How detailed is the world?

[Goodbrew]

Hi! I've been looking at this game for a while, and I was curious how much of the world you can actually fly around in. I see it boasts 24,000 locations. That is a lot! But what about 'between' those locations. Like, is there only world terrain on direct routes, or is there a lot of branching out.

I'm from Canada, and one thing I thought would be fun is to explore some of the provinces with my daughter. Is that a viable expectation? Or would I be stuck with mainly major city to major city?

[harrry]

FSX uses a globe of the whole world. In terms of terrain it is fairly accurate though some elevation features are softened in the sim because it uses say a so metre square to a pixel.
You can buy software which can considerably improve that.
Most of the terrain features are estimates and the buildings are mainly aautogenerated buildings to fill in spaces where buildings should be.l Some areas have more detail.
It is possible to buy photorealistic scenery but it is a bit flat and uninteresting. Programs such as those of Orbyx improve the situation as they sample down to a smaller distance...one or two metres to a pixel.
THat said Flying around in canada or the Cascade Mountains is a very pleasant experience even in the basic sim.

[svatem1]

default scenery is autogenerated = you won't see what's there in reality but it's made up by algorithm; so by default if you're not lucky (means couple of airports/cities probably), you won't be able to explore anything
but there are lot of add-ons that e.g. replace autogenerated scenery with something like what you can see on google earth; some of them have obvious downside of being staticaly frozen in 1 season

[DTG_Martin]

Hi Goodbrew,

Thanks for getting in touch with us. You can get a sense of the overall graphics of the game by checking out some of the screenshots on the FSX: SE steam page. There are also a host of videos on YouTube of players flying over Canada:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fsx+canada

Some of these videos might feature additional add-on content which is not available in the core game however.

Generally speaking the whole world is mapped out using satellite imagery. The game world is obviously designed to be viewed from the sky and the closer you get to the ground the more distorted the textures will become.

If you have any other questions please let us know,

- Martin

[Goodbrew]

Thanks for the input everyone! I appreciate it.

[svatem1]

generally speaking new york satellite imagery looks exactly the same as czech republic satellite imagery, any clues why?

i mean - genearlly speaking

Originally posted by DTG_Martin:

Hi Goodbrew,

Generally speaking the whole world is mapped out using satellite imagery.

- Martin

[MADG]

They really should try and work out some type of integration with Google Earth. There were attempts at mods that would do that, but as far as I know, there's nothing that really works at this point.

[harrry]

You can ufy in google earth. It has a built in flight sim. Not a bad one either. But google earth images are not really fantastic scenery for FSX like flying over very low quality photoscenery wiht no propper mesh or buildings.