I'm not sure exactly how Orbiter renders texture for planets, but it seems like it renders just one huge texture for each planet. While this looks good from a couple hundred kilometers away, the texture looks stretched and the resolution seems to be a kilometer or more on the ground.
Microsoft Flight Simulator and even regular games use small tiles of textures that are loaded as the player gets closer to them. Why doesn't Orbiter take a similar approach? The textures would look much better on the ground. I understand that this will soon become a massive amount of tiles that need to be rendered as the player gets higher. But with height, the textures could become progressively bigger until, once in space, the single texture tile is used.
I'm not positive if Orbiter renders the entire texture, including the parts that aren't visible, but if it does wouldn't this method be much more efficient and save processing power?
I'm sure there is probably a good reason this has not been done yet. I've just been wondering after playing FSX lately. Any thoughts?
