Yeah that's because the scenery is pre-rendered. Who said we have to pre-render the scenery? :)
Rendering in real time would only require a library of geodata which would be similar in size to the current FG scenery.
In that case, it wouldn't look like TerraScene scenery -- TerraScene used much more detailed inputs than we use (i.e. every city street in the U.S.).
Furthermore, you have to consider the land area we'd have to be rendering in real time. Average visibility on the U.S. east coast is about 7 statute miles, or about 11 km. That means that we'd have to render 380 km^2 of scenery in real time. In the Western plains and mountains, visibility of 50 statue miles (80 km) is not unusual, requiring rendering over 20,000 km^2 of scenery in real time.
Yip but the results still looked better than default scenery outside of the US. One can always add more data as it becomes available.
Actually, our scenery looks better than TerraScene did for Canada (I tried it), but TerraScene could have been tweaked to use non-U.S. scenery more effectively.
Well it was only 7.5 meters/pixel - I was thinking of at least 4 meters/pixel and possible down to 1 meter/pixel.
Also we can have extra high res textures around airports.
I think that what you're talking about probably will happen, but I'd guess that it will take at least four more generations of Moore's law before the highest-end personal computers can do this at a reasonable framerate even with the lower visibility.
If you generate the scenery at run time you will know the terrain type. Alternatively you could use the geodata to find that out.
Quite right, but the geodata would have to match the textures, including any fudging or adjusting done to smooth out curves and make things look better -- otherwise, you'll get trees in the middle of rivers, etc.
It would be neat if FG could properly support large ortho photos to start with.
That sounds like a reasonable project -- do you want to take a run at it?
All the best,
David
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