John Venema Posted January 7, 2019 Share Posted January 7, 2019 When Eugene’s team is finished with TE GB South for P3D, they will be 100% focused on finishing openLC Africa. This is at the expense of further TE GB regions being released but I feel that OLC Africa has been pushed back for long enough now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dadtom65 Posted January 7, 2019 Share Posted January 7, 2019 Hi John. Any idea’s when the Pacific Northwest True Earth might be coming out. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Avance Posted January 7, 2019 Share Posted January 7, 2019 At the moment, I probably won't buy TE products for P3D. I will be satisfied with the future OLC Africa and Asia and the regions to come. I do indeed find that future TE products consume far too much Go. I don't know the United Kingdom well enough and the EU England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are more than enough for me. I bought TE Netherland and after flying a few times over it, I din't go back there very often. Keep developing beautiful regions, that will be enough for my pleasure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flya150 Posted January 7, 2019 Share Posted January 7, 2019 Regions and OLC for my liking. Scott Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benny Posted January 7, 2019 Share Posted January 7, 2019 Such an interesting thread, I mean each time MFS came out with a new version we where all amazed how it was looking better then the previous version.. and sad that our rig could not run it nicely Then came companies like ORBX-Aerosoft-FyTampa.. and we where all stuck! Then those companies keep on pushing. Then came P3D... Xplane and AF2.. Then came photo realistic scenery.. at first it look good from far but not so from close up... then came TE and AF2 (Sorry I don't own Xplane) with super real photo scenery and cultivation (3D Building). My first experience was with AF2, what???? 120 Gig for the whole thing + ORBX, Then (for me) TE Netherland... But I was OK because I have AfF2 on a 3TB HDD.. Note: Yesterday I was in Saanen, freeware from Sylvain on AF2, wile flying around I was flabbergasted by the photo-real mountain and cultivation (thanks to Sylvain I guess), it is so real that now the plane look a bit cartoonish... (I will re-upload my video on this freeware later today in the video section, I had a problem yesterday) But when I built my new rig this past fall, I really thought that a 500GB as my main drive would be enough.. I was wrong... What to do now if I want some TE? Wile writing this I have an Idea, can I buy a 2TB SSD and re-install P3D V.4 on it and keep my 500TB as my main disk and OS??? Ben Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
robespierre Posted January 7, 2019 Share Posted January 7, 2019 P3D can be installed on a drive seperate to the OS.Be advised that it is easy to miss this option on install.ORBX scenery-don't have TE/AF2 -will install scenery to P3D on this separate disc.About 12gb of space on the OS disc are needed for P3D to install correctly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tttocs Posted January 8, 2019 Share Posted January 8, 2019 On 1/6/2019 at 3:57 AM, flying_fish said: VFR flying is done by staring at the ground... (whist scanning inside as well!) and comparing it to a regional map. The closer the scenery is to the map the more realistic is the exercise. IRL, VFR flying is accomplished using a variety of navigation methods, often in combination. One of those methods is called pilotage, which is what you're referring to here. VFR refers quite literally to the set of rules under which a given flight is conducted, not to how navigation is accomplished. That said, I can easily navigate using pilotage in traditional full-fat Orbx regions - it's fun and I do it regularly. Am I interested in TE for areas I fly? Sure, but not because I think it'll make pilotage that much easier. Scott Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stewart Hobson Posted January 8, 2019 Share Posted January 8, 2019 24 minutes ago, tttocs said: That said, I can easily navigate using pilotage in traditional full-fat Orbx regions - it's fun and I do it regularly Which is what I've been saying all along. You don't need TE scenery to accomplish this. If one wants TE scenery to accomplish this type of flying, by all means, spend the money. But TE is not necessary to do so, and long time simmers can and do testify to this fact. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dave302 Posted January 9, 2019 Share Posted January 9, 2019 Good topic. As far as disk space goes, this will become less and less of an issue over time as the price for storage decreases so I see no real problem there. I can see one day having all of the U.S. and Europe, and even more, covered in TrueEarth scenery, the operative phrase here being "one day". It will take a very long time and cost a lot of money to do this, which is why I am not terribly interested in the TrueEarth-type scenery right now. Personally, I'd rather have the entire world covered with openLC so that at least I can fly anywhere I desire with accurate landclass and customized, realistic textures. The TrueEarth scenery is truly beautiful, but I wonder if it won't stick out like a sore thumb when surrounded by lower quality landclass-based scenery. I can imagine flying across Europe or the U.S. and not being pleased to see the stark difference in areas covered by these different types of scenery. This is why I will wait until at least an entire continent is covered by the TrueEarth scenery before I buy it. In the meantime I'm happy to have the openLC scenery and eagerly await Africa/Middle East and then Asia. Dave Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flying_fish Posted January 9, 2019 Share Posted January 9, 2019 On 1/8/2019 at 7:42 PM, tttocs said: I can easily navigate using pilotage in traditional full-fat Orbx regions - it's fun and I do it regularly On 1/8/2019 at 8:09 PM, Stewart Hobson said: But TE is not necessary to do so, and long time simmers can and do testify to this fact. You are both right of course... all I'm saying is that TE will improve VFR flighing immersion enormously. For example, I just looked up a local VFR flight I did in a C152 from EGHD Plymouth (back in the day when Plymouth Flying School operated from there). It was a regular navex for the club called the 'dambusters'. It routed east towards Exeter then north to Wimleball lake, over to North Devon then back over other several lakes to Plymouth covering much of West Devon. Some of the reporting/turning points are visible in Orbx EU LC. More appear with EU England, and I expect all will be there in TE GB South. It will be possible to identify villages and towns from the air rather than a block of landclass urbanization around the larger roads. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david broome Posted January 9, 2019 Share Posted January 9, 2019 Just a general musing on one way future hardware and software "could" defeat the storage issue and at the same time greatly improve visuals. Who knows if all the technical challenges can be overcome or how long in the future they would be but these are my thoughts. There are two ways the storage issue can be addressed if we consider that ideally we would like the very best representation and realism for regions across the globe in our flight sim. The first is wait for the capacity of storage space to become large enough and cheap enough we could have a globe of hi res ortho - given the amount of space that would require this itself could be a long wait and it isn't very practicable to download that amount of data even over a theoretical 10TB connection. So it may be that a second way is more desirable, one that does not require anything like the amount of storage space Ortho demands and which ultimately could be far more visually pleasing even at ground levels. Exciting eh? Well don't over-dunk your digestives because this a blend of current cutting edge tech and some theorising how they may work together to produce such a result. With many new games that want to create huge open space areas with diverse eco systems that look great at ground level, such as the surface of the Earth, procedural generation is used. Using this technique can deliver extremely detailed surfaces without the horrible low res texture issue Ortho suffers from - but there is an issue. We want to recreate something that is already there and recognisable, not generate something new where randomness is a plus not a negative. Enter machine learning. AI could be trained to recognise land-classes, water, buildings, roads etc with very hi res ortho and build algorithms that could seed the procedural generation in such a way that it recreates that land-class as 3D environment. Maybe it would only need very detailed land class data and to fill in the blanks using that technique. The beauty of this is that the art and textures needed to generate a truly detailed 3D version (right down to 3D grass) are trivial compared to Ortho and the ground environment would be far more beautiful and if required physicalised so that weather effects were incorporated, the wind blowing the trees and grass, snow cover etc. As for all the other 3D objects such as buildings etc, they could still be custom modelled with autogen using land class data as now, perhaps they too could be far more detailed using techniques such as Object container streaming and others that Star Citizen uses. There would still need to be sacrifices made here to render city scenes but a decent bump in texture quality is very plausible It all depends how well AI can interpret Ortho and landclass data and subdivide into all the relevant ground textures to generate a 3D version and while this may seem implausible (how would it distinguish a white building from a white car etc) these are precisely the sort of thing machine learning is used for and remember AI never gets tired of learning, running such a program 24/7 could yield excellent results. We are already seeing machine learning being brought into gaming to improve rendering techniques and performance with the new G-Force RTX cards - perhaps one day our sim worlds will be generated with ray tracing. How far away could all this be if it is viable? Comfortably within a decade I would say - we aren't in Kansas anymore. The biggest issue is whether people have the funds or will to invest in the R&D it would require. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted January 9, 2019 Share Posted January 9, 2019 It is entirely feasible that we could render the entire world using a small fraction of the data, simply by procedural generation of ortho-like imagery using GIS source data (shapefiles, vector, DTM, DEM, DSM etc) which are collected on a country-wide or continent-wide basis and highly compressed. The sim engine would decompress the source GIS data in real-time based on your location and build out a 95% accurate terrain using 3D model libraries and a central repository of ortho textures to represent about 64,556 different land use classes of 16 4K texture variants each. You would need about 150GB in total for the ground terrain and 3D model texture database (worldwide) and another 50GB for the GIS source data. It would be at very high resolution too, about 25cm/pixel. So you'd squeeze the world into 200GB. And it would be so detailed you could walk or drive around your neighbourhoods and recognise it. Downsides? Well, this flight sim engine has not been built yet, and for loading times to be acceptable we need faster CPUs with more cores and more powerful GPUs. To be honest, I think this engine won't just be for flight, it will likely be a complete earth simulation that supports any type of movement, sport or pastime, including flying. It will be online with millions of users, and be built for VR from the outset. It will also be streamed in real-time to mobile devices with 5G connections, negating the need for local storage at all. Go see Ready Player One, a great book made into a half-decent movie by Steven Spielberg. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jpreou Posted January 9, 2019 Share Posted January 9, 2019 Or better yet, every license for a flight sim includes a drone user license. Where ever you fly, virtually, the drone goes also and you see the exact view that the drone camera sees. If you swap region or area, you get re-linked to a different drone. Scenery is always up-to-date since its a real-time view. Easy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andy1252 Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 11 hours ago, david broome said: How far away could all this be if it is viable? Comfortably within a decade I would say - we aren't in Kansas anymore. 10 hours ago, John Venema said: Downsides? Well, this flight sim engine has not been built yet, and for loading times to be acceptable we need faster CPUs with more cores and more powerful GPUs. To be honest, I think this engine won't just be for flight, it will likely be a complete earth simulation that supports any type of movement, sport or pastime, including flying. Thank you both. I for one had no idea about any of this stuff - this is a hugely exciting prospect. If anything's going to prompt me to take better care of myself so I can stagger on for a few more years it's this <grin> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flying_fish Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 On 1/4/2019 at 3:44 PM, bradley27 said: im sure i cant be the only person that feels its getting alittle out of hand Bet you are glad you asked now!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbmoke Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 I'm relatively new to this flight sim malarky, so decided to go big on a new PC and went straight in to X-Plane 11 and immediately went for the TE Great Britain additions (eagerly awaiting the north one to be released). Now my question to the OrbX scenery makers is this: is it your intention at sometime in the future to develop True Earth Europe? I, and am sure many others here would be interested to know of OrbX's intentions on this. Also, there has been discussions above about running out of memory space as more and more enhanced scenery packages are developed and installed. As my SSD is only 1Tb, but my other drive (not SSD) is 3Tb, is it possible to automatically transfer extra scenery addons to the 3Tb drive when the 1Tb drive is full, and if so, would X-Plane 11 be able to cope with running the 2 drives in parallel without any 'hiccups' so to speak? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 Yes we will make TE regions in Europe, although not all of Europe at once, more likely each or part of its 27 member states at a time, in between USA states. Yes, XP11 can make use of any drives installed in your PC to store scenery files, no problems at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Museumkeeper Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 On 1/7/2019 at 7:47 AM, John Venema said: When Eugene’s team is finished with TE GB South for P3D, they will be 100% focused on finishing openLC Africa. This is at the expense of further TE GB regions being released but I feel that OLC Africa has been pushed back for long enough now. Hi John Does that include TE GB North for XPlane and TE GB South and Central SP1's Kind regards Ian S Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Low Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 A bit of a shame that additional volumes of TrueEarth GB for P3D will be put on hold, but I understand why John wants to get Open LC Africa done when interested customers have been waiting a long time. I guess it just gives me more time to sort the funds out for a new PC Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 4 minutes ago, Christopher Low said: A bit of a shame that additional volumes of TrueEarth GB for P3D will be put on hold, but I understand why John wants to get Open LC Africa done when interested customers have been waiting a long time. I guess it just gives me more time to sort the funds out for a new PC We are looking at hiring some contractors to take over the TE region porting work so there is not a substantial gap between them. 20 minutes ago, Ian S said: Hi John Does that include TE GB North for XPlane and TE GB South and Central SP1's Kind regards Ian S No, those are on track for release either this month or early next. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevinfirth Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 2 hours ago, John Venema said: Yes we will make TE regions in Europe, although not all of Europe at once, more likely each or part of its 27 member states at a time, in between USA states Super. Do you have any idea in what sort of order you are looking at producing European products in please? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Museumkeeper Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 3 hours ago, John Venema said: We are looking at hiring some contractors to take over the TE region porting work so there is not a substantial gap between them. No, those are on track for release either this month or early next. Thanks John Kind regards Ian S Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Benny Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 4 hours ago, John Venema said: Yes, XP11 can make use of any drives installed in your PC to store scenery files, no problems at all. What about P3D? I mean I was thinking of buying a 2TB (or3) and reinstalling P3D on it but not as a C drive. Keeping my C drive for OS Ben Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 Yes same for P3D. Symbolic links can be used for any application. There is zero risk putting sims on your boot partition, I'm not sure why you would be worried about that. I have Windows booting from my 2TB Samsung EVO 970 SSD, which also has P3D and XP11 and all their scenery on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
david broome Posted January 10, 2019 Share Posted January 10, 2019 20 hours ago, John Venema said: It is entirely feasible that we could render the entire world using a small fraction of the data, simply by procedural generation of ortho-like imagery using GIS source data (shapefiles, vector, DTM, DEM, DSM etc) which are collected on a country-wide or continent-wide basis and highly compressed. The sim engine would decompress the source GIS data in real-time based on your location and build out a 95% accurate terrain using 3D model libraries and a central repository of ortho textures to represent about 64,556 different land use classes of 16 4K texture variants each. You would need about 150GB in total for the ground terrain and 3D model texture database (worldwide) and another 50GB for the GIS source data. It would be at very high resolution too, about 25cm/pixel. So you'd squeeze the world into 200GB. And it would be so detailed you could walk or drive around your neighbourhoods and recognise it. Downsides? Well, this flight sim engine has not been built yet, and for loading times to be acceptable we need faster CPUs with more cores and more powerful GPUs. To be honest, I think this engine won't just be for flight, it will likely be a complete earth simulation that supports any type of movement, sport or pastime, including flying. It will be online with millions of users, and be built for VR from the outset. It will also be streamed in real-time to mobile devices with 5G connections, negating the need for local storage at all. Go see Ready Player One, a great book made into a half-decent movie by Steven Spielberg. Thanks. Yes it makes much more sense for such technology to be an engine that can be used for many things than limited to flight sim. We will have dedicated desktop CPU's with 16 cores this year but the GPU's powerful enough may take a little longer, just depends how much faster they need to be that current top end GPU's though some performance could also be gained if such an engine (as is very likely) utilised the new tech that comes with RTX cards and beyond and of course used an API such as Vulkan. There are also new software techniques that can reduce the workload which if built from the ground up could be well optimised for such an engine. The funny thing with future tech is you are never quite sure how quickly it will advance and often it is market forces that dictate. Thing is, we think are around the corner can take decades and things we think are decades away can be suddenly be in common use. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Low Posted January 11, 2019 Share Posted January 11, 2019 Quote We will have dedicated desktop CPU's with 16 cores this year but the GPU's powerful enough may take a little longer, just depends how much faster they need to be than current top end GPU's...... You would think with the prices that Nvidia are trying to sell the RTX 2080Ti for that it must have the power of SkyNet As for TrueEarth versions of other European countries......I am interested in purchasing a detailed version of EBBR Brussels in the near future, so TrueEarth Belgium would be nice Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
orbmoke Posted January 11, 2019 Share Posted January 11, 2019 On 1/10/2019 at 11:21 AM, Christopher Low said: A bit of a shame that additional volumes of TrueEarth GB for P3D will be put on hold, but I understand why John wants to get Open LC Africa done when interested customers have been waiting a long time. I guess it just gives me more time to sort the funds out for a new PC Make sure that when you DO decide what to buy for your new PC, it's imperative in my opinion to go for the greatest memory SSD hard drive that you can possibly get. 1Tb just isn't enough memory. I don't know if they exist yet, but look for a 3Tb or even higher if possible. I'm just guessing that True Earth Global could be in the region of 10Tb, or even more maybe! Put it this way, I have on my 'C' 1Tb SSD hard drive. the operating system, X-Plane 11, True Earth South and Central, also, OrbX's enhanced airport sceneries (6 altogether). That has already filled up nearly half the memory space so far! My new PC specs are as follows: Desktop PC (64 bit) with .... Intel i9-7920X 12 x 2.90GHz GeForce RTX2080Ti 11Gb 32Gb RAM DDR4 3000Mz 1Tb SSD M.2 PCle 3Tb HDD USB 3.1 WiFi HDMI 2.0 4K resolution Windows 10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bradley27 Posted January 14, 2019 Author Share Posted January 14, 2019 On 1/10/2019 at 10:12 AM, flying_fish said: Bet you are glad you asked now!!! Was thinking the same thing Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kiki Posted January 19, 2019 Share Posted January 19, 2019 OLC Africa! I´ve been waiting for a scenery like that for ages. For sure, that will be a good seller. There is so much to explore and possibilities for different kind of simming in Africa. Just think about it: airliners with modern or classical tubes, bush flying etc. I will start it with a cargo flights in Kenya and Tanzania with good old DC-3! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MZee1960 Posted April 7, 2019 Share Posted April 7, 2019 I understood the Orbx scenery 'structure' until the TE regions started to arrive, and loved the way everything 'fit in' like pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle. I would be very much interested in how the TE products 'fit in' to complement the existing Orbx products : Global Base, Vector, Open LC, Full Fat Regions, Airports etc. A bit confused, I guess ....... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nick Cooper Posted April 8, 2019 Share Posted April 8, 2019 Hello, TEGB products are regions and therefore "fit in" in the same way that other regions do. The difference is that they are photo scenery based throughout, whereas the regions are landclass based. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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