Charl wrote:Robin
What's your internet speed/load time for this stuff?
I imagine it's not really flyable in present incarnation, or is it?
And I assume the mesh just sits under the phototextures?
You'll notice from all my screenshots that I'm flying something pretty slow:) I would imagine that it would be next to useless if you fly fast. The TP manual acknowledges the texture load, suggesting that you either fly round and round in the same spot, or simply pause the sim until the textures catch up. It also suggests mapping the scenery refresh to the keyboard, and I use this a lot. For instance, in the Auckland shot above I took off from Ardmore, but by the time I got to NZAA the textures where very blurry. A scenery refresh fixed it, but it is a slow process. Returning to Ardmore is a bit more successful, as I've already flown the area. That's one thing I notice -- textures are sharper behind you
The initial load is quite long -- about 5 minutes. However I'm always surprised how quickly a flight starts. For exploring a particular area down low and slow, it works very well.
Textures are cached -- both downloaded images and those converted for the sim. The texture folder for NZ, which has cached the area I've flown over, is getting rather unwieldy -- it takes about 10 minutes for Explorer to access the folder, as it includes 270,000 textures totaling over 1GB. This doesn't affect the sim loading though, just Explorer for some reason.
You definitely notice the patchwork nature of Google Earth. Some areas are very low resolution, but even the high resolution stuff is made up of lots of different colours/times/cloud cover etc.
Of course water isn't masked, so you are always looking at photos of water. Again, this is very patchy.
These photoreal textures, like all photoreal in FSX, sit on top of mesh without issue. Airport/park polys sit on top of the photo, which tends to obscure the photoreal detail a little. The author of TP suggests excluding these for areas where you plan to fly often using TP.
Sure, it has a long way to go -- starting at an airport is a bit bland without autogen, and you don't really get the benefit of the high resolution textures until you are up off the ground.
By the way, I did an experiment, putting my Marlborough autogen into the Tile Proxy texture folder, and it works well, except that it is a bit out of alignment. I think this is just because of the difference in the way TP works compared to normal Georeferenced TIFFs. Neither one is probably more accurate than the other.
It would be a good idea though to offer users the choice of my custom photoreal or TP photoreal, as TP allows for a higher resolution -- 1.2m compared to 2.4m. Picton, though, is very low resolution and just turns into mush using TP.
EDIT: a quick check of my internet usage suggests TP consumes just under 50MB per hour.
