Hey Guys, I thought I would give you some first impressions of a new product out there for FSX. Its called massive Scenery and is available from www.sim-savvy.com . I came across the web site a while ago and was a bit under impressed, it was very basic and gave no idea of the product. Being a photoscenery nut, I kept checking back to see what was happening. The other day I checked and, the site is up and running, and finished, and gives a good idea of product. Basically, it's offering the whole of the norh west USA in photoreal scenery. However, its different from the rest of the products in several ways:First, its deliberately a quantity over quality product - I spoke to Larry , the developer and he is aiming at people who want an accurate depiction of the real scenery, for instance student pilots etc for VFR practice, without the massive hard drive space and machine resources required with normal photoscenery. He has not included nightlighting etc and also while being able to do some colour adjustments , has had to draw a line over seeking image perfection due to the huge area covered. Consequently you are at the mercy of the source image quality, which is variable in places and differs from state to state, but overall, its pretty good. The resolution is 2m, and it looks pretty good, something I was initially sceptical of until I tried the samples. Anyway, here is some screenshots of a flight over California. I will post some other state pictures over the next few days. One other major selling point- He supplies the whole package on a preloaded Lacie 500GB desktop hardrive, that you can just plug into your PC as you like, so you dont even have to worry about space on your PC. I was pretty impressed and think it you should check it out. he has free download samples.

Hi,What is that black/blue square on all your shots from?

that looks stunning!!!

Hi,What is that black/blue square on all your shots from?

Hi Jim, It was my screen widget for core temp etc in the background, I was running in windowed mode. It only showed up on the screenshots, not the screen i was viewing!

OK just wondering!

MarkNice stuff. Do you think you could post a couple over Phoenix at approximately 4,000 ft.? Pretty please? :(

It's great to see projects of this scale being released. I remember when I used to dream of the day I could enjoy a flight sim and relive a flight looking at a world beneath exactly as I would have seen in a real flight. Now with Tileproxy and also more and more commercial projects, and with FS-X, that dream has come true. I wonder how the author of this project obtained the commercial rights to that much photoreal source? 500 Gigs of scenery? Wow!Regards,John

One thing I forgot to mention, if you are outside the US, you will have to pay custom duty at your local delivery office before they will deliver it to your house. I think that is why it is cheaper for the outside USA version. It cost me about

Thank you Mark! :(

One thing I forgot to mention, if you are outside the US, you will have to pay custom duty at your local delivery office before they will deliver it to your house. I think that is why it is cheaper for the outside USA version. It cost me about

Mark,Are you saying it cost you about

it looks very nice, but how do the city areas look? any screen shots of busy cities? How does it look at lower altitudes? I feel MegasceneryX doesn't look very good under 1000 feet, but after that it's amazing.

Does it have good load times? Tile proxy is definitely a low and slow approach and I like to fly at 24K or so.jja

I wonder how the author of this project obtained the commercial rights to that much photoreal source? 500 Gigs of scenery? Wow!

With the number of new(er) photoscenery products that have become available over the past year, I also wonder about this. Many of them don't say WHERE they got the source data from, and that makes me hesitant to purchase it.It wouldn't be difficult for someone to use one of the "tile grabbing" applications available for the past couple years to download large areas of scenery tiles from several online mapping services, then "convert" them themselves, then sell them to flight sim enthusiasts. It would take balls to DO that, but it wouldn't be out of the question. That's why I won't buy any commercial photoscenery product unless the developer DOES say where they got the source data from.I'm NOT saying the developer of this photoscenery product is doing this. But there ARE a lot of pay-for photoscenery "addons" out there that do not say where the source data came from. And as mentioned in many other photoscenery discussion threads, the cost of this data is NOT cheap in most cases. How much would it cost to get the rights to 500 GBs of photoscenery data in the first place?Good question you raised, John.

I agree it makes you wonder when they don't disclose the source.The scenery above appears to be a pretty good deal for what your get, but I would still rather have smaller areas that are better detail as far as color correction goes and also night textures.I wish that the MegaScenery titles would have continued for FSX rather than the MegaSceneryEarth stuff. They did such nice work on the MegaScenery SoCal, Vegas, Dallas, and Phoenix areas. I wish they would have continued to do those smaller regional areas in with good detail rather than the big areas that often don't look that great but are a good value.When they introduced MegaSceneryEarth I was excited that south Florida had finally been done. I downloaded the minute it was available, used it two times, but was so turned off by the source data with bad coloring and even clouds on the ground that I uninstalled it and never used it again. I have also never purchased anymore ftom them.I would perhaps give this stuff a try, but with no night textures there is no way I will buy it. I don't want to have to disable it everytime I want to fly at night.