Alderney island/ Earth Simulations Ltd

[David Roch 1,981]

A very very very small island in HD/ 4 seasons/ night textures with a mass of details.That's exactly Megascenery Earth's opposite concept.http://earthsimulations.com/topography_layer.html

[GHD 21]

A very very very small island in HD/ 4 seasons/ night textures with a mass of details.

There are actually five seasons :(

[David Roch 1,981]

There are actually five seasons :(

Right! :-))I thought Vivaldi was the developer!! :(

[victorwest2 0]

There are actually five seasons :(

Four. I really can't see Alderney needing any hard winter textures. :( :(

[mgh 89]

A very very very small island in HD/ 4 seasons/ night textures with a mass of details.That's exactly Megascenery Earth's opposite concept.http://earthsimulations.com/topography_layer.html

They seem very impressive but as you say, they are very very, very small islands. Alderney is only 3 sq miles in area. It's priced at

[PaavoNurmi 0]

They seem very impressive but as you say, they are very very, very small islands. Alderney is only 3 sq miles in area. It's priced at

[coturnix 1]

I

[David Roch 1,981]

And as i write this i notice how much i miss Richard Goldstein

[Lars Peter Hammer 0]

And as i write this i notice how much i miss Richard Goldstein

[Petraeus 147]

They seem very impressive but as you say, they are very very, very small islands. Alderney is only 3 sq miles in area.

Just to illustrate mgh's point, here's what happens when you detach Alderney from the European continental shelf and float it across on top of mid-town Manhattan. Not a large area.However ..... even with the demise of Aces, we are left with the technology that enables this to be implemented on a Megascenery scale. "All" it requires is a batch process for applying the seasonal colour changes that Earth Simulations have done (with suitable variation for different climatic regions, etc.) and a continuing exponential decrease in the price of disc storage. It may be over the horizon, but not too far beyond.

[pontiuspilotus 6]

AH - yes - same here.

I have been thinking the same thnig last night when I ran FS9 (my main sim is FSX at the moment). "Atmosphere" is the right word for it, and you get lots of that in Emma, Harvey/Monroe, Orcas Islands, Misty/Tongass/Glacier Bay, etc. I have the full FTX regions for Oz but it still feels like it is missing that certain something called "atmosphere" or "ambience." It probably has something to do with the way colours and textures are modelled in FS9. Or the sound of birds and animals in some of the Georender sceneries. Call it nostalgia!

[Andydigital 93]

"All" it requires is a batch process for applying the seasonal colour changes that Earth Simulations have done

While some of it was batch processed, a huge amount of it was painted by hand, it wouldn't have looked as good as it does if it was just done by machine code.

[Orbx 123]

I applaud what Earth Simulations have done with Alderney, it's a remarkble piece of work and it's precisely the approach Orbx takes with all its addon airports, which usually cover at least 50 square kilometres with hand coloured seasons and hand placed objects and autogen, including animated birds, sealife and other objects. Alderney is the way forward, because despite being small, it's a VFR and explorer's playground. Again, we have produced sceneries like it since mid last year when we released YMML Melbourne airport, and we now have seven airports using between 15cm - 60cm hand crafted photoreal terrain. We are moving to 7cm/pixel with our Tamworth project.I can't quite agree that doing a large-scale photoreal project covering entire countries or regions can be batch recoloured using scripts. All our seasonal variations are done by hand, in painstaking detail, for good reason. A batch process would not provide the clear deliniation between hues required to preserve bitumen, concrete, and many features in the terrain which don't actually change colour. If you think about it enough, the only things which change colour during seasons are predominately grass, crops, and maybe, some water in dams which may dry up over summer. The rest is static. I'd love to see an automated process which will be intelligent enough to recolour with the precision of a human eye.In response to FTX AU regions (covering an area the size of the USA) having no ambience or life, we have in fact added quite a lot of animated birds and other animals to those areas. You just need to get low and slow to see them.I was a huge fan of the Georender series as well, but the good news is that with FTX Pacific Northwest, Holger Sandmann, Jon Patch, Bill Womack and many other fine developers will be releasing products through FSAddon and Orbx which blend with our base FTX 1m terrain and you'll see many little airfields oozing with atmosphere in the region. We'll do Alaska as well, so we hope to bring back the glory days of bushflying.Now .. I am off to purchase Alderney - those guys need support and we need more developers like them to succeed!

[Guest srathe]

Purchasing has been a somewhat frustrating experience for me; after being presented with a download link, the downloads kept failing. Using a download manager seemed to cure it, getting to 93% quickly, but then failing too. I tried to re-engage the download manager, only to find out I'd used all of the available downloads, even though I'd never successfully downloaded it. So here I am half a day later, salivating over what promises to be a beautiful scenery addon, but unable to install it.I've emailed the developer both through the website and via a direct email, but haven't received a response, nor has my account been granted any more download attempts. Has anyone succeeded in downloading the package? Anyone gotten email responses from the developer? Any suggestions for me?

[David Roch 1,981]

Darren, the developer, is aware of this problem.Here is the answer I got from him:Hi DavidI'm very sorry for the inconvenience you're experiencing downloading the product.We were let down quite badly by our ISP and the service has been woefully slow effecting an unacceptable number of customers. I am currently uploading the website to a new dedicated server which has a 100 megabit connection and should improve the situation hugely. We will reset your downloads counter if you are one of those unfortunate users that is unable to succesfully download in the alloted tries, but as I say we are quite confident our ISP issues will be solved by the switch to the dedicated server. All customes will be sent an e-mail as soon as this has taken effect. Kind regards Darren