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Photo Scenery Massachusetts out!

L

Lionheart

SOH-CM-2014
Hey all,


Did you guys know that the entire state of Massachusetts is out at MegaScenery Earth?

You know this includes Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket... Let alone, all the various airports and inland area's up to its inner boarders...


I wish I had known about this. I'm getting it tonight.. One of my fave flight runs is to Nantucket via the Cape from Logan International. Always wondered what was inland of the beaches..

http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/cart.php?target=product&product_id=601&category_id=113


Bill
 
Dang Bill...I fly that same route too sometimes....

I did it lots in FS9 as there were so many nice addons for marthas vinyard for it..


Thanks for the heads up.....

Let us know how you like it ...
 
Lionheart said:
Hey all,


Did you guys know that the entire state of Massachusetts is out at MegaScenery Earth?

You know this includes Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket... Let alone, all the various airports and inland area's up to its inner boarders...


I wish I had known about this. I'm getting it tonight.. One of my fave flight runs is to Nantucket via the Cape from Logan International. Always wondered what was inland of the beaches..

http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/cart.php?target=product&product_id=601&category_id=113


Bill
Click to expand...
Wonder how that affects Plum Island?
 
Yep, shoudln't make a difference as long as Plum Island is higher in the scenery library priority. If this release is anything like preview MS Earth areas, one thing you might notice is that the Plum Island photoreal terrain doesn't blend as well as it does with the default terrain. I spent many hours color-correcting and tweaking the aerial imagery to get it just right, and the Megascenery product... well, not so much. :monkies:
 
That much is true. Bill's scenery looks like the real thing. Unfortunately where Megascenery takes over looks kind of gray in contrast. Why they don't color correct it is anybodys guess.
I much prefer flying on the North Shore instead of the "Irish Riviera", where the Cabots speak to the Lodges and the Lodges speak only to God.
 
Thing is, the source aerial photography is almost uniformly poorly corrected (if at all) in terms of color and contrast. I think part of the reason they're able to offer such large patches of scenery for a decent price is that they're not taking the days, weeks, or months to correct every image. As long as you go into the purchase with your eyes open to that fact, you should be fine.

I'll give you a for-instance: right now, I'm working on a patch of phototerrain for Emma Field X. It's not a big area, maybe 15km square. Even at that, and using 1m/px imagery, I've got 6 individual images at approx. 500MB each. Compiled the whole area BGL is 223MB at the 90% compression setting - and that's only one season with blend and water masks. The whole thing takes about 45 minutes to resample on my system, and I've had to compile it a bunch of times to get it looking the way I like.

It's no small thing to do a patch of photoreal right, and to do it for a whole state would take me months. And that's not including autogen and seasons! For that reason, I cut the guys at Megascenery some slack.
 
spotlope said:
Yep, shoudln't make a difference as long as Plum Island is higher in the scenery library priority. If this release is anything like preview MS Earth areas, one thing you might notice is that the Plum Island photoreal terrain doesn't blend as well as it does with the default terrain. I spent many hours color-correcting and tweaking the aerial imagery to get it just right, and the Megascenery product... well, not so much. :monkies:
Click to expand...

I purchased a portion of the scenery a while ago, and it all blended very well mesh-wise, the only small difference was a shallow "waterfall" in the mesh at the entrance to the river.

Mike
 
Bill W. has pretty much nailed it. From what I have seen and heard on other forums, the megascenery earth stuff isn't the best quality, especially resolution wise.

I tell ya, I used to hate photoscenery, mostly because what you could buy in FS9 was poor resolution at low altitudes and the autogen was lacking also. One of the best features IMHO in FSX is the ability to display high resolution with hardly any performance hit. Ever since I figured out how to do my own, I have been addicted to it, scouring the web looking for high res airports, adding autogen, it has TOTALLY transformed my sim experience. But it has also made me very picky about resolution which comes at a cost, HUGE file sizes = quality imagery.. Why fly over blurry blobs when I can see images like Tamworth or this airport image I d/led in Prague?!

prague.jpg
 
Getting photoscenery to look good takes a LOT of work, even if you have high quality source data. I'm working on the photo side of the Isle of Man project over at Earth Simulations, and even with fantastic source data it's slow going making it look just right in the sim. Couple in the fact that the source data for IOM is 50 gigs of imagery alone...

Of course that gets compressed when compiled for the simulator, but you get the idea. Doing the entire state of MA for that price, they have to compromise on something.
 
Im right behind you Mike.. Just got finished playing X3TC and have purchased and downloading the state of Mass now.. Should be fun.

Huge download, so I am thinking tonight is download night.. arrgh.



Bill
 
Everytime I go there I am so tempted to get more parts but I know that so far I've been disappointed with every pack I got. Such a pity.
 
Put me in the category of disappointed with MegaScenery. I purchased the Louisiana package and while I love the added details, the color looks like someone puked on the entire state.

Louisiana is NOT lime-green. I haven't purchased any thing else because of that experience.
 
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