Kind of hard to believe that just four years ago when you took off from Denver you had nothing but flat green tiles underneath you as you headed west. Pretty amazing...

Justin,This sounds great! I have landclass scenery for the eastern US that I bought from somewhere and it has been a huge improvement for VFR flight, yet it sort of butchered the coastline and some other bodies of water. In fact, it eliminated the waves crashing in some of the scenery. Is this an unavoidable problem with landclass scenery or will yours be better? ThanksDavid

HI David,I haven't noticed any difference at all in the coastlines or interior water bodies using my methods.Landclass itself shouldn't change coastlines or water bodies at all, just the appearance and location of the texture-types on the terrain.Whether or not mine will be better is something you'll have to judge after comparing. All I can say is that I am a stickler for accuracy and realism and am doing my best to raise the bar in that regard.I must say, so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive, and many have already begun submitting their local reports for the phase 2 tweaking.Hope this helpsJustinhttp://www.fsgenesis.com

Any idea when some western states will be availiable? I'm very familiar with how most if not all of Arizona should look, and I can definitely help you there...

HI Ryan,I'm working my way west, so the Rocky Mountains area will be in beta 4, probably in about 2 weeks.JustinFSG

fwiw, Justin Tyme has been a major freeware contributor to FS going back to 98, and maybe even earlier. He has written extensively about scenery design and gives freely of his techniques to help others create their own sceneries. As has been pointed out, there is a great deal of freeware on his genesis web page. I have downloaded the latest free beta...and from what I have seen in a short flight or two, it makes no untoward hit on frame rates. Justin, if you are reading along this far, the only other scenery I have ever bought was Eddy Denney's terrain mesh, which came out before yours. I most likely will purchase your full usa landclass...can you give an idea of its price?And, one more question...should users remove your freeware sceneries, or will the new landclass merely overwrite existing...files...oops...one more one more question..:-)will your us landclass include hawaii and alaska?thanks...sherm

HI Sherm,The US National Landclass beta series will always be free. These are just the raw conversion from NLCD to BGL, and not bad as they are.The tweaked and refined versions using end-user input will be under $20, which includes all future revisions and updates. The download will be probably less than 2 Mb for the whole thing, and there will be frequent revisions.The landclass will not effect any existing terrain mesh you might have, as it is just defining the texture locations on whatever mesh you already have installed.Hawaiian Islands is already done, as part of the Hawaiian Islands 9.6m Terrain & Landclass download.Alaska Landclass is a possibility, but not on the production schedule at he moment.ThanksJustinFSG

Your land class data made my New Hampshire hometown shine, that much is for certain. Thanks! What a difference!J

Justin, not sure if this would be of any interest to you or not, but I had worked on some LandClass stuff a while back.The source data I used was also from USGS but I think it's a different USGS source than you are using. The source I used doesn't have the blotchyness that the source you are probably using has.I also overlayed the original source data with several other layers such as the forrest types of North America. And then for the urban areas I used a dataset from the National Atlas website called Nightlights of North America which shows lighted areas over north america from space in very good resolution. I assigned 3 different levels to the night lights based on brightness which give dense, medium and light urban areas. The effect works very well.Anyway, I finished California, but never got around to the rest of the US. You are more than welcome to use my source BMP if you'd like. It's already been keyed to a color code. Attahced is an example of what it looks like for San Francisco area (some clarity lost in JPG conversion)Red areas are Urban areas, dark green/teal is farmland and the other green areas are various forrest [email protected]

Here's what the entire image looks like.Matt

Wow! Matt, you never cease to amaze me. I'm impressed. Do you have landclass coverage for all of North America?

No I made up the BMP that has all the land class data for all of North America, but I imported it for California, which you can download here at AVSIM. I was using FS Land Class so it was still quite a bit of work to import the data and never got around to doing more than California. Matt

HI Matt,I certainly appreciate your generous offer and it would no doubt save lots of time--IF I were using FSLandclass. Unfortunately, I'm not using FSLandclass, but a proprietary method that I've worked out based on Orlando Sotomayer's landclass tutorial. This allows me to work much faster and will facilitate the phase 2 production once that begins.Beta 2 will be released on Friday, and extends coverage to just west of the Mississippi, and south to the Gulf coast and Florida. I've also been able to vastly improve the rendition of urban and suburban areas by altering my texture mapping slightly.Thanks again for the offer, Matt . . .JustinFSG

Any thoughts as to whether landclass for fs2k2 will be compatible with the next upgade of FS?thankssherm

HI Sherman,My guess is that it will be. I think the terrain engine has some longevity. What will most likely change beyond backwards-compatibility is the 3D stuff, aircraft, etc.JustinFSG