71–80 of 131 posts
It would be so cool to use Microsoft's "earth copy" for stuff other than just flight sim. They say it's the most accurate representation of the earth ever. Wonder if you can do some interesting science with that.
I would love a real world driving sim. I don’t really care for driving on race tracks, but real roads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always said, a version of Grand Theft Auto, but with a real map of [your city], and with cops that enforce driving rules, would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers. After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dan…
it's one of those things I'd do as a millionaire. Some people would buy boats, private planes, art, ... I would hire a team to replicate my child neighbourhood perfectly in a gran turismo or preferably GTA 5 engine lol. You'd get pretty far with a million USD in the modding community
Just 160 airports? I remember mfs98 having thousands of airports.
There are over 35,000 in the game, they're mostly procedurally generated with some light editing to fix any major issues. 160 are handcrafted.
Most airports that people care about are modeled to a pretty high standard at this point. Even the tiny, remote ones. It's not just about making them look pretty but also about ensuring signage, taxi ways, etc. is where it's supposed to be. It's all licensed under the Creative Commons license too (CC BY 3.0); so MS could make use of this. It's one of the things I always liked about X-plane, the third party add on ecosystem is great.
And of course there are commercial scenery plugins as well. Orbx makes scenery for both X-plane and MS Flight Simulator. Which despite the awesome scenery that they have out of the box still requires stuff like that if you really want the best looking scenery. The default scenery is amazing of course; but it has its limitations.
I've not used that personally but it looks awesome. For X-plane, simheaven.com (very detailed open streetmap based scenery) combined with free satellite scenery generated using Ortho4XP gets things close enough. Not quite to the level of MS Flight Simulator but it's not that bad. And free.
With Orbx it actually looks comparable. That's actually a good way to compare the two simulators if you care about the visuals because the only difference would be the rendering engine; the content is essentially the same with orbx and much better than what comes out of the box with either simulation. There are some videos on youtube comparing the two side by side. They both look great. But also very different.
IMHO MS has an edge with things like clouds and weather. But it can also look a bit over saturated and slightly too pretty. X-plane is shooting more for realism. And part of that is that visibility usually just isn't really that great from a plane. And they have gradually upgraded a lot of things. E.g. the clouds and weather just got a major upgrade in a patch release and the physics based rendering in v12 is a big step forward and they are still doing major updates to things like HDR and cockpit rendering (which is a hard problem because of the way human eyes compensate for the huge dynamic range difference inside and outside).
It would be so cool to use Microsoft's "earth copy" for stuff other than just flight sim. They say it's the most accurate representation of the earth ever. Wonder if you can do some interesting science with that.
I would love a real world driving sim. I don’t really care for driving on race tracks, but real roads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love a real world driving sim. I don’t really care for driving on race tracks, but real roads.
I've always said, a version of Grand Theft Auto, but with a real map of [your city], and with cops that enforce driving rules, would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers. After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always said, a version of Grand Theft Auto, but with a real map of [your city], and with cops that enforce driving rules, would be a priceless tool for teaching young drivers. After I passed driver's ed, I still spent the next two years getting lost within a few miles of my house. But drop me in any alley in GTA5 and I can get to any other spot in a pretty short path (although I confess it often does involve dan…
it's one of those things I'd do as a millionaire. Some people would buy boats, private planes, art, ... I would hire a team to replicate my child neighbourhood perfectly in a gran turismo or preferably GTA 5 engine lol. You'd get pretty far with a million USD in the modding community
Something I would have loved to see, especially in this era of AI, is improvements to the ATC system. But it seems we're stuck with the one from FS2020, which in turn is largely the same it was 20 years ago. Not everyone can or wants to go to VATSIM for realistic ATC coverage, but the default one is just dreadful. Obvious phraseology mistakes, happily vectoring you towards terrain, asking you to descend 20k ft. in 2…
There are some third party companies working on LLM based ATC. It's a hard problem but that's mostly because there are a lot of rules and regional differences. Which is something that LLMs are actually good at making sense of. The new multi modal OSS models are only going to make this easier. MS with their investment in OpenAI is actually well positioned to do something here as well. So, it's odd that they haven't.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some third party companies working on LLM based ATC. It's a hard problem but that's mostly because there are a lot of rules and regional differences. Which is something that LLMs are actually good at making sense of. The new multi modal OSS models are only going to make this easier. MS with their investment in OpenAI is actually well positioned to do something here as well. So, it's odd that they haven't.
What are some good examples of such companies?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You cannot build a model that is both good for gaming and meteorology. This was the prevailing wisdom in AI before generalized transformers as well. We're rapidly moving toward black box hyperintelligent AGI.
There has been zero motion towards true AGI so far, hyperintelligent or otherwise.