Photoreal scenery is not very heavy to run, is it?

Hi,
 I am giving a try to Google Earth. Very nice indeed :-)
It uses OpenGL (like FlightGear) and renders quick and nice. Every movement
(rotate, traslation, zoom in/out) is very smooth, even with the high
resolution terrain textures and with average vga cards and medium/high
screen resolution. 

So I guess, using more photoreal scenery into FGFS would give a more
realistic result with less human effort then using default terrain textures,
vector roads/lakes/rivers/railroads...

I am pretty shure that geometric representation of roads/lakes/etc... is
very usefull when there's no aerial picture of the terrain. That is very
easy to use into FGFS scenery because there are databases offering numeric
datasets to import into the scenery creation process. But I have to say that
the result is not very nice when compared with a photoreal scenery.

I know the topic is rather old, some people did also contribute in using
aerial picture into FGFS scenery but it seems to me the process to let
average FGFS users contribute is rather diffcult and not very documented.
Some people told me using photoreal scenery is performance overkill, FGFS
would have suffered in FPS; well, I can't do any benchmark with Google Earth
but I see very high performances, the result is really nice :-)

I wonder if (I hope) there's something new going on with photo real
sceneries by now. What's the interest of Terragear developer in walking this
way? I am shure many people will contribute because VFR is still very
appreciated and I cannot believe that a simulation of the world (roads,
buildings, bridges and so on) without photo real mappings can be as much
appreciated as a simulated world with only 3D objects and no real mappings.
And I don't even talk about the human effort in generating this kind of
only-3d world which is huge in comparision to a aerial pictures mapped 3d
terrain scenery.

Anyway, I hope this post gets some good feedback, I'm looking forward to
find interest in this aspect of the simulation. In the meanwhile, I go on
building 3d 'buildings' to insert into the scenery of my town which is
something I like doing anyway :-)
I did post some of them in the "Jon Stockill's FlightGear Scenery Object
Database" and I will add some more in the next months.

 Roberto

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