I didn't notice a big difference in my region, but I'm sure it looks better in many places around the World :-)

Same here,....can anybody point me to what the actual difference log is between this current Beta and the prior non beta?  Am I missing something:? I'm sure that I am.

Now, what do I think about 10.25 Beta 1 ? I have a new wish: I want 2 "texture resolution drop-down boxes" in the rendering options. The first for my plane, the second for the landscapes, sceneries, AI planes, etc...

 

That's an idea, which I also had for myself since longer time. Ok ... since around 2 months I have a really good GPU, so I wouldn't really need it myself, but ...

 

I don't need HD grass. I don't need HD gravel. I don't need HD dirt. For this, I'm OK with the lowest resolution. But I want a cockpit with a decent resolution. No ugly textures where it's hard to read the instruments.

 

+1.

Usually I'm up in the air (that's what a flight simulator is actually built for). But we seem to belong to an endangered breed :lol: .

 

Usually I'm up in the air (that's what a flight simulator is actually built for). But we seem to belong to an endangered breed :lol: .

XP10 sucks, it has no HD 4096k Textures of Mailboxes, Trash cans, Street Poles, etc :lol:  :Just Kidding:

I don't need HD grass. I don't need HD gravel. I don't need HD dirt. For this, I'm OK with the lowest resolution. But I want a cockpit with a decent resolution. No ugly textures where it's hard to read the instruments.

 

Usually I'm up in the air (that's what a flight simulator is actually built for). But we seem to belong to an endangered breed .

Actually, I do prefer HD grass and realistic looking ground surfaces. I had a few 3rd party airports for MSFS, that were replicas of small airports I landed at in real life. Being able to fly to these places in a simulation, as well as places I'd like to visit...........give me purpose. Without any purpose, I'll quickly loose interest. I like seeing all of these new airports, as well as planes, being released. It's a reason to want a computer upgrade. For me, it was always the scenery for real flight. I quickly became disinterested and bored with IFR, when taking IFR instruction. Preferring mountain flight, IFR routes didn't take me where I preferred to go. I soon realized, that it would have been a waste of money, to continue working on my IFR rating. I would never continue with enough IFR flight plans to keep currency. Some people just love the different shades of gray, and finally seeing the runway at the end of the flight. Not me! I like perfection in graphics, to duplicate what we see in real life, and a reason to want to go to places.

Not everyone flies a tubeliner at 38k ft. Some fly VFR props and helicopters low & slow. I actually like to see something realistic. So yeah we want HD everything thank you. If your system is too old then maybe stick with XP9 instead of wanting to hold everyone else with newer hardware back.

I'm not saying that good graphics is something bad. But ... the main aspect of a good game (in this case simulator) should be the "plot" and not the graphics.

As an example - I have seen endless wingview videos on youtube with maxed out graphics and very detailed scenery; people were beside themselves: "Great video", "fantstic", "awesome", ... (although it is boring to watch out of a window for 8 minutes, with a really poor plot).

Or ... there are movies with much action (explosions, spectacular stunts, you name it) but slim plot. I for myself prefer it the other way round.

 

And ... imagine ... there are games out there with "horrible" graphics, but they still can be intriguing for hours ... e.g. Tetris.

As Dr. Dr. Sheldon Cooper said once (don't remember it verbatim): "By far the best GPU is ... human imagination." Bazinga !

 

Edit: by the way - I too like more flying VFR than IFR (partly VERY low and slow), but even from 200 ft AGL you won't recognize any grass as HD grass.

Not everyone flies a tubeliner at 38k ft. Some fly VFR props and helicopters low & slow. I actually like to see something realistic. So yeah we want HD everything thank you. If your system is too old then maybe stick with XP9 instead of wanting to hold everyone else with newer hardware back.

 

:smile: I don't want to hold everyone else with newer hardware back. Please read my post again. If you have the latest hardware, just select the "extreme" setting for everything you want. It's just about giving more control to the user, so more users will be able to use default sceneries with their very heavy default textures by selecting lower resolution textures for the sceneries in order to keep a high resolution cockpit (and that's important in a flight simulator). As far as I know, not everyone in this forum has the 6 Gb GTX TITAN.

 

If you need high resolution grass, you'll still be able to select this. :wink:

 

I only have a problem with the default more and more heavy textures. With photo-sceneries + OSM2XP, the performance is much better.

http://www.pilote-virtuel.com/viewtopic.php?id=42195

http://www.pilote-virtuel.com/viewtopic.php?id=56906

http://www.pilote-virtuel.com/viewtopic.php?id=57255

Nothing better in life than landing on a grass strip, seeing the blowing grass and opening the window and taking in the smell. For realism- maybe some dangerous gopher holes, muddy wet sections ( we do train soft field takeoffs/ landings for a reasons) and maybe hazardous boulders too, or even a hang glider guy waving right when you cross the trees on the landing threshold where you were planning to land. Atmosphere = reality and some smiles on a boring computer monitor.

I liked the improvements and desperately waiting for the skymaxxx addon coming soon.  I hate flying XP10 with the visibility/fog bug and skymaxxx will fix this problem.

 

The new textures look really nice !

 

The autogen still leaves a lot to be disired.  I was flying over the Monterey Peninsula and notice a town full of Gas Stations. I quit counting after one hundred ! I hope ben and company come up with a better way of placing the the autogen buildings.

They need regional autogen update or else I only fly midwest and northeast and use sim heaven for Europe in Xplane. Arizona, Nevada and California houses have clay roofs and slab on stucco houses and tall buildings are rare. In time, hope they regionalize the autogen. They should at this point save art assests and reuse them for futire Xplane releases.

 

 

I was flying over the Monterey Peninsula and notice a town full of Gas Stations

 

It's not so much the gas stations (yes there is a *lot* of them), but the densities of towns and cities are really low even on the highest of settings. Also some of the house/building groupings are really strange for example houses that snake along long stretches of road are unrealistic, especially when they snake around square road grids.

 

I really hope that the autogen-zoning algorithm will see some major improvements ... because the pics from Ben's preliminary re-cut of NYC doesn't really give me much hope at this present time. 

 

Probably it would have been better to go with FSX's autogen approach where the 3D art assets match-up with the underlying textures over a large area. At least their method currently looks much more realistic than what we presently have. 

Probably it would have been better to go with FSX's autogen approach where the 3D art assets match-up with the underlying textures over a large area. At least their method currently looks much more realistic than what we presently have. 

 

I don't think this will change ... Austin (in an interview in 2011) was very proud of his approach, and in theory, it's a nice idea to create towns from the ground up.

 

I have thought a lot about this in the last weeks and see 3 main problems:

 

1. The biggest problem is that the spaces between the houses are completly ignored currently by the algorithm. Where in reality you have parking lots, gardens, playgrounds, sports fields, kiosks, waste containers, ... in X-Plane there is nothing. In FSX there would also be nothing, but it has city ground textures. With UrbanMAXX, we can also have such textures, but unless there are 3D buildings, X-Plane should include such textures by default.

 

2. The second big problem is of course variety. A plausible city has not just gas stations, apartments and business areas. A plausible city also needs schools, police stations, fire departments, some "cultural" buildings (that can resemble museums, libraries etc.), stations, churches, mosques, etc. The irony here is that OpenStreetMap already provides information about these types of building. I don't know if X-Plane internally already recognizes this, but just lacks proper 3D buildings currently.

 

3. The last big problem is how rural areas are displayed. The texture quality here is not the problem - it's certainly okay. The problem is how the textures are aligned and how they are related to streets, railroad tracks etc. In many areas this looks very random (i.e not like made by humans, but by a random generator). And where it does not look random, streets or railroads tracks cut directly through agricultural areas (fields), instead of separating different fields. Alpilotx' "European/American treelines and farms" addon helps a little bit, but does not solve the underlying problem.

 

No. 3 is also the reason why OrbX' FTX looks so good. It's not the texture quality. It's how textures are placed and aligned with the rest of the world.

 

No. 3 could be solved by changes to the ground texture algorithm. It's probably not easy to do this, though.

 

No. 1 and 2 can -- if Austin's approach is to stay -- only be improved if much much more 3D objects are created. I wonder if Laminar had the financial resources to do so.

By the way: Austion does not much with/about the artwork ... in the best case he allocates resources, and tells that they need to be done. Effectively its a work of others. And the one who does autogen has already spent quite some time to bring us where we are today. Of course, this is still not enough .... and when will it be enough at all :smile:? Because, the enemy of more artwork is always "even more" artwork ... real lifes diversity can only be matched perfectly with a diversity at the level of ... uhm ... "real life".

 

Also, algorithmically matching real life is an extremely complex task ... again: much more complex than many might imagine, and to bring it to todays level it has already received a lot(!) of man hours (and a lot of sleepless nights of a few guys). Yes, its maybe different than the FSX way of things, but neither is this FSX ... :wink:  ...

 

So yes, just like - almost - everything in X-Plane, the autogen is evolving and will evolve too over time (its still worked on, and new objects etc. are created / included ... and they get introduced in the sim, when they are ready). The good thing is, that the system in itself is extremely powerful (and I think, in some parts of the autogen you already can see this ... while in other not so much)

 

About 3. ... this is the part, where things become really complicated. And there are already ideas flying around inside Laminar - since quite some time - how this could be taken care of one day ... there is still no final solution, nor could I tell you when that might become the case.

BUT

 

No. 3 is also the reason why OrbX' FTX looks so good. It's not the texture quality. It's how textures are placed and aligned with the rest of the world.

This is something I do not believe ... if this would be true, then ORBX would have done some real big magic inside FSX. But maybe we need to differentiate our opinions/observations very carefully here! I think, its not possible, that ORBX has - by any type of magic - rural / agriculture textures perfectly aligned with the road network (because this needs a very deep integration between how roads are put into the scenery and how agriculture textures are drawn in the landscape --> very complex stuff)! But what you might observe is something different: namely the autogen aligned to the rural landscape! Which happens not by matching ground textures with roads (because this doesn't happens in FSX - to my knowledge) BUT by the inherent "autogen annotated to the textures" system of FSX ... and here is one of the big differences between FSX and X-Plane. FSX creates all of its autogen via texture annotations .... while X-Plane does not, and does it in a different ways (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse).

 

So to sum it up: yes, the autogen might not to please everybody’s taste ... but because its art(work), it is the same like with every other art(work) ... some like it, some hate it ... but you can rest assured, that it will not remain static over time :wink:

 

 

PS: and no, until now, no OSM building informations / tags are used in the autogen process. This is something planned for the future ... (when ever that might happen).

Also some of the house/building groupings are really strange for example houses that snake along long stretches of road are unrealistic, especially when they snake around square road grids.

 

But it seems, they are doing this quite often in real life (which might be the reason, why the autogen "artit" might try to mimic this in some way):

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d26756!2d-122.5954523!3d38.0923027!2m1!1e3&fid=7

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d13519!2d-120.4354639!3d37.3139118!2m1!1e3&fid=7

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d12939!2d-104.761715!3d40.4306534!2m1!1e3&fid=7

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d12717!2d-90.5879018!3d41.5707906!2m1!1e3&fid=7

etc.

 

Of course, X-Plane doesn't mimic this perfectly ... but at least there are real phenomenon which it tries to copy in a remotely "plausible" way ...

 

 

But what you might observe is something different: namely the autogen aligned to the rural landscape! Which happens not by matching ground textures with roads (because this doesn't happens in FSX - to my knowledge) BUT by the inherent "autogen annotated to the textures" system of FSX

 

Okay, I see! Thanks for the explanation!

But it seems, they are doing this quite often in real life (which might be the reason, why the autogen "artit" might try to mimic this in some way):

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d26756!2d-122.5954523!3d38.0923027!2m1!1e3&fid=7

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d13519!2d-120.4354639!3d37.3139118!2m1!1e3&fid=7

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d12939!2d-104.761715!3d40.4306534!2m1!1e3&fid=7

https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!data=!1m4!1m3!1d12717!2d-90.5879018!3d41.5707906!2m1!1e3&fid=7

etc.

 

Of course, X-Plane doesn't mimic this perfectly ... but at least there are real phenomenon which it tries to copy in a remotely "plausible" way ...

 

Nice examples -- and from high flight levels, like FL200, FL300... X-Plane 10.25 now looks really close.

 

The problem is at lower heights, when you see there is JUST the "snake", with nothing inbetween but naked ground.