Old good FSX

[Ysop]

Whatever the result about this dispute over graphics is: it will never be perfect and some people will always be complaining. For both platforms.

In 1.5 years of flightgear I've learned more things and had more fun than in 15 years of MSFS.

[wkitty42]

I made small test - I demonstrated Everest FG picture and P3D photoreal picture to 30 peoples. All 30 peoples marked photoreal picture as better than FG. 2 of that peoples are professional DTP operators and graphic designer...
Strange, no one complained about wrong shadows.

because they are not thinking about changes like seen in a sim... they probably just looked at it like a static picture and possibly no one paid any attention to the shadows if the sun was in the pic... this (not thinking in living moving terms) is a common occurence, though...

on the competition question, i don't think FG is in any competitions... the folks that develop it and generally those that fly in it are doing so because they want to...

[GinGin]

Whatever the result about this dispute over graphics is: it will never be perfect and some people will always be complaining. For both platforms.

In 1.5 years of flightgear I've learned more things and had more fun than in 15 years of MSFS.

Indeed , that is the most important .


@V12 : and so ? What is showing your test with those 30people ? That’s just pure subjectivity in my opinion.

It depends on screens you shown, on how people judged it ( more realistic , or more eye catching ) , etc
Something can be breathtaking , but far from reality physical wise.
That was a bit the aim of discussion at some point

[Bjoern]

You can play with procedural shading or landclasses as long as You like, but in many cases You never correctly depict reality. Nice examples are cities with OSM buildings and roads, when OSM buildings are positioned on roads depicted in texture and OSM roads crossing buildings in the texture.

The urban textures placed via landclass are derived from satellite photos taken of a random city somewhere on the planet. it's crystal clear that the things shown on this texture do not correspond to road and building placement data supplied by OSM. Ideally, you would not even have to use such a texture in the first place if the building density supplied by OSM data is high enough to add enough clutter to settlements to produce a believable townscape.

This issue was not really apparent in MSFS because the terrain engine simply placed an urban texture with a corresponding set of defined locations for autogenerated buildings and then simply deleted buildings that intersected with vector roads during scenery loading. No crossing buildings, but no texture matching the road network either.
X-Plane places autogen buildings alongside roads in areas marked as urban. A more detailed road network therefor produces a denser cityscape without relying on an underlying texture. This is a good compromise if you do not want to rely on an OSM dataset.

I made small test - I demonstrated Everest FG picture and P3D photoreal picture to 30 peoples. All 30 peoples marked photoreal picture as better than FG. 2 of that peoples are professional DTP operators and graphic designer...
Strange, no one complained about wrong shadows.

30 people have not seen the same scene at a different time of day or in a different season.

As realistic as photoscenery is, it only works with a corresponding set of very, very dense OSM building and vegetation data and during the time of day and season that it was taken.

[V12]

I showed them 2 static pictures and 2 YT videos :

OK gentlemans, we agree that we do not agree.

[Thorsten]

I showed them 2 static pictures and 2 YT videos :

Yawn...

* then you make a flight with FG preferably in non-Corine terrain with no regional landclass definitions, looking for landclass seams/scenery glitches, do not use the environment settings and take a screenshot
-> FG scenery gets depicted under the worst possible angle, distance and lighting conditions
-> what this hides is
- the low number of places in which landclass seams are really problematic (in hires CORINE scene, that's in my experience close to zero)
- the ability of environment settings to bring the scene to life
- the ability of the shaders to make it look good from both large and small distance
- and our ability to readily customize and improve regions

Of course people like whatever picture/video you doctor better - that's why you doctor them in the first place. That's the whole point of why you do it.

Bye.

Well, that was a fast comeback from the goodbye...

[GinGin]

Yeah, no point to discuss more .
Blinkers

[Thorsten]

I showed them 2 static pictures and 2 YT videos :

Or, to bring it home graphically:

I gave 1000 people the choice between procedural scenery:




and photoscenery:



Guess what they picked?

[montagdude]

For what my opinion is worth (about 2 cents probably), count me in as not wanting photoscenery. People have already listed the problems with it, but basically, it doesn't look good unless you are 5000 ft high or more, and even then only in certain conditions. I do a lot of low-level flying, and it looks bad from there. I even saw a video the other day of some ORBX payware photoscenery in X-Plane and thought it looked bad at lower altitudes. I think the way forward is clear, and it is the path FG is already on: procedural scenery generation with high-detail landclasses and OSM data for roads and buildings, and maybe some improvements to the textures. Yes, there are a lot of places in the FG world where the data and/or effort needed to make it look good is lacking, but slapping on a satellite photo isn't the solution.

[Richard]

I think, MS made some agreement with Google, not Bing. 3D buildings are too realistic to be some type of the autogen.

They are using Bing maps; it's in Feature Discovery Series Episode 1: World; 2 Petabytes of data; ref: from 02:00 in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZL5PCZO8cc

I meant that we do not need to compete with MSFS - we will carry on doing our own thing as best we can and see how good we can make FlightGear with the resources that are freely available. We can never hope to have anywhere near the resources that are available to the MSFS dev. team; both in terms of funding; but also the raw data.

[StuartC]

MSFS2020 is not targeted at the likes of us, its targeted at the big money spenders. You know, the ones who think nothing of spending upwards of £5k on just a rig to run it.

[V12]

Something for SurferTim - Caribbean evening with my new 36 EUR bird :





This thing flies amazing.

[Thorsten]

FSX is dead horse

And they say you should get off a dead horse when you notice, yet here you are, investing more and more money into it

[V12]

1) If You will better look on that screenshots, You wilk see that is P3D
2) It was my money, not Your...

[Thorsten]

1) if it's P3D, you're off-topic because the thread is about FSX
2) it's you who continues to say contradictory things all the time, not I