Flying a milimeter above the ground

[aero-3fsx]

Now with 4 64bit flight sims many developers are considering the real benefits and how they can take advantage of it

OrbX scenery is naturally going to get a lot better quickly as alluded to from JV messages about new tech

I would plead the case for such a level of realism that exploring the OrbX scenery with hang-gliders, para-gliders and ground vehicles be given close consideration

Before train sim came out all those years ago I believe it was the developer of My Traffic that made some addons for driving trains around the FS world

Now we have separate sims for this, they are so limited to where it is specifically created

For ultralow flying, the ground textures need to be crisp and clear from very low altitudes or on the ground

LOWE is a fine example of this with almost photoreal scenery

I am just asking for ground vehicle exploration of the FS world be taken into consideration when designing new OrbX scenery

Thanks for your attention

[DAVIDF4]

One particular thing that would be good to review is the base land class texture for coniferous forests (seen extensively in the PNW). It looks terrible, especially when an airport butts up agaist it (particularly with it on a slope) and you can see it in all its blotchy glory from the runway. Even when flying over it, it sometimes clashes with the upright trees on slopes and the result is a spikey straw like mess from some angles.

 

If we can have longer range autogen and better autogen coverage in 64 bit world, then is there still a need for this texture to try so hard to simulate a tree canopy? Just make it a plainer set of green colours, dark enough to hide pop up and simulate tree cover at distance and simple enough to not give away its low resolution at close range.

[Meerkat]

Yes, it seems, with the availability of more memory, we all like to have it really "real" now. I aggree for the case of forest textures that look very outdated, that a forest floor texture could do better with sufficiently dense autogen, but it should be an optional feature. One could also imagine new texture sets with 0.5 or even 0.25 m resolution to give a better feeling of ground proximity when flying really slow (or driving around). This would probably require more than 16 GB of RAM and a graphics card with LOTS of VRAM.

However, at the end of the day, we still have only a few processor cores that have to manage the huge amount of terrain and texture data that a 64bit sim can theoretically hold. I doubt the P3D engine, especially the memory management, is already optimized for that.