Disappointed with MegasceneryEarth San Francisco

[Guest rdg]

I'm in the UK and gave up yesterday when I couldn't sustain a d/l rate above about 25kb/second. It's a little faster tonight but not much - gonna be a long wait. Interesting that someone's managed to get hold of it but disappointing to read their first impression. The publicity screenshots looked fine to me but then I guess they might have been specially selected.

I have not had any problems downloading. My speeds were between 200 and 300, but never constant. Not sure why there are so many having issues. I know they sent out an email stating that the download bandwidth had been adjusted. Maybe there is so many folks downloading that they cannot handle the traffic. I think I am going to wait to buy any more though. Although their price breaks go down to the $2 range, 50 or 60 can add up. Maybe after they make there first million the price per tile, regardless of quantity, will go down to .50 cents a tile. Then most states would be about $25. I can do that. What are the chances?Bob

[Guest rdg]

I'm in the UK and gave up yesterday when I couldn't sustain a d/l rate above about 25kb/second. It's a little faster tonight but not much - gonna be a long wait. Interesting that someone's managed to get hold of it but disappointing to read their first impression. The publicity screenshots looked fine to me but then I guess they might have been specially selected.

I have not had any problems downloading. My speeds were between 200 and 300, but never constant. Not sure why there are so many having issues. I know they sent out an email stating that the download bandwidth had been adjusted. Maybe there is so many folks downloading that they cannot handle the traffic. I think I am going to wait to buy any more though. Although their price breaks go down to the $2 range, 50 or 60 can add up. Maybe after they make there first million the price per tile, regardless of quantity, will go down to .50 cents a tile. Then most states would be about $25. I can do that. What are the chances?As far as the quality, maybe their marketing team has a plan. Release first phase for 6 months. Second phase will be the higher quality version.Bob

[JiBrady 20]

For the second time, all three downloads aborted. This time I was at 95% completion! The Free Download Manager program reports "Server does NOT support resuming downloading! I remember being told they had corrected this problem, and that the server would now support resuming.Great,Jim

[TPerson 15]

For the second time, all three downloads aborted. This time I was at 95% completion! The Free Download Manager program reports "Server does NOT support resuming downloading! I remember being told they had corrected this problem, and that the server would now support resuming.Great,Jim

To everyone who has mentioned download problems and no resumable downloads... Are you guys paying attention that this is NOT a product available at the MegaSceneryEarth website? Some of you seem to be thinking this is a MSE product. It is named MegaSceneryEarth San Francisco but it appears to be something that should be called MegaScenery "X" San Francisco. It's a different product on a different website with different pricing and isn't available on a per tile purchase plan.Again I wish PC Aviator would make up their minds on the direction (and pricing) they are taking with their photo scenery products!Todd

[Guest twsimfan]

To everyone who has mentioned download problems and no resumable downloads... Are you guys paying attention that this is NOT a product available at the MegaSceneryEarth website? Some of you seem to be thinking this is a MSE product. It is named MegaSceneryEarth San Francisco but it appears to be something that should be called MegaScenery "X" San Francisco. It's a different product on a different website with different pricing and isn't available on a per tile purchase plan.Again I wish PC Aviator would make up their minds on the direction (and pricing) they are taking with their photo scenery products!Todd

Todd,This scenery is apparently for the moment only sold out of PC Aviator's site but it is produced by the same Aerosoft group that produces the rest of the MSE scenery.Everybody,I got another promo mail from PC Aviator today selling this SF scenery in 2 forms: DL or DVD and also had a link for purchasing the total Washington State scenery as well as a number of other products. One of those was "Kalaupapa Hawaii X" from Tyler Newport. I looked that over and bought it but not from PCA but from Flightsim.com's store. It is of a small penninsula on the North side of Molokai. The scenery is great if kind of small for it's price but in FS.com's store I also noticed that Tyler Newport has a bunch of other photo sceneries including SF/Oakland, Orlando, Miami, Washington DC, Copenhagen, and a bunch of others I don't remember at the moment. They also have photo scenery from another company called "Taburet" with a number of cities including SF. I don't know anything about any of these and can't vouch for them but I do intend to try out some more of the Newport ones including SF & Orlando in a week or so.The Kalaupapa one is great fun. Not a lot there but what is there is top quality. A great place to get in some ultralite fun. I did that and checked out the night side of it with a 172 then did a flight from there to Dillingham on the far side of Oahu in about 20 minutes. Of course I cheated and used the default accel pack P-51 Mustang cruising at a bit over 300 to make that kind of time. :) It was fun... started from a Newport scenery and flew over most of HawaiiX then landed at Aerosoft's DillinghamX. Good stuff! This island hopping stufff is fun... I may have to buy Aerosoft's TahitiX. lolI hope to make some time later on this evening to shoot some screenies of Kalaupapa and put them on the screen shot forum.One great feature with this little Kalaupapa scenery is that Newport blends in the edges where it meets up with the default scenery for both the land and the water so you don't really see an edge. It would be nice if he does that with his other photo sceneries but I doubt it.Sorry to get so far off topic here. I do wish I knew somebody who had seen all of these SF sceneries and could say which was best. But that is too much to hope for. :-sighLater,Tom Wunder

[Guest ryebred]

I also noticed that Tyler Newport has a bunch of other photo scenery including SF/Oakland, Orlando, Miami, Washington DC, Copenhagen, and a bunch of others I don't remember at the moment. They also have photo scenery from another company called "Taburet" with a number of cities including SF. I don't know anything about any of these and can't vouch for them but I do intend to try out some more of the Newport ones including SF & Orlando in a week or so.

I had seen those as well and tried to find any reviews of them but could not find anything. The Tyler Newport San Francisco screen shots looked pretty good, but one of my pet peeves is vendors selling products and only providing tiny screen shots. I usually don't buy products with sufficient screen shots or testimonials unless it is a well reputable vendor of which I have had good experiences with in the past. I violated this with the Megascenery Earth San Francisco add-on as the screen shots on the PC Aviator site were really small with no way to enlarge them. I may violate this again and try the Tyler Newport photo scenery since I am not very happy with the MegaScenery Earth version.

[Guest ArtieLange]

You guys should check out Fsdreamscapes, the Oahu photoscenery has insane resolution, and the entrie state of Utah is something like $35. Both of these products are not even finished and they blow away megascenery.

[Guest orionll]

At least you were able to download. I let it run overnight. This morning I see all 3 downloads failed to complete. The "free download Manager" reports "unknown server error". These are the same problems I had with the initial release of MegaSceneryEarth. I was told they fixed these problems, that you could resume downloads, but for me, I am still getting aborted downloads.I am disappointed in there service, and quality.jim

Same thing here.

I third that. Can't get better than 30 kb/s past 30 mb.

[flyerkg 62]

I subscribe to PC Aviator's MegaSceneryEarth emails and I have not received any such email announcing tiles available for the San Francisco bay area. In addition I just went to the MegaSceneryEarth website and there are no tiles available for any part of California.So what exactly are you talking about?Todd

Hi Todd,That is interesting that you have not received the announcement. I received the email but when I originally went to the download store website, there was nothing concerning the San Francisco tiles. I just checked now and it appears in the Best Seller Box.Keith

[flyerkg 62]

You guys should check out Fsdreamscapes, the Oahu photoscenery has insane resolution, and the entrie state of Utah is something like $35. Both of these products are not even finished and they blow away megascenery.

I'm curious about your FS setup. I have the FSdreamscape for California, Florida and Hawaii. I notice a jagged plateau around the airports that I use and when I uninstall the products the scenery areas return to their original state. I am running FSX SP2. I believe it has something to do with the limitations of mesh rendering. I can run all scenery selectors to the max in most cases and cannot seem to smooth out the raised surfaces around my airports. It does make a tremendous difference elsewhere. Keith

[TPerson 15]

Hi Todd,That is interesting that you have not received the announcement. I received the email but when I originally went to the download store website, there was nothing concerning the San Francisco tiles. I just checked now and it appears in the Best Seller Box.Keith

We seem to be talking about two different websites. The MegaSceneryEarth website is here:http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/I'm assuming you are talking about this site:http://www.pcaviator.com/dlstore/home.php?cat=49This is what I've been talking about. Two different websites adding to the confusion. If this is a MegaSceneryEarth product then why is it not available on the MSE website? BTW I am subscribed to emails from the MSE site and not PC Aviator.Todd

[flyerkg 62]

We seem to be talking about two different websites. The MegaSceneryEarth website is here:http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/I'm assuming you are talking about this site:http://www.pcaviator.com/dlstore/home.php?cat=49This is what I've been talking about. Two different websites adding to the confusion. If this is a MegaSceneryEarth product then why is it not available on the MSE website? BTW I am subscribed to emails from the MSE site and not PC Aviator.Todd

Todd,We are seeing the same thing. I definitely would not buy this product now. It still doesn't appear on MSE even though it is advertised as MSE through the PC Aviator site. They must be a little behind on things.Keith

[Guest ArtieLange]

I'm curious about your FS setup. I have the FSdreamscape for California, Florida and Hawaii. I notice a jagged plateau around the airports that I use and when I uninstall the products the scenery areas return to their original state. I am running FSX SP2. I believe it has something to do with the limitations of mesh rendering. I can run all scenery selectors to the max in most cases and cannot seem to smooth out the raised surfaces around my airports. It does make a tremendous difference elsewhere. Keith

I was talking about their photoscenery, not mesh. Did you post your problems at the Fsdreamscapes forums ? Dean is very helpful, I don't have their mesh so I can't compare things for you, but I'm sure somebody at their forums could help you.

[Guest sssummer]

I'm curious about your FS setup. I have the FSdreamscape for California, Florida and Hawaii. I notice a jagged plateau around the airports that I use and when I uninstall the products the scenery areas return to their original state. I am running FSX SP2. I believe it has something to do with the limitations of mesh rendering. I can run all scenery selectors to the max in most cases and cannot seem to smooth out the raised surfaces around my airports. It does make a tremendous difference elsewhere. Keith

Keith,I borrowed the quote from Dean at the FSDreamscapes board, but this explains why the plateaus with the high resolution 5m mesh and what he is doing to correct it.Hi the airport plateaus are actually a limitation of Microsoft Flight Simulator that have only recently started being solved by 3rd party developers such as FS Genesis, FS Dreamscapes and tools such as ADE...We did document the limitations of Microsoft Flight Simulator in the ProMesh documentation, however we are working towards fixing every airport in the datasets now that FSX is going to be around for a while... The problem isn't in the mesh, it's a problem in the airport flattens as FSX doesn't support sloping runways...Until a couple of weeks ago the only option was for users to use ADE (airport design editor) to create polygons to fix the problems on a local level as vector based data is not our speciality, however, our new technology that we've developed in house is enabling us to manually upgrade each airport, but it can take up to one day per airport to do by hand depending on the airport size...We have not as yet announced anything official for airport plateau fixes as yet, though we are working on fixes for VFR+ Utah at this time... Please understand that we did document the limitations of FSX when it came to using high resolution mesh, but there are now a few possibilities to be able to solve these problems... One is that we'd like to support community based solutions through the use of ADE and host those temporary fixes on our site, secondly we are working by hand to fix each airport and that is a process that will unfortunately take some time with literally tens of thousands of airports to be done it's not something that can be fixed quickly...One limitation too to being able to fix the airport plateaus, is that many FS default airports are not located in their real world location, which means that we're not able to provide fixes until those airports are able to be properly located, some of them are miles away from their real world location and we really can't start flattening areas on the source mesh which is accurate, in order to accomodate inaccurate airport data...Once we have photoscenery coverage for California we'll be able to finalize all airport flatten issues for that state...Hope this helps,Brian S.

[flyerkg 62]

Until a couple of weeks ago the only option was for users to use ADE (airport design editor) to create polygons to fix the problems on a local level as vector based data is not our speciality, however, our new technology that we've developed in house is enabling us to manually upgrade each airport, but it can take up to one day per airport to do by hand depending on the airport size...

Brian,Thank you for the detailed reply. I have ADE. I will need to get up to speed on using it. So far it seems like a pretty dynamic application. I haven't done much with scenery design for a couple of years now. My guess is that each of the individual polys will need to be flattened incrementally to smooth out the plateau around the affected airports. Please correct me if I am wrong.Keith