I have no predictions on distribution model. But I can say that tiles _are_ streaming friendly and _add-on_ makers want this now. AutoOrtho, e.g. is an attempt to get to streaming without format support from LR.

There will be a transition period where vector overlays are DSF over raster tiles.
And there will be DSF backward compatibility for DSF overlays and DSF meshes in both cases.

The new system covers the poles well – it’s designed on a cube mapping of the earth and not a plane, which makes the poles no longer a nightmare. And since it’s variable res, we can have the poles without spending tons of install space on them.

I think _having raster tile support_ will be *significantly easier* than the Vulkan port. But this is only the first step in all next-gen scenery road map items.

So, in general whenever anyone asks a question that’s designed to answer the question “is this feature going to be a free upgrade or a paid upgrade” I do my best to *NOT ANSWER*. 🙂 🙂 🙂

I think it is worth noting that _support for the format_ can come sooner than _LR ships some raster tiles_, and they don’t have to have the same business models. With that in mind, “no comment”.

very interesting, thanks for sharing. There are probably two aspects of scenery size: the size of the tiles that are displayed and has to go into VRAM and the size of the tiles for the entire planet that will go to the user’s disks.

Is “all raster tiles, all the time” also to be used for vector data including for example roads? Or only color (I had argued before to use s2maps.eu maybe with super-resolution), seasons, DEM etc?

I understand from OSM that tiles for the entire planet in ZL19 would be about 56TB. And ZL19 has only ~30cm resolution per pixel. So maybe not enough for sharp borders of roads or driveways in a rasterized image? A quick estimate shows that vectorized road information of the entire planet is about 4000x smaller than a full set of ZL19 tiles.

OSM also do not store the most of the tiles for the web but they create them on the fly on demand. That is because in reality users look only at very few of the tiles at that level. OSM store only about 0.023% of all ZL19 tiles, they say. Is that also the plan for LR? Do you foresee that people still can download the scenery or is the planned change requiring a streaming service?

Is this planned for XP12?

Thanks for the blog posts. Always a fun read!

1) Are you going to be able to provide a full Earth terrain with that new system, pole to pole? That would be huge. Not that it is vital but it would be a bit underwhelming not having that. If that makes sense.

2) Any idea on how many months, sleepless nights and alcohol is that transition going to require? Will you be on the “consumption level” of the Vulkan renderer rework back then? Or is it much easier?

Cheers! 🙂