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alpilotx

X-Plane 10, Landscapes of the world (125 screenshots)

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Hi,I - as one of the Global Scenery developers - wanted to share with you a more comprehensive selection of "outside the demo are" screenshots from around the world. To not make this post explode, I uploaded them to a picasa album, where you can look at them in a slideshow. There you will find 125 pictures from quite some locations (mostly Europe) from these places:

  • Austria - Zell am See
  • Barcelona
  • Corsica
  • Hawaii
  • Japan
  • La Palma
  • Norway (yes, the fjords, as someone requested)
  • Pyrenees
  • Scotland
  • Switzerland

Follow this link: https://picasaweb.go...capesOfTheWorldI hope, this pictures will help you to better understand what the 8 DVDs can give you.

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Guest venustus01

I must say these look fantastic.!!!Applause.gif

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Indeed! Thanks for sharing those magnificent shots Andras. Mountains and valleys look 10 times more real than before, can't wait to explore it myself!

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Very awesome. This is a little quantum leap compared to XP9 in my opinion. Terrain looks so much smother than it did before and the higher resolution textures do make quite a difference as well. Cant wait to explore the world.I noted a few low res XP9 textures - I hope those will get replaced at some point - and there didn't seem to be a single palm tree on Hawaii too. Other than that this is really great stuff.

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Andras....I have to say these look OUTSTANDING and this post/thread is exactly what will make ME buy XP10 (I have the demo and it is growing on me daily anyway but these shots are just superb). The water and atmosphere in them is breathtaking and the night shots especially blow me away!!!!There is only 1 criticism/negative if I am allowed (I'm also not so keen/pleased with the lack of airports but I am aware that this can be solved with building your own, and from community contributions and so is not a huge issue in the medium/longer term).....and that is the built up areas - the "plausible world" just doesn't seem right when it comes to cities/large towns.As a case in point, the shots of Barcelona just don't do it at all for me - its does not look like Spain's second city at all and I don't mean from total accuracy/each and every building in the right place point of view, but very generally from the lack of buildings, the greeness of it all. It shoud be a sprawling mess of urbanisation but it looks like a rural village when you look at it from a building density perspective.I don't know if this is a landclass issue, or a texture issue but I'm hoping that this can be tweaked/improved upon but other than that, again these shots are fantastic - thank you.RegardsSteve

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I like the promise shown in the norway & scotland shots. Would I be correct in saying that glaciers / forests depicted in OSM will appear in x-plane?

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Totally agree with Steve's assessment. I would've liked to have seen the urban areas throughout the world built up to basically resemble the actual areas. At that point 3rd party can come in and refine the scenery closer to the real thing. Of course, if you're willing, you would pay for those services. I don't know how X-Plane does the addon scenery. Is the addon scenery mostly free or pay? If it's pay, then X-plane 10 should include the basic airports and cities that sort of look like the airports and cities we all know. Right now, it doesn't look like they are similar.


SJED

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I like the promise shown in the norway & scotland shots. Would I be correct in saying that glaciers / forests depicted in OSM will appear in x-plane?
No, forests and glaciers don't come from OSM ... That wouldn't have been a good idea (believe me, I did most of the raw data processing). The problem with OSM is, that it doesn't has a good global coverage. I mean, in some places they are very accurate (forests , glaciers etc.) ... in other places (and many remote areas of our quite big planet belong to those areas) you get almost nothing. So, using this as a basis for the natural scenery (which I am in charge of) would have meant, that many many places would have looked quite empty. AND, even in the detailed places, often the forests are not too well classified. What do I mean? I mean, that I usually like to tell apart broadleaved/conifer/mixed forests (and as far as possible, dense and sparse forests). The landuse data I employed tells me all this information and is much more coherent around the globe. For the USA (Alaska, Hawaii included), Europe and New Zealand I could use 100m resolution data (believe me, that is quite good for landuse!) ... and for the rest of the planet 300m data ... XP9 used km res for the entire planet (so, you see, we have quite some improvements here). And this is the data where the forests and glaciers come too.But I admint, that especially for glaciers we are thinking about ways to use them from OSM, as their borders are often even more accurate than our landuse (and in detailed valley, which they usually fill, it would bring some nice improvements) .... but this will remain something for the future :-)

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Totally agree with Steve's assessment. I would've liked to have seen the urban areas throughout the world built up to basically resemble the actual areas. At that point 3rd party can come in and refine the scenery closer to the real thing. Of course, if you're willing, you would pay for those services. I don't know how X-Plane does the addon scenery. Is the addon scenery mostly free or pay? If it's pay, then X-plane 10 should include the basic airports and cities that sort of look like the airports and cities we all know. Right now, it doesn't look like they are similar.
Well, I read this comments quite often nowadays (and I am not surprised at all). But let me try to answer it again. Well, the main problem with the cities is, that our planet is big, we are many different races, with many different building styles ... and it is almost impossible to please everybody (without replication all the 1.000.000.000.000 buildings on the planet). Of course, what is possible - and FULLY supported by X-Plane - is kind of a regionalization. With this technique (as I told - it is in X-Plane now), you can supply different sets of artwork (or replace parts of the base set! Yes this works!) for different parts of the world. AND the global scenery has a quite good "abstract" structure, in that it already has many roads (as far as OpenStreetmap provided them), and many object positions in place (and is highly differentiated). The "only" thing missing (but of course the one you, the users see and miss - rightly so) ... is a lot of artwork, to make all these differences visible. AND this is not a tiny task ... this means to create thousands (really thousands), of differen, detaile, high quality artwork (objects) ... often with special features to accommodate the autogen specialties (which makes them look good even with auto-layouting). So, Laminar had two choices ... either wait 3 more years (or employ a lot of other artists), and deliver a lot of nice cities (or nothing, because the concurrence has filled the market) ... or start now. Start now, show the great technology, give you something now to play with, and have tech in places which allows for a lot of customization in the future (for the community or 3rd party developers).So, I don't expect that everybody likes this approach ... for those I recommend to step back now, and I invite you to come back in 6-12 months and look againsmile.pngPS: My main focus was - and is - in the X-Plane development the natural landscape (as that is, what I worked on). And that is what I try to show you here in my screenshots (as we had quite some nice improvements there - as you can see). Other guys are working on the cities etc. , and they will show what is worth to be shown at the right time wink.gif.

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Well, the main problem with the cities is, that our planet is big, we are many different races, with many different building styles ... and it is almost impossible to please everybody (without replication all the 1.000.000.000.000 buildings on the planet). Of course, what is possible - and FULLY supported by X-Plane - is kind of a regionalization.
Hi Andras,I think what most people are complaining about the look of cities in X-Plane is not the regionalization etc, but simply the fact that there's too much green in urban areas. Seems like X-Plane 10 treats urban areas landclass as rural landclass and just splashes autogen and roads over green fields. IMHO one of the first things the artwork makers at Laminar should do, is producing generic base urban textures to replace the current generic base green texture in urban areas.Marco

"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity." [Abraham Lincoln]

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Ok, I'll buy that reasoning. I've waited many months or years for products when I wish they would've just put out what they had and build on it in future upgrades. I do love the look of XP10. You've done a great job but I'm more a city and suburbs type guy who flies big jets from city to city so, of course, that's where my interest lie. I think I will take your advise and take a wait and see posture. You're last quote was sort of cryptic."PS: My main focus was - and is - in the X-Plane development the natural landscape (as that is, what I worked on). And that is what I try to show you here in my screenshots (as we had quite some nice improvements there - as you can see). Other guys are working on the cities etc. , and they will show what is worth to be shown at the right time wink.gif" Can we expect these cities in the initial program or sometime at a later upgrade or can't you say.


SJED

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You're last quote was sort of cryptic.
With my last sentences I only addressed, why I did almost exclusively landscape shots, without much urban areas ... because thats what I worked on (and where I know, what is good enough to post as screenshots). Nothing else :-)

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Impressive shots Andras. Re. The regionalization of the autogen, do u know when instructions for this will be issued, for those of us that want to do it? Shots of Australia pretty please :-) ?

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I think what most people are complaining about the look of cities in X-Plane is not the regionalization etc, but simply the fact that there's too much green in urban areas.
This is the point I was trying to get across exactly - Screenshot 8 for example - the site immediately under the aircraft is the huge marina area in Barcelona and there is no/minimal/the odd tree in reality (almost the heart of the city from a tourist perspective) but XP depicts it as almost green fields with the odd suburban street which loses that immersion totally - I'm not at all bothered for absolute 100% accuracy (I can buy that later if I want to - or if the missus lets me - when a dev releases that sort of product) but I do think that it lets the rest of XP down at this moment.
PS: My main focus was - and is - in the X-Plane development the natural landscape (as that is, what I worked on). And that is what I try to show you here in my screenshots (as we had quite some nice improvements there - as you can see).
And as I stated, the rural shots, Norwegian fjords, Austrian Alps - the more natural landscapes do look absolutely amazing - words don't do them justice tbh and I congratulate you on that work - its just superb im%20Not%20Worthy.gifHopefully the "city guys" can work their magic in the same way because however its explained, I (and I appreciate you don't cater to just my demands/needs!!) think that, atm, the urban textures are a definite weak spot.RegardsSteve

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