Hey guys,
Love the sim. The aerial photography is addicting, and I'm having a very hard time going back to FSX / Orbx patchwork texture-autogen when they are just abstractions of the real thing.
However, flying low is not a good experience right now, and it's obvious trying to populate the world with 3D objects would take forever. However, I was wondering, would it not be possible to create bump or displacement maps to give the ground more texture when flying low? IE, areas that are green: any darker smaller object is likely to be a tree, bump/displace that darker value upwards. Or in urban environments, isolate road color and bump everything else (all the houses/buildings) up. That should allow them to catch light highlights and help depth. Some of this might need texture tagging or whatnot, but for relatively low maintenance maybe it would help. (or maybe it would be a mess, I don't know).
For water: Clearly we are missing specular reflections of the sun and detail maps/animation of waves.. sorely needed. But at the same time, it is wonderful to have all the lakes/ponds/streams be the proper color of real life, rather than one solid hue like in FSX, which isn't great either. Would it possible to maintain the color and texture of your current water, and overlay a different specular material, with wave detail (bump map possibly?) overlaid to give it texture and catch highlights? I'd hate to super real ground texture run into cartoony water, but at the same time it's bizarre to fly over glasslike featureless deep water.
Anyway, good stuff. I'd love to see boats leaving trails, road traffic on major arteries, street lights on urban centers at night, and air traffic in the sky (even if they are just flying loops or are magically appearing, I just want to swoop down on them!), or have mulitplayer where I can see other people's planes. That's my wishlist! Things that help immersion. I'm not so interested in ATC and proper procedures etc, I just love flying around. Many thanks!!!