Aerofly FS 2 UK Scenery

  • Are there currently any plans to develop Scenery/Airports for the United Kingdom?

    Little doubt there are many Aerofly FS 2 customers , like me, that are keen to be able to take advantage of the simulator in an area of the world familiar to us.

    I'd particularly like to see the UK rendered in enough detail to be able to navigate via an accurate VFR representation, ideally photo-realistic or as close as possible using high resolution textures - I appreciate I might be pushing my luck at this stage of development!

    Whether the additional scenery & airports be developed and provided via IPACS or ORBX, I have little doubt this area of the world would prove popular.

  • Hi

    There was this discussion about ORBX and UK earlier, where somebody mentioned that access to high quality aerial imagery makes the task difficult and expensive.

    That got me thinking.. ORBX have produced England and Wales regions for other sims already. Wouldn't it be good enough as a source material for AFS version or am I missing something?

    Jay

    Over and Out

    Jay

  • Hi

    There was this discussion about ORBX and UK earlier, where somebody mentioned that access to high quality aerial imagery makes the task difficult and expensive.

    That got me thinking.. ORBX have produced England and Wales regions for other sims already. Wouldn't it be good enough as a source material for AFS version or am I missing something?

    Jay

    Do they use land class for the other sims? Maybe its not actual aerial images?

    Regards,

    Jan

  • ORBX used landclass exclusively so far (except in the vicinity of some of their airports). They are going to release a first photo region soon as a test, i.e. the Netherlands. However they will not redo the UK in photo-style anytime soon, as far as I recall a statement by them.

    You may also keep in mind there was an ambitious project by Earthsimulations to do the whole UK in - extremely high-resolution - photo plus autogen plus objects. Screenshots and first published areas in Scotland looked excellent beyond imagination. Despite they cancelled the project soon because of the disproportion between buyers and the price of imagery. This was for FSX/P3D, you can imagine the proportion for AFS2.

    There has been a dated, considerably lower resolution FSX photo scenery available from another maker (PlayHorizon/Generation, I think), which I don't own though.

    Kind regards, Michael

    Intel i7-6700K 4.0 GHz / Asus MAXIMUS VIII RANGER / Kingston 32 GB DDR4 / Samsung SSD M.2 500 GB + Samsung SSD 1 TB + Intel SSD 500 GB (AeroflyFS2) + WD HD 6 TB / EVGA GTX 1080Ti 11 GB / LG 34UM95 3440 x 1440 / HP Reverb / Win 10/64

    Edited once, last by pmb (February 23, 2018 at 12:37 AM).

  • XP11 with ortho4XP and various community made autogen items can create very impressive scenery, so I'd guess we might be stuck with the home made versions using the IPACS tools. It seems that commercial costs of using photo scenery and charging for it is prohibitive, as you just aren't going to sell enough copies to make your money back.

    i5-12600K/MSI RTX 3080/Win11/64Gb RAM/Asus Xonar DX+ Beyer DT990 pro headphones/LG 34" UM65 @2560x1080/Quest Pro/TM Warthog+VKB MkIV Rudder pedals

  • Alayn266 and others,

    Tileproxy is much different than FSEarthTiles!! The concept of Tileproxy is to pull from a virtual earth service just what tiles are needed right now and place them in your PC memory so they can be transferred to the GPU for viewing while you fly - in AFS2 methodology, you would create all the scenery\images\map_xx_xxxx_xxxx.ttc files "on the fly". This concept worked well several years ago when Internet speeds were quite a bit less than now. It did take a few seconds before you could start flying after you chose a location but then it simply loaded the required tiles out ahead of your view. It also cached the tiles on disk so if you wanted to refly that area, there wouldn't be any need to reload them. It actually works very well - but it took a real smart chap to figure out how to do it - Microsoft, of course, didn't develop it. The beauty of Tileproxy is that you can fly anywhere in the world with Photoreal imagery underneath - the problem for us would be cultivation and airports - they still have to be created ahead of time.

    Dave W.

  • Well, since this thread has already been hijacked, I'll just underline the advantage that TileProxy provides - namely, you don't have to download and install gigabytes of photorealistic tiles to fly anywhere in the world where aerial/satellite photos are available.

    But Christian Buchner has abandoned TileProxy. There is a new approach being developed, that gives a similar end result without a lot of installation hassle. ''World Terrain" is the name of this new FSX/P3D utility, and it's available for free evaluation. I use it all the time for flying low and slow in FSX Steam Edition.

  • Many thanks to all for the informative replies.

    Sadly, the impression is that high quality scenery for the UK is looking unlikely in the near future, which is a shame.

    An ideal solution imho would be to associate scenery generation with an already robust and detailed mapping service like Google Earth. I appreciate this would no doubt be difficult, not least because, I would assume, increased server load at Google's end and the fact there is a profit being generated from the sale of the end-product - the sim would require some form of agreement and compensation for Google.

  • While ORBX has mentioned that they will not redo the UK in photoreal due to the high cost associated with it, they may eventually be willing to convert some of their amazing UK airport sceneries to Aerofly FS 2 and then add some photoreal area around them, similar to what they did with Meigs Field where they also added additional photoreal scenery in the surrounding area. This could be a pragmatic compromise and provide us with some high quality UK content. I personally would welcome this approach as I am a big fan of the UK as well and it is my main flight territory in FSX. As we do have the Geoconvert Tool, we could then add additional surrounding scenery to those airports on our own. Maybe something ORBX might consider to do?

    Kind regards,

    Jerome

  • While ORBX has mentioned that they will not redo the UK in photoreal due to the high cost associated with it, they may eventually be willing to convert some of their amazing UK airport sceneries to Aerofly FS 2 and then add some photoreal area around them, similar to what they did with Meigs Field where they also added additional photoreal scenery in the surrounding area. This could be a pragmatic compromise and provide us with some high quality UK content. I personally would welcome this approach as I am a big fan of the UK as well and it is my main flight territory in FSX. As we do have the Geoconvert Tool, we could then add additional surrounding scenery to those airports on our own. Maybe something ORBX might consider to do?

    Kind regards,

    Jerome

    Any progress towards UK coverage would certainly be welcome Jerome.

    IPACS have certainly provided a reasonable set of tools to enable scenery and airport development for Aereofly FS 2 but, inevitably, to be able to create accurate and impressive results requires a certain skill set.

    As an enthusiastic photographer I'm comfortable and competent with Photoshop but when it comes to 3D software - design and rendering, using, for example, 3DS I'm unfortunately lost and have never had the inclination or will power to put in the effort to learn.

    I certainly hope that the UK is modeled at some point - as you've said, there are already several products that would serve as a good starting point, even if developers are reluctant to begin from fresh.


  • I certainly hope that the UK is modeled at some point - as you've said, there are already several products that would serve as a good starting point, even if developers are reluctant to begin from fresh.

    In case of ORBX, they would not even have to begin from fresh. They recently mentioned that converting an airport from P3D to Aerofly FS 2 takes about 15% of the original time to build the airport, which seems to be quite an efficient conversion process they came up with. They also announced a large amount of such airport conversions from P3D to Aerofly FS 2 for this year, and so I am hoping that some of their UK airports may eventually also be among those. It would definately be a great start for the UK in Aerofly FS 2.

    Kind regards,

    Jerome

  • In case of ORBX, they would not even have to begin from fresh. They recently mentioned that converting an airport from P3D to Aerofly FS 2 takes about 15% of the original time to build the airport, which seems to be quite an efficient conversion process they came up with. They also announced a large amount of such airport conversions from P3D to Aerofly FS 2 for this year, and so I am hoping that some of their UK airports may eventually also be among those. It would definately be a great start for the UK in Aerofly FS 2.

    Kind regards,

    Jerome

    That sounds promising.

    The focus, certainly in the past, tends to be towards major English airports opposed to my location in the Glasgow area of Scotland - Glasgow International - EGPF is my closest airport (hence my username)

    It's understandable due to population statistics etc. There have been some exceptions E.G. http://www.uk2000scenery.com/newsite/My_Hom…iles/Page2.html and several other.

    If ORBX can convert their existing UK based scenery and airport products it would certainly be welcomed. If it is actually as straightforward and as fast as they seem to be suggesting there is little reason for them not to proceed.

  • Orbx has tentatively offered the possibility of Germany photoreal, and while many people supported the idea, there are quite some people against it. Earthsimulation did a fabulous Scotland scenery for FSX quite long ago. Too bad they went out of business and it's not for sale any longer. I am willing to pay hundreds of dollars if it's converted to AFS2.