45 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

possible to get SATELLITE-imageries from that OSM

Ortho4xp lets you import satellite imagery into xplane from a choice of about 15 or more different default sources.

https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP

when you do that it looks like, e.g.

WED, the scenery editor for xplane includes streamed esri satellite data to assist in constructing realistic airports

https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/

josm for everything else.

https://josm.openstreetmap.de/

both wed and jsom edit vector maps, not images like satellite photos. any satellite images you see in jsom come from the same sources ortho4xp uses to put the background tiles into xplane, plus many others that probably aren't quite as interesting.

https://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Maps

Edited January 15, 20233 yr by mSparks

6 hours ago, mSparks said:

Ortho4xp lets you import satellite imagery into xplane from a choice of about 15 or more different default sources.

Really? I thought it was just a few in the drop down in Ortho4xp!  Where are the other sources?  Would love to try them!

Edited January 16, 20233 yr by MrBitstFlyer

https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP/tree/master/Providers

8 hours ago, mSparks said:

both wed and jsom edit vector maps, not images like satellite photos. any satellite images you see in jsom come from the same sources ortho4xp uses to put the background tiles into xplane, plus many others that probably aren't quite as interesting.

Ah ok thanks. I understand now. I missinterpreted « supports loading background imageries ». I thought it would offer such imageries but it obviously only allows loading them from another source. Sorry for the confusion.

On 1/8/2023 at 9:14 PM, mSparks said:

The reason, imho, that Goran used the term "light years", which I also initially balked at, is there simply isnt - "maybe" a couple of the pmdg offerings get halfway there.

For, iirc, an aircraft it took 2 people 2 years to put together.... released..  how many years ago now?

Maybe he is bluffing, but I'm reasonably sure I smell the stench of someone who knows something they are desperate to share and can't yet. 

According to the timestamp. The very next day...

https://fselite.net/content/hot-start-announces-airbus-a220-coming-to-xp12/

lol, noice.

I just installed the Fly Away UHD mesh and I'm impressed.

Well did a little test on an area I know well - Torres Straight Islands in far North Australia. I give it about 8/10. The islands and outlines were all correct House and roads etc were where they should be (But European bungalows not the North Queensland Stilt houses) some places had tarred roads where they should have been dirt. Landclass or vegetation was well done. A credible and realistic representation, the only thing not done was the reef system which is extensive up there, not visible or done well at all. Then again seen a video of MSFS for the same area and it was by comparison woeful. Depends on the data you have to start with, seems to me the XP approach to creating scenery works quite well just needs fine tuning not sure if the Ortho approach fixes reefs around islands (The other sims used the photoreal or google zoom in and copy approach to do that) There was an airstrip or two missing that was about all. Horn Island was credible. Wind turbines were missing as well!

The only other thing I noticed was the water pattern repeating, which I had not noticed before, depending on the angle of the sun, that was a bit ordinary!

 

Here it is with the Alps scenery by Frank Dainese and Fabio Bellini.

 

On 1/12/2023 at 6:48 AM, mSparks said:

Of course, for up close and personal its well worth the SDD space. not quite 100% perfect yet, I find the roads quite jarring when looking up close, but not bad at all.

Agree - have had pleasant results with certain areas not well represented by Orbx True Earth 🙂

On 1/12/2023 at 1:29 PM, Tork_Curve said:

...i predominantly fly low level VFR and in MSFS i can recog ise landmarks i use in a real plane in the real world and navigate by them....not a chance with xplane unfortunately.

Real world pilot, here, too.

Any claim of "can't use XP for IRL Visual Nav / VFR practice" is absolute BS and should be rejected with extreme prejudice.

It is absolutely true that XP terrestrial scenery isn't even in the same league as FS2022 (when it comes to being pleasant to look at), but I have NEVER had a problem getting where I need to go using the Default landmarks/features in the sim, regardless of whether I've ever been there IRL or not.

XP is far more detailed than any VFR chart I've come across, and is as detailed as Bing or Google maps.

If you can't find your way around any given area in XP, you're doing it wrong.

On 1/13/2023 at 9:26 AM, GCBraun said:

I have terabytes of Ortho and if you go anywhere outside of the most popular regions in the US and Europe, the result is often atrocious. Clouds everywhere, awful coloring issues, weird glitches and resolution problems of all sorts. Yes, if everything works as expected, the result is similar to MSFS, but the total area of the world where this happens is, unfortunately, minuscule.

Currently I am using MSFS about 70% of the time. If XP had the same quality scenery as MSFS does, that would be 50/50. 

I generally agree, but TBH there are plenty of places in MSFS that are rather dreadful relative to the common Glamour Shot geo areas of MSFS.

For e.g., the area around Dubai, which is a quaint little town some folks have heard of, was so bad when I visited it that I've not bothered to go back.

On 1/16/2023 at 2:34 PM, mSparks said:

According to the timestamp. The very next day...

https://fselite.net/content/hot-start-announces-airbus-a220-coming-to-xp12/

lol, noice.

I was very happy to see the news (though TBH their current products are much more to my liking). 

But a single addon (or handful), even those at the extreme fidelity levels of HotStart, doesn't make ANY sim "light years" better than any other.

If that were true, sales of MSFS would've dried up the day after Challenger released 😉

So if their own A220 is what Goran meant by "light years ahead", he's a self-serving shill. But I don't believe either of those statements are at all true, at least with the public information we presently have.

No, "light years ahead", in terms of XP, must be something else, and something much bigger than any single addon. And I truly hope he's right 🙂

7 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

But a single addon (or handful), even those at the extreme fidelity levels of HotStart, doesn't make ANY sim "light years" better than any other.

a nailgun is "light years" ahead of a hammer,

you see the same outcome - a nail in a plank of wood, but a builder that only has a hammer will never compete meaningfully long term with a builder using a nailgun.

This is why I suspected Goran had a secret to share, for developers XP is very much light years ahead, you see that as the time between the PMDG DC6 from P3D to MSFS vs the Hotstart CL650 from XP11 to XP12,  my impression (The stench of someone who knows something they are desperate to share and can't yet) was a new example of that being the etiology of the "light years" comment.

On 1/20/2023 at 3:03 AM, Doering said:

Here it is with the Alps scenery by Frank Dainese and Fabio Bellini.

 

Holy Mother of...

What a FANTASTIC video, Laurie!

(and p.s., I'm glad I'm not the only one who appreciates that little hot rod jet 🙂 )

Quote

a nailgun is "light years" ahead of a hammer,

you see the same outcome - a nail in a plank of wood, but a builder that only has a hammer will never compete meaningfully long term with a builder using a nailgun.

Yes, of course, and point well made.

However, developer productivity is, frankly, utterly immaterial to the people who pay the bills (i.e., me and all the other customers who fly what gets built).

Continuing your Tool analogy, my company is a heckuva lot more productive deploying & maintaining solutions based on Windows, and our customers are a heckuva lot more productive because of those solutions. But does that mean Windows is "light years ahead" of Mac OS or Linux for either us or our customers? Certainly NOT 🙂

Quote

This is why I suspected Goran had a secret to share, for developers XP is very much light years ahead, you see that as the time between the PMDG DC6 from P3D to MSFS vs the Hotstart CL650 from XP11 to XP12, 

This is a false comparison. P3D and MSFS have nearly nothing in common from a development perspective. Hence the incredibly long gestation of "ported addons" by even highly experienced ESP developers. They basically have to start from scratch...

XP v11 to v12, OTOH, have a tremendous amount of code in common. And the changes, though significant, are indeed in the Update class of effort rather than the Rebuild as required by ESP to MSFS.

A much better comparison point to use would be dev effort of DCS World vs X-Plane. DCS dev is truly glacial, and XP can fairly be considered a RAD in comparison, despite being able to deliver similar levels of fidelity in the end products.

So, XP is great for developers, but the addons in DCSW are every bit as good. We just have far more limited choices... 😉 

 

Quote

stench of someone 

friendly advice:

"stench" is inherently unpleasant, like garbage or dog farts.

"scent" is generally a far more pleasant connotation, like flowers or the open ocean.

I'm sure Goran's secret falls more in the latter than the former 🙂