into that. I think I've already got the mask width set to 50, but it might have reverted on my. A number of settings did when I ran it the second time, even though I had saved the previous config. It's a learning process.

This is my first experience with Ortho4XP, but it's all automated to some extent. It is a somewhat tedious process to select the image and map out where you want higher ZLs, and then you have to wait for it all to download. Downloading is the longest part for me, but not too bad. I just downloaded a full tile at ZL16 and it took just less than two hours. Of course, ZL16 is pretty low quality and is the bare minimum, but better than default in XP11. All of the conversion and masking, etc, is done automatically by Ortho4XP though. I'm not completely happy with some of the masks, a few lakes are strange looking, but I'm going to play around with it a little more. Maybe need to do some higher ZL spots around some lakes here and there.

Actually, it's not that hard to setup using external drives. This 5TB WD model is on $100 on Amazon. And they also have this impressive sounding unit for only $109 with supposedly 16TB of SSD (though there are no reviews, so I question it, and it's also much slower transfer speed). $500 for 25 terabytes doesn't really sound too bad to me, honestly.

I am curious, just how much room does your USA Ortho take at ZL17+?

But remember, your still downloading those same terabytes of data with MSFS, it just does it in the background as you fly, which isn't an option for someone like me with slow internet. Yes, it may take me days to download all of the scenery for the areas I fly in and require terabytes of storage, but once I have them downloaded in XP, that's it. I can fly in them whenever I want and I don't have to download them again if I fly someplace else. The fact that XP12 can be made to look almost as good (if not as good or better) than MSFS without the need to stream data (the only high-speed access I have available is data-capped at 100Gb/mo) makes it the more attractive option for me. I know MSFS is impressive, but it just won't work for me.

Ok, so the tutorial I watched for Ortho4XP mentioned to use the alpilotx mesh for the autogen overlay, but SimHeaven is also for autogen. I can use it for the overlay in Ortho4XP, correct? That way, I don't need to download the alpilotx mesh just for the overlay.

ok, so photogrammetry is something new to MSFS20, right? I remember FSX and prior using ortho I think. The photogrammetry is what allows MSFS to actually generate buildings that sort of resemble their IRL counterparts then? I'm working on building an ortho set for one of the areas I tend to fly (near the airport where I'm going to be getting my flight training later). Unfortunately, it's a slow process with my internet, probably won't be done until late tonight or tomorrow. Also downloading simHeaven at the same time (can do that since it's downloading slow because the server is slow, even with my lousy connection I've got bandwidth to spare for the ortho download at the same time).

Honestly, I'm unsure what the difference is between photogrammetry and ortho. I've used plenty of ortho sceneries in the past, though I haven't delved into it for XP11 yet (looking into it now, since I don't have XP12 yet). Photogrammetry isn't something I'm familiar with. I'm currently downloading Ortho4XP, SimHeaven X-America and VFR-Landmarks, and thinking about the alpilotx HD mesh. First, do I need all of those or is there overlap here (I think simHeaven said something about including a mesh). Also, can you tell me if any of these are compatible with XP12 when I upgrade to it, or will I have to download them all over again (they are pretty dang big downloads).

Yep, I'm betting I could do the same with some of the places I've lived or visited. I admit, MS has outdone themselves on the world side of the sim. I've heard some complaints regarding the flight physics not being as realistic, but I could overlook those as the type of flying I do is generally modeled well enough. Unfortunately, I'll likely never be able to run it since it's not possible to get true high speed internet out here where I live, and it's not likely to be possible (affordably so, at least) anytime soon. From what I experienced, even with the near gigabit cable service I had before I finally left that awful city life, the sim would still struggle to run. However, I guess they royally messed something up with the SU11 rollout as I've read a number of complaints about terrible download speeds since then. I've also read plenty of complaints from before that, though, so I think it's just MS (I'm not a fan of MS, if you haven't been able to tell already).

Well, I gave up. The internal downloader in MSFS is a joke. I took the computer down to the cell tower, sitting about a quarter mile away. At that location I get 250+ Mbps download speeds. MSFS was downloading at 15-20 Mbps. Sat there for an hour and barely managed to clear 1Gb download. As a test, I loaded Steam and downloaded ARK: Survival Evolved, which is a 50Gb download (170Gb of disk needed, though), and had it done in ten minutes. Obviously MSFS is not going to be usable, so I'll just stick with XP12. I think it's the superior sim in every respect except the world modeling, so I'm fine with that.

Yes, there is a method to that thought. Seeing the best they can do is impressive, but what I'm more interested in is what the software is able to do with the areas that they aren't concerned with making look the best. In other words, what is the typical "autogen" scenery look like, since that is what you see 99.9% of the time (or at least what I see, since I don't fly around LA, New York, Gibraltar, etc, very often.)