• There seems to be an uptick in Political comments in recent months. Those of us who are long time members of the site know that Political and Religious content has been banned for years. Nothing has changed. Please leave all political and religious comments out of the forums.

    If you recently joined the forums you were not presented with this restriction in the terms of service. This was due to a conversion error when we went from vBulletin to Xenforo. We have updated our terms of service to reflect these corrections.

    Please note any post refering to a politician will be considered political even if it is intended to be humor. Our experience is these topics have a way of dividing the forums and causing deep resentment among members. It is a poison to the community. We appreciate compliance with the rules.

    The Staff of SOH

  • Please see the most recent updates in the "Where did the .com name go?" thread. Posts number 16 and 17.

    Post 16 Update

    Post 17 Warning

New Scnery from... VERO?

S

sade60461

Guest
I just recieved an email from simmarket advertising photoreal scenery from a company called VERO. Has anybody ever heard of them? The scenery does look good and the price is not bad considering what you get.

Check it out at http://www.vero-fs.com/ and let me know what you think.

Here is the url to the simmarket page http://secure.simmarket.com/vero-san-francisco-bay-california-01.phtml


As quoted from the simmarket page,

Welcome to the first release of VERO Flight Simulation Environment Lab. California Scenery.
Fly over the real World as never before. That's right! The ortho-photos used for this scenery have been optimized to reach the best luminosity, contrast and color balance/intensity so, good-bye to those blend and washed-out ground we were used to.



This San Francisco Bay scenery covers an area of 38.153 sq. Km (14.731 sq. Miles) featuring:
  • 1m/pixel and 30cm/pixel resolution aerial imagery
  • Autogen
  • High Resolution 30cm/pixel for the areas around San Francisco, San Jose, Napa, San Carlos, Oakland international airports
  • Precisely made night variation textures
40.000 sq.km coming every 2 weeks, thanks to the optimization technique developed by VERO-FS that allows the production of very large areas in a very short time frame.



Special Launch Offer: Buy today and get FREE
  • the upcoming fall, winter and Hard winter variations for the state of California
  • more autogen every week
NOTE: The price is incredibly low for the quality of this product and for the covered area, but it is meant to be lowered for the next releases, as the number of buyers increase. So, spread the word and help the price go down for the remaining upcoming releases that will cover the entire state of California.


Thanks in advance for the input.
 
sade60461 said:
Thanks in advance for the input.
Click to expand...

The developer's site has some areas available for download. I had downloaded the work for Mount Shasta in Northern California, discovered I did have it installed on my new system (??) and took a flight around the area. FSX offers better opportunities with photo based scenery and it becomes a matter of personal choice as to what is or is not appealing. So try some of the free offerings and see if it suits your fancy.
 
LCSims said:
The developer's site has some areas available for download. I had downloaded the work for Mount Shasta in Northern California, discovered I did have it installed on my new system (??) and took a flight around the area. FSX offers better opportunities with photo based scenery and it becomes a matter of personal choice as to what is or is not appealing. So try some of the free offerings and see if it suits your fancy.
Click to expand...

This operation along with yours has the right idea. I think you will both see extreme profitability in the coming years as your goals are realized to a broader extent.

Personally, the idea of having wide area photoreal scenery with autogen, seasons and night textures with good mesh and airports that line up is awesome.

Some of Vero's airports don't line up, so we'll have to see what they do in time.
 
I'm more than slightly hesitant to get this.

The developer did an interview and frankly some of the stuff he says is a little odd. There's a bit of a language barrier there however;

http://simflight.com/2010/03/18/interview-gabriele-cripezzi-of-vero-simulations/

Essentially it seems that you have to buy an external hard drive with the 'base pack,' consisting of summer textures, night textures and hard winter textures. You then have to buy the other seasons yourself.

But then again if it's only 10 euros for the base pack that isn't really a problem.

Edit: The hard drive thing will only apply for when the entire california pack is available (hardly surprising when if their figures are anything to go by it would be 252gb).
 
Skittles said:
I'm more than slightly hesitant to get this.

The developer did an interview and frankly some of the stuff he says is a little odd. There's a bit of a language barrier there however;

http://simflight.com/2010/03/18/interview-gabriele-cripezzi-of-vero-simulations/

Essentially it seems that you have to buy an external hard drive with the 'base pack,' consisting of summer textures, night textures and hard winter textures. You then have to buy the other seasons yourself.

But then again if it's only 10 euros for the base pack that isn't really a problem.

Edit: The hard drive thing will only apply for when the entire california pack is available (hardly surprising when if their figures are anything to go by it would be 252gb).
Click to expand...

On second thought, I dunno. After reading all the interviews and looking at most of the webpage, it's starting to look like all he does is drastically tint the pictures to various colors to make the seasons. That's making some of the shots look creepy and unreal, like you're flying around on LSD instead of in a winter wonderland.

I'll see what they come up with in the future. Right now I'm burnt out on payware considering I'm still dealing with the wreckage PMDG left of my FSX.
 
tigisfat said:
On second thought, I dunno. After reading all the interviews and looking at most of the webpage, it's starting to look like all he does is drastically tint the pictures to various colors to make the seasons. That's making some of the shots look creepy and unreal, like you're flying around on LSD instead of in a winter wonderland.

I'll see what they come up with in the future. Right now I'm burnt out on payware considering I'm still dealing with the wreckage PMDG left of my FSX.
Click to expand...


Yes that was my feeling. After reading the interview, I was thinking that this is kinda nice. Then I noticed that the first scenery package is 23gig and you still have to d/l the other 3 seasons. And that is still only the first part of California. WOW, you would probably need a 2tb harddrive just for California, and forget the whole US. I enjoy photoscenery, but I'm just not quite sold on this one.
 
sade60461 said:
... WOW, you would probably need a 2tb harddrive just for California, and forget the whole US. I enjoy photoscenery, but I'm just not quite sold on this one.
Click to expand...

Rough figures for photo work is about 1gb per 1,000 sq miles. Kalifornia is over 150K sq miles. Each seasonal release would eat it's own 1gb. Throw in night textures (photo night textures???), along with autogen and you're looking at 850, 900gb.

Let's not compute the space for Texas!

It will be interesting to see how this developer does. There has been promises made by others (Tig knows who...), so we'll have to see if this pans out.

Personally, since Kalifornia is home and I have 80% of the airports properly worked, I'll soon start downloading the "good stuff" to make the scenery for the state. But with my internet speeds and the size of the source material it will be a 2,000 hour download. Anyone got fast fiber optic cable and a spare 2tb HD??
 
LCSims said:
There has been promises made by others (Tig knows who...),....
Click to expand...

agree.gif
 
This is precisely the problem that rules out full photoscenery as a replacement for generic textures for flight simulation for the foreseeable future - it's not just a question of storage, it's also d/l capacity and the absence of 3d modelling in the scenery.

While photoreal is nice, it's a simple fact that it's no more `real` than generic textures when it only offers hand-hewn colour optimisation for `seasonality` when of course there are many aspects to the seasons above and beyond mere colour change - from the air roads are far more visible outside of spring/summer as the foliage coverage is less, making landscape contours easier to discern. Then there's the ever present issue of the photo only representing a date in the past, a date which may not be shared by the neighbouring tile. So in truth, it's NOT `real` and unless one regularly flies over the landscape one wouldn't know.

And so far, every attempt at adding autogen to large-scale photoscenery has petered out through lack of enthusiasm, the generic nature of the textures being placed on the `footprint` and the relative conspicuity of the seasonal variation on the non-seasonal tile.

I've no doubt that while photoscenery offers something on the smaller scale, it will not be offering anything on the global scale for years to come, if ever.
 
I have quite a bit of photo scenery, including all of MegasceneryEarths California package. The two things that let it down from my perspective are the lack of 3D objects (which is accepted as a trade-off with this type of scenery typically) and the huge increase in load times.

With photo scenery you need a RAID array to really get the load times to an acceptable level, but even then the disk hardware to do this cost-effectively just doesn't exist yet. Ideally you'd want PCI SSD's in RAID0, but that's a multi-thousand $$ setup with the sizes required.

Perhaps we'll see large size solid-state storage go the way of the flash drive - I can remember a few years ago 256mb was expensive, now you can get 4gb drives for virtually nothing.
 
I guess I'll stick to megascenery for now. I enjoy photoscenery once in a while, but the bold claims they made did not match what I saw in their freeware/demo areas. Only time will tell if they follow through with their promises. Thanks to everyone for their advice and input.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top