Photoreal

[tanken2]

Looking at aerofly I see the point of high detail cities and approach and photo real for the rest of the world , rather than try to highly detail everything. Now with HD drones will we see more high detail photo real as opposed to the satellite imagery.

[Charl]

Yup just need a coupla 100TB HDD to hold all that.
Was a time when 100MB was a lot...

[chopper_nut]

I remember when downloading a 10mb aeroplane for FS98 was a big deal...

[toprob]

Most of the imagery used in Aerofly FS2 is the same old stuff, whether it is sourced from satellite or photographed by aerial mapping, the difference is the quality and resolution.

It depends on what is available, and we'd need someone to actually do the work. I can only really judge things from what is available here in NZ, but I do know that most of the country is available in a resolution somewhere between 75cm and 10cm, so there is plenty of data to make some complete coverage. Apart from a couple of annoying areas without any coverage -- like the eastern edge of the Southern Alps.

It's really just a matter(!) of doing the work, plus distribution. Both are tricky, and IPACS can only do so much themselves. I have mentioned before that I hope to do some of this myself, but at the time I did have help, which is now not available. So if anyone wants to speed up the process, then please let me know! It'll mean a lot of work, though.

Distribution needs to be considered, the arrangement I was looking at with IPACS had them distributing the final project, via Steam, so it would need to be payware. It could be distributed some other way, but it would take a bit more than just uploading it to a file sharing site and hoping for the best. Most have bandwidth limits, which would kick in quite quickly for a large, popular download.

Another issue is the airports -- a fully photoreal NZ wouldn't be much fun without at least a couple of dozen custom airports.

I will just point out that NZ is one of the few places in the world where you can distribute and sell some really nice quality imagery and data, under the Creative Commons 4 license. So if we had a team of say 10 people working quite hard for a while, it could certainly happen!

[tanken2]

Looking at aerofly the state of California in pretty good photo real and numerous airports is twice the size of New Zealand and works very well . My P.C handles it well and cockpits are highly detailed and nearly fully functional. I flew over N.Z and it is in pre European state.