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Sorry ... but I have spent now so much time on this (and even in PM with Roman) .... I need to take a break here (and now). I think ,most of the things are already more or less answered here (or "between the lines" ). PS: about the rotation: that is "automatic" and done by the shader (but of course, even a shader can be reprogrammed )

Colin, do you know how a Global Scenery is generated? I mean, especially keeping in mind how big our planet is, how diverse it is, and how complex it would be to cater for every possible local specialty? The thing is, that we need to have ways to create it all in "automated" ways (without too much manual intervention), where we have to rely on existing (or usually improved / processed) data sources and complex algorithms to translate it in a - here comes the word Ben highlighted - plausible world. Everything else is NOT possible / feasible when you need to take care of an entire planet. BUT of course this doesn't stops anyone to create his own, regional sceneries, where he can take care of every tiny detail he wants to (the X-Plane engine and scenery system is open enough to give you almost every possibility you might dream of - but its of course a lot work, which doesn't comes via magic) Now for the trees / forests ... Their type is not decided by biogeographic zones (which we have quite a lot on our planet ... especially if one takes a regionalized and not generic approach). That would be too diverse, if one wanted to do it in a perfect way .... For example take the WWF Global 200 ecoregion classification ... yes, it divides out planet in 200 different ecoregions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_200 This would mean, we would need to handcraft for each of those regions an own set of different forest (sparse and dense versions of deciduous, mixed and coniferous forests etc. ) ... and try to make enough (different) textures of all possible trees there. Definitely not an easy task (I know, because I deed the XP8/9 forest sceneries and had help from a good friend with crafting all the textures and forests .... some info about that is still on my site: http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/old-forest-downloads/ and http://www.alpilotx.net/documents/ ) ... so, thats why we go the plausible approach, and "only" work with climate zones for the forests (and for the ground textures too). These are derived from high res - real - climate data and are usually a combination of temperature and precipitation zones. This is then also the reason why you might see the same forests on Hawaii and Oregon ... obviously you have similar climates in the given location OR that texture was used in more than one of the climate sets (it might be understandable, that we did not - until now at least - try to reproduce thousands of different tree species )

Tsetosh is right on point here, and I appreciate that he was able to answer from a different customer point of view. If we're going to be really honest here, sparkie66, PMDG too has had their fair share of delay, most recently being the week long debacle for the 777. If memory serves me right for the Saab release, we were pretty much about the same. Unexpected things happen, especially when it comes to programming. More than anything, I think a lot more goes on than meets the eye that a lot of customers do not realize when it comes to getting a product online for distribution (even after the product is complete). Over the years we have done various types of rollouts. I personally prefer those that don't specify dates, but I know customers in general have shared their frustration over being kept in the dark. This is one of those scenarios where it's "damned if you do, and damned if you don't". We either take the heat for being silent, or we take the heat for being talkative, but even still I am trying to find a balance. As has been seen lately, one of those ideas is to share informative dialogue with our customers not many days before something is to happen. It's still a best guess scenario, but the premise definitely is to let customers know we care and that we haven't gone on vacation to leave things in the state they are currently in. If there's anything we truly do care about it's our customers and making sure we can do as much as we plausibly can to please them. Rest assured, this update will get out and your patience in the process is very much appreciated. We're just busy making it a little better than it already is.

Thanks, I will post here when we are done.

For me no problem. Always share that modification for free, to let all the users use it. Of course! No problem! Of course let know the users in a text file, that they must preserve the original files in case something goes wrong.

isn't Xplane10 a flight sim or a Tree Simulator

Yes! of course the engine can do a lot ... but its very complex to artificially create a lot of content (we already do much more than you might imagine ) ... As I told in my previous posts: we have ideas about this too ... but none of them are trivial, nor will they happen in the near future (like including the road network structure etc.). Forest lines are a similar idea (do you know my "treeline farms" add-on scenery for Europe/USA ?? You find it on my website) ... which improves exactly this problem ... And another thought: you tell "If you look at Ukrainian fields" .... here you might see the problem. If I (I as a human!) look, then I see that ... but now tell a computer: these are Ukrainian fields, and they look this or that ... and now tell this for 100 different regions ... and define for all of them a unique look (create textures etc.). You see .... this is the problem with a Global Scenery where you want on the one side make everything look as good as possible (well, at least plausible) while on the other side you need to take care of complexity .... and balance the need for human power. If we had a staff like GTA5 has (many hundreds of artists etc.), then anything would go ... but we have to work with what we have at hand ... We try (and as I told you, we already do more of that than many of you might imagine ...) You mane water features (water fields ??? ) like lakes etc ... Then you don't know the other implications of this. Water is until now part of the base triangle mesh! And the more you refine the coastline, the more (and smaller and smaller) triangles you induce into the mesh .... which all "cost" extra. You will see, that in my HD Mesh Scenery v2 I already improve this (having used less vector simplification on the data) ... but even there you won't see super smooth coastlines (but definitely better than in the Global Scenery).

Well, it extremely depends on the landscape too (and as so many users tend to look primarily at their home region ... you often have people who are disappointed and a lot of them are very happy ... depending on how "interesting" their landscape is)! If the raw data - landclass / elevation / water features - gives you a diverse environment (like usually is the case in the mountains etc.) ... then its much easier to generate an interesting landscape out of it. Whereas when the raw data does not give you much variety (for example the landclass says "grass" for 1000 square miles ... and the elevation is flat like a pan) then there it is very hard to make such a scenery look interesting (especially when you need to generate it automatically - which is the case when you model the entire planet). For these cases we have quite a few shader tricks (and even some tricks in the scenery generator) ... like a shader which tries to "mix"/alternate textures via some noise function (to make it less repetitive) ... etc. but even those can't make a big / flat / single landclass area "interesting". This is a complex topic which we work on since quite a long time ... but until now, we didn't have better solutions (yes, some better ideas we have ... but they are something for the future). In you first screenshot there are two of those "dull", repeating patterns ... the city ... which is really bad until now (but will be improved with 10.25/ 10.30), and the forest (I don't know how much tehy will improve ... but ok, its at least looks like a forest). In the second screenshot you complain about the "crop" textures ... again, a very complex issue, because the pattern of crop patterns can be extremely varying and its almost impossible to make this "perfect" by only using a few textures. So here we have to rely on some kind of "plausible" approximation but not have perfect approach .... Still, you can clearly recognize it as agriculture area. In this area there are some ideas for the distant future .... like using the pattern of roads (if they exist in the source data) to derive some more realistic agriculture patterns (but this is nothing you should expect in a year or two). Still, you always have to remember, that with a Global Scenery style "generic" approach, you always have to simplify and work with generic textures ... which can never result in a perfect representation of real world (like a photoscenery). On the other hand, the better (the more diverse) your raw geo data is, the better can this approach work ... (again, I recommend to compare some of the mountainous areas ... there I wouldn't say that the default terrain is "bad" ). PS: aah, and I see that your screenshots are from Ukraine! There we have another - raw data - problem .... until now I don't have detailed landclass data for that region and have to rely on the more coarse, 300m resolution global data. Whereas in USA, Europe, Alaska, NZ and now Canada I have 100m or better resolution landclass data .... which makes a very big difference!

mabye.....but catching bugs "pre-customer" is something we specialize in I very much try to do things most customers won't even try....ever and put my code through a pretty hard wringer. We do expect hardware related bugs, possibly sound or graphics related....usability bugs, but as far as aircraft complexity or systems bugs....of course we will get a few, but not as many as folks my think IMO. Jan knows how to break stuff like nobody I've ever seen. TomK

I can understand your point, but I think there is a larger picture to see. Cameron and the rest of the developers have been getting pressure from many people who ask repeatedly "when is the update being released?" and others still concerned about their individual issues. I believe the information provided to the public is an attempt to keep people informed that they ARE working on it, as well as what they are working on. They have listened to their customers, researched the reported problems, and are in the process of making corrections and improvements. I think the report was well done and appropriate. I hope that you can see their efforts as customer oriented. I think you'll find that over time they are a very good company that takes their work, and customer's views very seriously.

Artists time is more expensive than new PC hardware. People always get older and slower. Computers always get faster and newer. Better to over detail it than under detail it.

Mother of all X-plane aircrafts for sure, damn shame it isn't the NG version. But hey finally a 737 that does not look like crap, such as some freeware that will remain nameless. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk - now Free