POI Billboards of Belgium
Now the VFR dream comes true!
Now it is possible to have a detailed information on the area seen 1000 feet below you, injected directly into the scenery!
This upload will add POIs as “POI Billboards” - MSFS static scenery objects, for a given country/area, brought to you by 3DSpotters Team.
Here is Belgium with 24942 POI points.
Refer to the included maps.
You may turn ON/OFF each part independently.
Please also check our "POI Billboards of" series for other countries.
To install
Drop the scenery folder from ZIP to the Community folder or (preferably) use any of good MSFS Addon Linkers.
A Technology
POI Billboards, that you will download here, are based on a completely different mechanism than Microsoft/Asobo built-in POI’s. That way you will get thousands (and I mean thousands) of billboard signs scattered all over the country, based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) information, supplied by OSM contributors, with minimal to non-existent FPS hit. You can see a lot of information at once: cities, towns, villages, attractions, train stations, temples, lakes, rivers, island and so on (assuming you have good eyes and paused the simulator). POI Billboards were designed to provide this information to the simmer, while not obscuring the landscape too much and keeping FPS high (well, you will judge).
HOW-TO
=> minimize MSFS loading times:
The only possible using scenery drawback could be extended MSFS loading time, so to minimize the time try the usual ways:
turn OFF Windows File Indexing feature on the disk,
switch ON only the scenery you will really fly VFR in a minute,
keep your sceneries on SSD disks, preferably on M.2 ones,
do the same with all other sceneries/aircrafts/liveries :)
=> minimize scenery size on a disk:
turn ON Windows File Compression feature on the disk; it should have advantage to give you 40% disk space gain and processing overhead should not be high on the other side.
Credits
Credits go to:
OpenStreetMap Authors & Contributors at: https://www.openstreetmap.org
Overpass-Turbo service at: https://overpass-turbo.eu/
WinHour, member of 3DSpotters team, for JAVA POIOSM2FS software tool at: https://github.com/Winhour/POIOSM2FS-Converter
For additional information please refer to docs/files saved on this (first) scenery main folder (when unzipped to Community or elsewhere).
A great idea, but . . .
These would work much better if they could be displayed/hidden in flight in real time in the same way as the default POI markers (via the Mugz mods tools). As it is they are too much to have visible all the time. Also, the text doesn't seem to scale? On a 4k screen these are unreadable until you get quite close.
Sounds like I'm bitching here, but not meant as. These could totally transform the sim as an exploratory tool if made 'pop-up-able' but as they are they are unusable for me. Of course, I've no idea of what would be involved in making this happen so it may not even be possible, let alone feasible.
**update**
Having stayed with my test flight a bit longer I'm getting used to these. I tend to record all flights and keep the recordings of the interesting ones, so I could at least turn the billboards off before a replay (for any videos, screenshots etc), but if they could be dynamically enabled/disabled I would consider these billboards a 50% improvement on the sim itself.
3 years ago
Hi Andy, you are 100% right and I would be more than happy if somebody come out with the solution, how to hide/shows Billboards on a user action. Alas...
These Billboards are a proposal against Microsoft/Asobo POI's because... their POIs just do not work (if there is more then a bunch of them at once) :D
So the decision have to be made by a user: to use POI Billboard in their flight... or not :)
I personally prefer to use them - it's kind of sport to spot yet another billboard and get to know what is there in real life :)
3 years ago
RipPipPip
andy1252