tonywob

Since the legality of this tool is questionable, this topic is locked.

What's interesting is that anyone with some coding experience could probably put together a small python script that picks up the requests it sends and redirects the requests to somewhere else, e.g. legal imagery sources such as NAIP WMS for the USA or remap the Bing tile requests to Google or Apple and even recolour/touches up the images in the process. This is exactly what the original tool did for MFS. Even better, just use autoortho which can be pointed to sources users are allowed to actually use and is open-sourced. He's not the one advertising it here. Initially it was free (hence this post) and users are free to make up their own minds on whether they want to support this product or not.

Developers pretty much have the freedom to do what they like and set their prices as they see fit. If people keep buying their stuff and subscribing to it, they'll keep doing what they're doing. It seems most people don't mind this and will pay it. Getting your hands on aerial imagery legally in many countries is incredibly expensive and difficult. I remember shelling out thousands just to cover small areas around airports. In places like the UK and Norway, some providers wouldn't even sell it to you without taking a large cut out of every sale. Some other developers at the time took the easy way out and just stole the imagery from Google (some even left the watermarks on!). Maybe this developer found some legal loophole or is just hoping that Google, Apple, and Microsoft won't care. But I'd have a hard time sleeping at night, thinking I might wake up to a lawsuit. Messing with their imagery, tweaking it in any way (like changing colours or contrast), and charging for it, that's asking for trouble. Good luck to him though.

@jcomm, it's the other sim, but it looks like there was a watch party there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R88PK7cd8nw

I only recently discovered what actual HDR is on my Mac display after seeing it come up on a Youtube video and I can't go back now .

Thread locked. I suggest this is taken to PM.

The orthos do change colour somewhat (e.g. Snow in winter, and more brown colours in autumn), the sim has done this for a while now.

Topic closed.. this went way off-topic.

Whilst it's great there are options, what is this doing differently or better than AutoOrtho already does, it seems pretty much an identical solution? Is it easier to use? I've not used either solution since neither work on Mac OS.

Default MFS uses rasters for some features (vegetation, water, elevation etc)... and that looks really good. I see this as a positive step, as long as we can fall back to vectors if we need to for really tight detail that rasters can't encode.

I'm probably one of the few who liked it and thought it got rid of the "flying on rails" experience :D

Also doesn't work for us Apple Mac luddites... hence any graphical improvements are a bonus

Looking forward to synthetic vision, although it appears that one is coming a bit later than this version.

That's an impressive list of changes and it's great to see the graphics finally getting some love.

It is indeed, one of the best areas to fly in the sim Tried that, there was nothing satisfactory that could do it without needing a lot of processing per tile and if I kept the grouping as 1 metre/species, it still produced a LOT of polygons and X-Plane's point fill tree coverage in polygons was too sparse for the results to be as pleasing. I tried decreasing the grouping size to larger units, but it starts to lose the realistic and varied look. In addition, the points no longer exactly match where there are real trees. Either way, I already have the output as images for MFS as well, so once XP is updated to support rasters, I'll be able to use them as well. I did this with the TrueEarth series BTW for Orbx to keep the file sizes down, but had to sacrifice some accuracy Performance was never an issue and the legacy DSF format could handle it, it was simply the size of the files that becomes an issue. Yes, generally it works on black/white images and looks for noise and patterns using a sliding window. As long as the imagery is taken in mid summer and not blasted out by sunlight, I found it worked fine. If you also combine it with NIR imagery, it's pretty accurate. It actually failed in the Concrete area in my screenshot because the mountains are all in a dark black shadow, so I had to use other techniques to detect the trees