The entire earth eventually being in the sim?

  • hi this is a question for the devs. Will the entire earth eventually be in aerofly fs 4? I know that satellite imagery needs to become available but will we eventually be able to fly anywhere on earth in aerofly fs 4? And are there any plans for dubai region?

    • Official Post

    Technically you can already fly around the globe, so the entire earth is in the sim... :P

    Unfortunately the high resolution images take up a lot of storage space, so we focus on smaller regions for now.

    But we're constantly working on new regions and more airports to extend the coverage of high resolution scenery.

  • I doubt that the entire earth will ever be in Aerofly FS (any future version) unless IPACS switches to something like X-Plane's plausible but not photorealistic tiles terrain system or MSFS 2020's online streaming of orthophoto scenery from the cloud. Under IPACS current scenery implementation with low to medium resolution orthophoto scenery, the so-called HD scenery DLC packs each take 80 gigabytes of storage for a total of 240GB for the three that only cover western Europe and maybe about 15% of the USA. A wild guess is that it would take about 20 more 80GB DLCs to cover the rest of the world which would be too much dedicated drive storage for most people to commit for a single game. Plus all that would most likely cost more than the net capital value of IPACS company several times over.


    My suggestion for IPACS, granted I know absolutely nothing about scenery development, is that they go ahead and build in to the base game all the cultivation (trees and buildings and roads) and higher resolution terrain elevation mesh for the rest of the world. But to keep the costs and disk storage requirements down, IPACS should not bother to attempt to provide the orthophoto scenery images because that would cost too much in licensing costs. They should just continue to use the ultra low resolution images they have currently under license for the rest of the world. Then leave the job of creating the high resolution orthophoto image scenery tiles to Aerofly FS community volunteer devs who can freely use Google and Bing Satellite maps and post on flight-sim.org like they already do now for Aerofly FS 4. That way IPACS avoids the license fee costs for sourcing satellite images and the volunteer devs avoid the difficult task of creating cultivation and higher resolution terrain elevation mesh for their orthophoto scenery packages. Leave the airport creation for the rest of the world up to the community volunteers using the new online airport creation tool.


    An example of how this would work already exists for Aerofly FS 4. Well sorta anyway. If you look at Florida in the USA, IPACS seems to have created cultivation for most of the state (except for the northern part and the panhandle part I think) but not the HD orthophoto tiles or the HD elevation mesh (which does not matter since Florida is pretty flat anyway). And our excellent community volunteer developer, IZ0JUB has previously created the HD orthophoto image scenery tiles for Aerofly FS 2 that should also work for Aerofly FS 4 per RE: IPACS - Any Plans to Finish USA HD Scenery Offering? using the Aerofly FS 4 cultivation that already seems to be present for central Florida.

    More info about this on USA - Florida Keys

    Edited 2 times, last by Jet-Pack (IPACS): Merged 2 posts created by jayeye2011 into this post. (May 6, 2023 at 10:10 PM).

  • User orthos still do not show up properly, if you do not disable IPACS buildin orthos. Otherwise you will end up with a mixture of user and ipacs tiles switching during approach.

    Thanks Thomas, for that, would it still be necessary to know which one? Because in the C: root folder of FS4, disabled...all Europe or the rest of the world is not very useful or advisable. Or did I forget something?

    Best wishes 😉

    Pascal

    AFS2 / FS4 / MSFS / - Intel(R) Core i7 -12800HX 4.80 GHz - DDR5 4800MHz 32 Go - NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3070 Ti 8 GB GDDR6X - 2x 2 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4