Yes, I think it's unreasonable, there are lots of legacy systems running on 32 bit distributions, and there are very few people who can afford to have such large amounts of RAM Forcing everyone to go 64 bit is just a hard idea
I don't think we're doing that.
The current state of affairs is that we're offering two different sceneries for download, a lowres version and a hires version. If we recommend that people on 32bit systems use the lowres version, why is that a problem?
MSFS users have had view distances of 100 km since 2005 and didn't have to run 64 bit to see SRTM terrain.
I've been experimenting with 250 km visibility on a 32bit system in FG.
A LOD system is necessary, unless you also think node culling is unneeded. And we need to stop using such ridiculous amounts of RAM for terrain which is not viewable.
I'm all in favour of a LOD system.
I'm also all in favour of cleaning unneeded triangles from the scenery. I'm also all in favour of making a useful balance between resolution of terrain features and vertex count. Load on the vertex shader is just as much a problem as memory consumption.
My point is - none of this justifies emergency measures or alarm cries. The old scenery is still available, it will be available for the forseeable future, it works fine on low memory / low performance systems.
So some people can't use terrasync any more to get updates because that defaults to the new scenery. That is the only thing which will actually happen. So the new scenery in the current iteration works only for people with lots of memory. As long as we state it clearly and get the information out, I don't see the problem.
Just take a breath, if the new scenery doesn't work revert to old, and let's fix any issues with new scenery in good time. For years we've been sending the message to the scenery team that getting something out, even if it's not perfect, is better than nothing. Now we have something out, it's not perfect yet - if we now all clamor that they should have waited till it's perfect, we're sending the completely wrong message.
And a terrain LOD isn't easy. The best solution I see is to precompute it and store two resolution levels of scenery on disk. Because doing it on the fly is complicated. But then, loading tiles will slow down - which is the bottleneck for truly large visibility. I can get 350 km worth of CORINEscenery into my memory, but it takes more than 10 minutes to appear.
So let's just relax a bit, then talk about what we want to achieve and how to do it