Megascenery Earth question

[Arklight1 140]

After such a search I read that the quality seem to vary between areas to a high extent. I was thinking about the area in southern California situated just to the north of the Megascenery Southern California (which I have for FS9) since I got maps for that region (from Megascenery USA). But how is quality for that particular area.

I have Tile 89 from that area (Fresno/Clovis/etc..) and I like it. I received the 50% off offer in the mail as well and am thinking about picking up that same section you mentioned (I live in Clovis).

[shimedawg 0]

Hi,Based on what I've experienced, photoscenery is much easier on computers than those sceneries with plenty of autogen features

This is a matter of you get what you pay for.I can't fly with any photoscenery because I either fly helicopters or planes that fly low and slow. Photoscenery looks so flat and fake it completely ruins my experience. Scenery with realistic autogen like Orbx WILL RUN SLOWER, but holy crap does it look good. I can barely fly anywhere else now that I have flown ORBX PNW and AUSTRALIA. I also suffer from very low frames around seattle and vancouver and a little in portland. I just plan my flights not to land there. I can fly through and suffer from stutters for a few minutes and continue on.It boils down to how you fly. If you fly high and fast than just buy flat photoscenery. You are too high to tell it looks fake. If you fly low and slow then you have a choice to make. And if you do a lot of bush flying the answer is easy. Outside large cities ORBX performs as good as or better than default FSX. That is a fact mentioned in every major review, including the latest issues of both PC Pilot and PC Aviator magazines. But everyone uses the sim for their own reasons, so to each their own.

[Gaiiden 98]

Unfortunately it has turned out to be impossible to fly in Seattle area with the slider settings suggested by ORBX. I got stutters and fps around 10-12. I also experienced that if I turned down road traffic from 16 to 0 and GA traffic from 20 to 0 (all traffic off) things improved somewhat. Fps went up to about 15-17 and stutters decreased somewhat. But if I then turned down texture resolution scenery density and water (three steps!) very little changed with regard to fps and smoothness.

Sounds like you have a decent graphics card but are lacking in the CPU department. Running lots of AI traffic will chew up your CPU cycles and slow your framerates. FSX isn't that intensive for modern day graphics cards (unless you jack it up with a ton of HD REX textures) but it still can chew up a modern day processor. Intel is supposedly cutting the prices of i7s in half very soon to match AMDs price cuts and I got my eyes on a quad core i7....

[jfri 42]

This is a matter of you get what you pay for. Scenery with realistic autogen like Orbx WILL RUN SLOWER, but holy crap does it look good. I can barely fly anywhere else now that I have flown ORBX PNW and AUSTRALIA. I also suffer from very low frames around seattle and vancouver and a little in portland. I just plan my flights not to land there. I can fly through and suffer from stutters for a few minutes and continue on.

You suffer from very low fps with that system where all amin components are significantly faster than mine. I have been thinking in upgrading my 6000X2 to a Phenom II quad 3.4 GHz like you have. But there seem to be little point in that.

Sounds like you have a decent graphics card but are lacking in the CPU department. Running lots of AI traffic will chew up your CPU cycles and slow your framerates. FSX isn't that intensive for modern day graphics cards (unless you jack it up with a ton of HD REX textures) but it still can chew up a modern day processor. Intel is supposedly cutting the prices of i7s in half very soon to match AMDs price cuts and I got my eyes on a quad core i7....

In big city regions it isn't sufficient to completely turn off all AI traffic even if it improves things somewhat.

[markturner 0]

Megascenery is the real deal - actual photos of the area, so what you see is identical to real life. And you can turn on the autogen if you like. That goes for all photoscenery. And the nightlighting works on sim savvy and megascenery.There are some very fervent Orbx fanbois around who think nothing else comes close. I have all orbx products and just about every photoscenery prouduct made for FSX as well. So I am not biased. Orbx stuff is not photoreal, its just FSX scenery done as it should have been done - IE with more varied textures and those and the autogen and landclass area properly placed. And it does look good. BUT it does not look as real as the photoscenery. After carefully trying out both, I prefer to fly with photoscener, but if you like the orbx stuff, fair enough. But do try out the best of photoscenery first. Sure there are areas of photoscenery that the source imagery is not great, but conversly, there are some fantastic areas and when its good, its unbeatable.You can try Vero-fs for california here: http://vero-fs.com/ this is top quality stuff with seasons, nighlighting and its cheap.. They are rolling out the whole of California.Sim Savvy, already mentioned, excellent value product an at 2m resolution, wont tax your machine at all.Have a look at the links in my sig, to my screen shots and videos on you tube - all done with photoscenery. You will be impressed I am sureChers,Mark

[Mojave 7]

I have the MegaSceneryEarth area you are talking about - just north of the SoCal area, it covers the Mojave west to the ocean and south just to Cajon Pass.The quality is good. It's overly orange/red. One BIG IMPORTANT note about MSE scenery. It is not actually complete. This scenery in particular does not go all the way to the Colorado River. Similarly, the Central Arizona scenery I purchased does not got all the way to the river, nor does it go all the way east to New Mexico. So you're stuck with no scenery in between - they need to make that clear. They say California and Arizona are complete but that is false advertising. I stopped at that point and will not purchase anymore MSE until they fix this.I am developing freeware scenery for NM and even when I overlap the NM/AZ border, there is still about 50 miles of NO scenery west into Arizona.

[meshman 109]

I am developing freeware scenery for NM and even when I overlap the NM/AZ border, there is still about 50 miles of NO scenery west into Arizona.

When some one I know was mentioning buying the Arizona MSE, I asked about the gaps. It's funny, because there is source material available for all of Arizona. Same applies for California. Maybe the developer of MSE is allergic to the Colorado River? :(

[shimedawg 0]

Megascenery is the real deal - actual photos of the area, so what you see is identical to real life. And you can turn on the autogen if you like. That goes for all photoscenery. And the nightlighting works on sim savvy and megascenery.There are some very fervent Orbx fanbois around who think nothing else comes close. I have all orbx products and just about every photoscenery prouduct made for FSX as well. So I am not biased. Orbx stuff is not photoreal, its just FSX scenery done as it should have been done - IE with more varied textures and those and the autogen and landclass area properly placed. And it does look good. BUT it does not look as real as the photoscenery. After carefully trying out both, I prefer to fly with photoscener, but if you like the orbx stuff, fair enough. But do try out the best of photoscenery first. Sure there are areas of photoscenery that the source imagery is not great, but conversly, there are some fantastic areas and when its good, its unbeatable.You can try Vero-fs for california here: http://vero-fs.com/ this is top quality stuff with seasons, nighlighting and its cheap.. They are rolling out the whole of California.Sim Savvy, already mentioned, excellent value product an at 2m resolution, wont tax your machine at all.Have a look at the links in my sig, to my screen shots and videos on you tube - all done with photoscenery. You will be impressed I am sureChers,Mark

To be fair, I have nothing against photoscenery and like I said above I own some myself. I think the main question here is how you fly. If you fly low and slow, at about 1000 ft in a chopper or something similar like I do, then photoscenery just looks way too flat for my taste. Orbx and Flytampa are probably the two best scenery's for my style of flying. Orbx has the best coverage for the $ but it is not photoscenery as you mentioned.If I was flying at higher altitudes then I guess it wouldn't matter. But for my style of flying photoscenery does not look good. However, I have not tried the Vero product but I have heard good things. Would it look good at in the 500-1000 ft range? And does it have full autogen?

[jfri 42]

Megascenery is the real deal - actual photos of the area, so what you see is identical to real life. And you can turn on the autogen if you like. That goes for all photoscenery. And the nightlighting works on sim savvy and megascenery.There are some very fervent Orbx fanbois around who think nothing else comes close. I have all orbx products and just about every photoscenery prouduct made for FSX as well. So I am not biased. Orbx stuff is not photoreal, its just FSX scenery done as it should have been done - IE with more varied textures and those and the autogen and landclass area properly placed. And it does look good. BUT it does not look as real as the photoscenery. After carefully trying out both, I prefer to fly with photoscener, but if you like the orbx stuff, fair enough. But do try out the best of photoscenery first. Sure there are areas of photoscenery that the source imagery is not great, but conversly, there are some fantastic areas and when its good, its unbeatable.You can try Vero-fs for california here: http://vero-fs.com/ this is top quality stuff with seasons, nighlighting and its cheap.. They are rolling out the whole of California.Sim Savvy, already mentioned, excellent value product an at 2m resolution, wont tax your machine at all.Have a look at the links in my sig, to my screen shots and videos on you tube - all done with photoscenery. You will be impressed I am sureChers,Mark

One thing that scares me off MSE is that I have seen info about corrupted scenery like misplaced objects. Sim Sawy is to expensive for me. Vero fs has interesting low pricing.

To be fair, I have nothing against photoscenery and like I said above I own some myself. I think the main question here is how you fly. If you fly low and slow, at about 1000 ft in a chopper or something similar like I do, then photoscenery just looks way too flat for my taste. Orbx and Flytampa are probably the two best scenery's for my style of flying. Orbx has the best coverage for the $ but it is not photoscenery as you mentioned.If I was flying at higher altitudes then I guess it wouldn't matter. But for my style of flying photoscenery does not look good. However, I have not tried the Vero product but I have heard good things. Would it look good at in the 500-1000 ft range? And does it have full autogen?

I mostly fly at 3000-6000 ft sometimes as low as 1500 ft but rarely below 1000 ft except of course during landing and take off. A thought here. Photoscenery might look flat but what about autogen? Isn't that oversized i.e to high instead of to flat. So we seem to have two unrealistic options to choose from.

[yankeegolf3 51]

Hi,Simsavvy too expensive. 200 $ for 34 US states, It makes 5.9$ per states including a 500Mb hard disk drive.In my opinion, it is one of the best bargain on the sim market.