yeah, it's rather steep in price...I would love it but as an example the England & Wales VFR Photo scenery which I purchased and love to death btw (I consider it the best PhotoScenery there is) is 56,000 sq miles with all 4 volumes and it still works out cheaper than this Swiss one which is only 1/4 the area covered.I'd be willing to fork out for maybe half that price but even then the wife would probably kill me when the CC statement came through...:-lolRegardsDave

good lordy! its almost 3 times as much as the entire sim cost. Blow that for a joke!

Hi all,Take a look there,http://mypage.bluewin.ch/thwantz/This is my homepage with some nice screenshots and technical details in 3 langages ( french, german and english )One remark:The picture are taken from aerial ortophotos and are not colorizedThe colors have only been corrected to compensate haze and exposure irregularities. This explain also the high price: we had to pay about 6$ for each square kilometer to get it. Cheers, Jean-Pierre Author of Switzerland Professional

That's the way this hobby is going, I'm afraid :(

Great work and I hope you can get back your investment and maybe a little more...You might consider that if you lowered the price you might get a lot more people to buy it -rather than having a only select few purchase it. I am sure it is a gamble either way!Really great work-I look forward to a time when the whole world looks like this. http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

Did you read the comment above by the author? He paid $6.00 per square km for the photos. 16,000 square miles is about about 41,000 square km, which works out to about $250,000 just for the photos! At $150 per copy, he will have to sell more than 1,600 copies just to break even. That doesn't count the time involved. So $150 doens't seem so unreasonable, does it? That said, I can't aford to spend that much on an FS addon, although if it was my home area that was being done, I might find it.

Hi Paul:thanks for telling me about the conflict between nightmaps and one-texture-for-all-seasons: I didn't know that. My own photoreal stuff is for the backcountry so I didn't try making a nightmap, otherwise I would have found this out the hard way :-(Great idea for the utility, though I'd assume it takes a few minutes to rename thousands of files ;-) BTW, do you know of this freeware re-naming utility?http://www.georgedillon.com/web/freeware/therename.shtmlCheers, Holger

Hi there:I second Geof's praise and good wishes - definitely an amazing commitment of time and money with a stunning result! Hope you guys will be able to market this product successfully.As for autogen placement with photoreal, I've had success with a fairly simple approach to adding custom autogen, though it's still not feasible to cover the entire area. You can find my posts by searching for my name (Holger Sandmann) in the scenery design forum.Cheers, Holger

150 bucks.....no thanks! No matter how great it looks.Johnny"I'LL BE BACK"[div align=center]http://www.avsim.com/hangar/fly/josve/zone.jpg ][/div

I wish your scenery success! :)

>Great work and I hope you can get back your investment and>maybe a little more...>>You might consider that if you lowered the price you might get>a lot more people to buy it -rather than having a only select>few purchase it. I am sure it is a gamble either way!>>Really great work-I look forward to a time when the whole>world looks like this. >http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpgG'day Geof,Actually I think the prices of these sorts of scenery types are bargains as they are. When I looked into doing a similar sort of project for Australia, I figured the cost of the raw data would be somewhere between $60,000 - $100,000 depending on how much mesh detail and texture detail I wanted to recreate. And that excluded the massive, humungous amount of work involved in actually creating the product. Needless to say I dismissed the project as commercially unviable, although technically possible.It would be nice to see the whole world look like this, but I can't ever see the price of source data going down unless MS themselves put out a "super" version of their simulator and paid hefty licence fees to the various agencies that have intellectual ownership of the data. Otherwise I just can't ever see this sort of esoteric, high detail stuff sell in the sort of high volume commercial quantities that might lend it to being available in a moderately priced simulation.On the other hand, if I was filthy-rich and had 100 spare hours every day, I'd love to do this for Australia even though it would be at a financial loss.

Is it true the Swiss photographic scenery is based on 10 years old data ? Think I read this somewhere, but not sure.Mike

I didn't mean to imply that it isn't a bargain-but bargain or not many will pass on it because of the relatively "high" price.But if only 500 copies are sold because of this relatively "high" price-wouldn't it make sense to cut the price in half and perhaps sell 2000 -or even cut it 1/3 it to $50 and sell 5000?http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

>Hi Paul:>>thanks for telling me about the conflict between nightmaps and>one-texture-for-all-seasons: I didn't know that. My own>photoreal stuff is for the backcountry so I didn't try making>a nightmap, otherwise I would have found this out the hard way>:-(>>Great idea for the utility, though I'd assume it takes a few>minutes to rename thousands of files ;-) >>BTW, do you know of this freeware re-naming utility?>>http://www.georgedillon.com/web/freeware/therename.shtml>>>Cheers, HolgerHi Holger,Actualy I suggested that the folks at Megascenery write and provide such a tool with a simple menue like "what season would you like?" etc. I use "rnameit" a very advanced file renaming tool, it will make mince-meat out of that job. :)Tis Freeware:http://fileutil.tripod.com/Rnameit.htm"Therename" looks like it could be even much more powerful as it is huge at over 3mb compared to Rnamits 100k, thanks for the link!

>Hi all,>>Take a look there,>>http://mypage.bluewin.ch/thwantz/>>This is my homepage with some nice screenshots and technical>details in 3 langages ( french, german and english )>>One remark:>The picture are taken from aerial ortophotos and are not>colorized>The colors have only been corrected to compensate haze and>exposure irregularities. This explain also the high price: we>had to pay about 6$ for each square kilometer to get it. >>Cheers, Jean-Pierre Author of Switzerland Professional Hi Jean-Pierre,Thank you for more of the details.As far as the color goes I apologize for my harsh words... I understand about the need to "tint" but perhaps then what I am seeing is the result of something else.There are some problems associated with some of the resampling methods used for the photoreal process as sometimes ALL of the textures can come out sharing just one 256 color pallet resulting in a very shallow color depth for the whole scene, as the green prairies seem to have lost that depth, but perhaps not.I will have to revisit my notes on what version and what tools etc. as I am in the midst of reprocessing new data for the continuing sagas of my Rochester NY photoreal project.Didn't mean to be overly critical, I know about the cost associated with such a project and it sounds like you made out quite well, Data cost seem to be dropping every day.Again thanks for the reply here at Avsim.