That looks fantastic Thorsten! I can't tell if it is better or worse than Orbiter
It's rough around the edges, but in several ways better than what Orbiter 2010 can deliver. Orbiter has a hard-coded restriction on the detail level allowed for the clouds and out of the box not much utilizing a modern GPU. I understand there's ongoing development to have a DirectX rendering backend for Orbiter, and that allows some more graphical tricks, but without installing the experimental devel stuff, this is the best I could get from Orbiter 2010 with hires textures:
vs. Earthview at similar altitude:
Note how the ALS shader gets the blue glow of the atmosphere which Orbiter does not.
Here's the cloud issue illustrated - Orbiter 2010:
And Earthview:
I can push 4 times the resolution for the clouds to the renderer - if the texture memory is there, it shows
What would you need specifically?
If you check the earth- and cloudsphere models in current GIT
/Models/Astro/clouds_unitscale_hires.ac
/Models/Astro/earth_unitscale_hires.ac
they're all spheres cut into 8 pieces which are individually textured. However, in cutting and texturing, I haven't managed to make the seams match up precisely - there's probably some trick beyond moving things around with the mouse and hoping for precision which I don't understand. So right now the model shows seams - and it'd be nice to not have them.
Ideally, also cutting Earth into even finer pieces might be nice and ease some of the re-loading stress. But I had no clue how to map the textures correctly then...