EU Netherlands TrueEarth - alpha shots!

[John Venema]

You need to remember these are alpha shots, the beta team has not even been given a build yet. During beta testing each km square of the Netherlands will be inspected by the team and any such anomalies will be pointed out to the development team.

 

Whilst we do appreciate fair critique, it's far too early to be nit-picking these screenshots  

[Phil Hulme]

1 hour ago, John Venema said:

You need to remember these are alpha shots, the beta team has not even been given a build yet. During beta testing each km square of the Netherlands will be inspected by the team and any such anomalies will be pointed out to the development team.

 

Whilst we do appreciate fair critique, it's far too early to be nit-picking these screenshots  

 

Hats off to those guys: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=area+of+netherlands 

[CrownCityMisfit]

I am 100% in favor of photoreal regions. I hope this foreshadows more in the future. I'd be very happy to never fly over landclass again.

 

Thanks for pushing the envelope - even if it requires pushing me in to another computer upgrade.

 

Is there a coverage map? - reread the OP and saw its the entire country.

 

 

[Mikael Cedergren]

18 minutes ago, CrownCityMisfit said:

I am 100% in favor of photoreal regions. I hope this foreshadows more in the future. I'd be very happy to never fly over landclass again.

 

Thanks for pushing the envelope - even if it requires pushing me in to another computer upgrade.

 

Is there a coverage map? - reread the OP and saw its the entire country.

 

 

I agree. I’d be happy to never fly over landclass ever again too. I rather upgrade my HD. I understand though that some countries like Australia would not be very realistic given its enormous size.

[Sid]

8 hours ago, J van E said:

 

Talking about my house: it seems most houses I see on the picture are 'vrijstaande huizen', standalone houses (how do you say that in English) and I do wonder how Orbx will model the 'rijtjeshuizen' of which there are a LOT in the Netherlands. (All looking different too.) In other words, I am curious how many specific custom Dutch models there are in FTX Netherlands. I'd hate to see my house (and my entire neighbourhood) portrayed as a single house (although I'd love to have one in real life LOL )

 

In answer to your question, we call them 'detached' houses in English J van E. And yes, I'm also looking forward to seeing custom Dutch-style housing/buildings. I'm sure this won't disappoint once we get into seeing beta shots down the line. Exciting stuff! Really looking forward to exploring, discovering and learning even more about the Netherlands with this scenery.

[BDBAM]

More Bait and more Teasers! Thanks Fellas!

The Salivation  continues! Incredible as always!

Bitchen looking if I may say so! Cheers!

[caleb1]

On 10/30/2017 at 2:09 PM, Sundancer said:

 

That airport, Caleb, is Amsterdam Airport, as known as Schiphol (EHAM). Rwy 18L is right ahead of you.

When you have good eyes and you look carefully, my sailing boat has a berth at that lake in the distance, The Westeinderplassen. ;-)

 

Cheers Fred

 

Thanks.

[Varhomol]

On 31.10.2017 at 1:13 AM, Hans Bodde said:

Noordoostpolder: https://www.google.nl/maps/place/52°32'12.1"N+4°37'23.6"E/@52.536692,4.6219167,278m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m13!1m6!3m5!1s0x47c5f6d0bdfe526b:0x25c50a4f6fee50be!2sGlidersite+EZZC+Castricum!8m2!3d52.5368535!4d4.6232386!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d52.53669!4d4.6232328

Mr.Hans,the coordinates of this gliding club are not specified correctly.Correct:Noordoostpolder:https://www.google.ru/maps/place/Zweefvliegclub+Noordoostpolder/@52.6844109,5.907993,840m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x47c87b7f6681c6cf:0x403c5dffa79fbfc9!8m2!3d52.6849078!4d5.9047303?hl=ru  Developers, take note,please.

[fly_ebos]

Does this cover the country “the Netherlands” or will it be the area of the low countries, including eg Flanders (part of Belgium)?

[kevinfirth]

23 hours ago, J van E said:

 

I've seen more of those errors, not just on this picture, but 1. I guess that's what you get when you use a system to add buildings (I don't think they placed everything by hand for starters) and 2. this is alpha so I suppose real obvious errors will be corrected, if not at release than later in a patch.

 

EDIT
Here's another example of a building partially hanging over water:

 

It's not something that would annoy me totally though: there always will be oddities when placing 3D objects on photoreal. It's inevitable. I also don't think you should take 'every house' too literally: I certainly do not expect my own house to look like it does in real life. 

 

Talking about my house: it seems most houses I see on the picture are 'vrijstaande huizen', standalone houses (how do you say that in English) and I do wonder how Orbx will model the 'rijtjeshuizen' of which there are a LOT in the Netherlands. (All looking different too.) In other words, I am curious how many specific custom Dutch models there are in FTX Netherlands. I'd hate to see my house (and my entire neighbourhood) portrayed as a single house (although I'd love to have one in real life LOL )

 

This is because if you look closely all the building are completely rectangular.  The alpha build we are being shown hasn't used the actual building footprints - but placed autogen probably over an area defined by the largest length and width of a particular irregularly shaped building.  In many cases you wouldn't really notice this too much, apart from when it  leads to building in water etc.

 

It would be great indeed if these anomalies could be ironed out for release - its certainly technically possible - Arno Gerretson's scenproc utility has an algorithm in it that allows irregularly shaped building footprint data to be automatically broken down into smaller rectangles so that the end representation more closely matches the irregular building shapes.  Pre-processing of the data may therefore be possible to make it even more accurate.  It may depend on source data quality, performance, legal stuff etc I don't know.

 

Perhaps one of the OrbX devs could enlighten us a bit if possible?

[kevinfirth]

22 hours ago, John Venema said:

You need to remember these are alpha shots, the beta team has not even been given a build yet. During beta testing each km square of the Netherlands will be inspected by the team and any such anomalies will be pointed out to the development team.

 

Whilst we do appreciate fair critique, it's far too early to be nit-picking these screenshots  

Please don't take my previous post as nitpicking - it's great to see a more scenery like this being produced  

[NoLonger]

2 hours ago, fly_ebos said:

Does this cover the country “the Netherlands” or will it be the area of the low countries, including eg Flanders (part of Belgium)?

 

I think it's the Netherlands only. I do have to say I wonder how things will look near the border when photoreal meets FTX Global, specially in places where you are bound to see a lot of Belgium or Germany, like around Susteren in Limburg where the country is rather small. Maybe the photoreal will pass the border a little everywhere...? But well, I am sure the Orbx team will make the transition smooth.  

[sightseer]

It looks great to me and I hope as much of the world as possible gets redone with this 'photoreal plus accurate autogen' concept.  (done well - like this appears to be - of course)

[Tony Wroblewski]

Looks very good and a welcome change to landclass scenery. My guess is that you've used the 3DShapes NL data for the buildings? When I looked at this data some time ago it was hard to know what was a terraced property and what wasn't, the data simply shows it as a building with some basic info such as height and type, so I suspect some guess work will be needed here to use the correct autogen. I also had the same problems with the buildings in the water or on canals. They are marked as water buildings in the data, but it isn't always accurate, so I feel the pain for whoever is going to go through this by hand

 

Anyway, it's a great step forward though and I'm really looking forward to seeing this and the PNW in AFS

 

[Xflyboy]

5 hours ago, tonywob said:

Anyway, it's a great step forward though and I'm really looking forward to seeing this and the PNW in AFS

 

Me as well, AF2 will really shine with this new tech!

[sun_king_135]

Are there any plans to bring the other FTX regions to this new standard? 

 

Kind regards. 

[KVSandleben]

8 hours ago, sightseer said:

It looks great to me and I hope as much of the world as possible gets redone with this 'photoreal plus accurate autogen' concept.  (done well - like this appears to be - of course)

 

A pipe dream. No amount of diskspace will be sufficient, not to mention the cost of optaining suitable imagery.

[FalconAF]

35 minutes ago, KVSandleben said:

 

A pipe dream. No amount of diskspace will be sufficient, not to mention the cost of optaining suitable imagery.

 

Not a "pipe dream" at all.  He DID say, "as much of the world AS POSSIBLE".  Obviously, there isn't good photoreal coverage of the entire world that would make sense converting for our flight sim use.  So "The Coverage" would be selected with quality available source material in mind.

 

And "no amount of diskspace will be sufficient" isn't accurate at all either.  It would all depend on what the end user wanted to purchase and could afford for storage space. I already own enough hard drives to store the entire United States in Megascenery Earth products.  Yeah, if they contained all 5 seasons I would need more storage space, but it certainly wouldn't be "no amount of diskspace will be sufficient...".

 

However, it might take the next 40 years before it all happens.  And many of us will be long dead and gone by then. 

 

[Mikael Cedergren]

”A pipe dream. No amount of diskspace will be sufficient, not to mention the cost of optaining suitable imagery.”

 

With all due respect but this mindset is not one that our Swedish Ingvar Kamprad had when he first visioned and revolutionsised the idea for furniture storage with IKEA, or how the US could put the first man on the moon or how Henry Ford streamlined the automobile industry, or Steve Jobs with the iPhone and so many others. The  type reasoning will take us nowhere. Everything is possible

[Daveebee46]

This scenery looks really nice, I think I'm going to have this, Germany North and South, I think France should be under consideration.

[NoLonger]

8 hours ago, KVSandleben said:

 

A pipe dream. No amount of diskspace will be sufficient, not to mention the cost of optaining suitable imagery.

 

Nonetheless I share Dave's hope!  I do think these kind of photoreal sceneries will be limited for quite some time for various reasons, and Orbx certainly won't stop creating landclass based regions, but I am looking forward anyway to more photoreal regions! 

[John Venema]

13 hours ago, sun_king_135 said:

Are there any plans to bring the other FTX regions to this new standard? 

 

Kind regards. 

 

Some of them. Pacific Northwest (excluding Canada) will be the first. We are looking into other new USA regions being photoreal as well.

 

Here are some very early pre-alpha shots of our PNW photoreal tests, no autogen here as yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please remember these are pre-production testing shots only, a long way from the final product but I wanted to share this so you know we're already working on it for FSX/P3D and AFS2.

 

 

 

[NoLonger]

31 minutes ago, John Venema said:

There is still some work to do to refine things, for example most Dutch people live in row houses (I grew up in one), not detached houses.

 

Cool! Exactly what I asked for yesterday!

 

31 minutes ago, John Venema said:

These shots here are closer to the ground - notice how unique buildings are shaped exactly how their footprint is (the large industrial building with a circular courtyard in the last shot). You can also see smaller vegetation footprints surrounding crop fields.

 

Holy cow... This is getting even better than I thought!!! Again, I haven't been excited like this about an upcoming addon in years.  

 

Also good to see PNW is already being worked on!

 

EDIT

Loving that smaller vegetation too btw!

[jellef]

On 31-10-2017 at 12:03 PM, jellef said:

 

Neil, talking about airports in NL, I'm certain Lelystad (EHLE) is included. But do you know that it is currently extended to a much larger commercial internal airport? It will open in April 2019 but construction is well underway now.

 

Jelle

Anybody here to reply to my question?

[John Venema]

If EHLE is in the FSX database it's included. If not, then we will add it yes.

 

Update: Yes, it’s included.

[AnkH]

Any words on the size of such a "photoreal" product? Personally, I started dreaming of an ORBX Switzerland using this new technique the moment you posted the first alpha screenshot of the netherlands... shame on me

[BaronKen]

Thanks for the update and previews JV. Will be looking forward to these new additions to ORBX land!

[KVSandleben]

1 hour ago, AnkH said:

Any words on the size of such a "photoreal" product? Personally, I started dreaming of an ORBX Switzerland using this new technique the moment you posted the first alpha screenshot of the netherlands... shame on me

That would probably be well outside of the normal prize range of an FTX product.

There is a reason why Switzerland Professional is such an expensive add-on. The imagery costs a fortune.

[HiFlyer]

39 minutes ago, KVSandleben said:

There is a reason why Switzerland Professional is such an expensive add-on. The imagery costs a fortune.

 

Yet Aerofly FS2 comes with full Switzerland orthos, just waiting for the buildings......... somebody will do it, eventually.

[Neil Hill]

Hi Jelle,

 

Yes, EHLE is included but not the extension.  If Eugene can get updated PR for that extension area I'll be glad to do it but without the updated PR it would just look wrong.  If anyone's interested there are currently 25 airports and 13 gliderports in this Netherlands "region".

 

Cheers, Neil

[NoLonger]

17 minutes ago, Neil Hill said:

Hi Jelle,

 

Yes, EHLE is included but not the extension.  If Eugene can get updated PR for that extension area I'll be glad to do it but without the updated PR it would just look wrong.  If anyone's interested there are currently 25 airports and 13 gliderports in this Netherlands "region".

 

Cheers, Neil

 

Just checked a Dutch wikipedia site and it shows 21 regular airports, 6 military bases and 16 gliderports. So perhaps 2 airports (21+6=27) are missing and 3 gliderports...? Although I am sure the ones that matter are there now. 25 plus 13 is fine with me but well, while you are at it you might as well add EVERY airport there is. That would be utterly cool.

 

Here is the wiki: it also shows coordinates!

 

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_vliegvelden_in_Nederland

 

The link also shows 'chopper havens'.

[kevinfirth]

2 hours ago, KVSandleben said:

That would probably be well outside of the normal prize range of an FTX product.

There is a reason why Switzerland Professional is such an expensive add-on. The imagery costs a fortune.

But I would pay a premium for a quality photoreal region to reflect that cost  Granted I may be in the minority but who knows?

More PR us regions first is a sensible strategy, since I think US imagery is freely available? if that creates the demand for that type of scenery (and I fully expect it will) hopefully Orbx would consider reworking existing regions in PR?   I will personally subsidise the UK to some extent if its a project Orbx would consider  And I have a collection of open source licence free land use, building and vegetation GIS data I've built up which I'm happy to turn over...

[Mikael Cedergren]

You are not in the minorty Kevinfirth I would not imagine! I too would pay a premium for quality photo regions. By the way, will the Orbx PNW region photoreal blend well with all the Orbx PNW airports and their surrounding photoreal? Nothing more frustrating coming from a regional photoreal area and approaching another developers photoreal airport surrounding and the color is just darker or way lighter. It takes away so much fro the immersion.  

[pmb]

57 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

But I would pay a premium for a quality photoreal region to reflect that cost  Granted I may be in the minority but who knows?

Add me here, too.

 

The future will certainly depend on the commercial success of the NL project. Should the NL region (and following photoreal regions) keep what they promise and sell well - what I expect - ORBX might certainly adapt their future projects accordingly. As any successful company, they have always said, they will do what they can expect to sell well.

 

Kind regards, Michael

 

[NoLonger]

50 minutes ago, pmb said:

Add me here, too.

 

The future will certainly depend on the commercial success of the NL project. Should the NL region (and following photoreal regions) keep what they promise and sell well - what I expect - ORBX might certainly adapt their future projects accordingly. As any successful company, they have always said, they will do what they can expect to sell well.

 

Kind regards, Michael

 

 

In that regards you could say that choosing the Netherlands is a gamble because it is not the most interesting country to fly over. But maybe that's because I live there.  Foreigners might think otherwise. At the same time: there are a lot of flighsimmers with enough money to spend in this wealthy country so... we'll see. I am happy anyway Orbx choose the Netherlands to be the first!  Come to think of it: another advantages is the size: people are probably more willing to give a small country a try, which won't force them to buy a new HD right away. Ah, well, I am sure Orbx gave it some thought and know what they're doing!

[kevinfirth]

1 minute ago, J van E said:

 

In that regards you could say that choosing the Netherlands is a gamble because it is not the most interesting country to fly over. But maybe that's because I live there.  Foreigners might think otherwise. At the same time: there are a lot of flighsimmers with enough money to spend in this wealthy country so... we'll see. I am happy anyway Orbx choose the Netherlands to be the first!

 

J, I don't think its much of a gamble at all.  It looks great in Alpha, and JV has confirmed those bits we've nitpicked about already  will most likely be addressed.  I predict it will be a runaway success, to be closely followed by the same with PNW (that might even tempt me to fly outside the UK..!  

[NoLonger]

38 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

 

J, I don't think its much of a gamble at all.  It looks great in Alpha, and JV has confirmed those bits we've nitpicked about already  will most likely be addressed.  I predict it will be a runaway success, to be closely followed by the same with PNW (that might even tempt me to fly outside the UK..!  

 

Oh, I am also sure the product will be totally awesome: it looks totally awesome right now already!  I am just wondering how many people are interested in my flat country.  But well, maybe a lot of people are very interested in this new tech and approach and they will all get it, no matter what country it is. 

[KVSandleben]

2 hours ago, J van E said:

In that regards you could say that choosing the Netherlands is a gamble because it is not the most interesting country to fly over. But maybe that's because I live there.  Foreigners might think otherwise.

 

If you say that as a local one can be sure it is correct.

I have to agree there. I tested NL2000 extensively when it came out for FS9. I liked the effort, but geographically the Netherlands suffer from the same problem as most of the parts of northern Germany. All is flat as a pan. It's the area I try to avoid when I plan holidays at home.

[kevinfirth]

11 hours ago, John Venema said:

We can match all building footprints precisely. There is still some work to do to refine things, for example most Dutch people live in row houses (I grew up in one), not detached houses. So working within the limitations of the autogen building system we will refine the buildings to more closely resemble Dutch row houses.

 

These shots here are closer to the ground - notice how unique buildings are shaped exactly how their footprint is (the large industrial building with a circular courtyard in the last shot). You can also see smaller vegetation footprints surrounding crop fields.

 

And yes, we will have the tulip fields showing from April-May for the season  

 

Superb John, better and better  

[Mike707]

2 hours ago, J van E said:

 

I am just wondering how many people are interested in my flat country.  But well, maybe a lot of people are very interested in this new tech and approach and they will all get it, no matter what country it is. 

I love how the new tech looks and the thought of flying over real terrain and accurate autogen interests me greatly. That gives the user much more to explore. Day one purchase for me.