It says right on top of their website that the photos are from 1995 and 1996. Switzerland as a state has been around since 1291 (Founding of the Swiss Confederation) so I don't think there's much reason to complain about images 7-8 years old ;-)Cheers, Holger

Ok, thanks for the info, Holger.Was not really meant as a complaint. The Swiss mountains will probably not look much older ;)Mike

Hi Paul,Thanks for your reply. I'm also aware about a known bug related to DXT1 rendering on Nvidia cards. I don't know if it's what you meant. For my scenery, i used Imagemagick to cut and resample the tiles to the right dimension and then Imagetool to convert to DXT1. Some tiles have an alpha channel to render water. The color dynamic is therefore reduced to only 3 colors/texel. The quality of the original aerial photos was not the same everywhere and i had to make some compromises between grass,rock and snow to get a general good looking landscape. Some weeks ago, i made a real flight for fun over the alps. I don't have a PPL but i live near a small airfield. I was really astonished how close were the real colours to my scenery. The key difference is in the contrast dynamic which is inpossible to render on a screen, even with the best graphic card available.Regarding the prices, you are right, they are dropping drastically. They will also drop in Switzerland in the next four year due to a new governement approach in geodata delivery. But we couldn't wait longer. Satellite data is available too at lower price, but it stil difficult to find cloudfree shots covering the entire country. Remember that we have mountains at a heigth up to 15000 ft. One can count the number of cloudfree days in the year on the fingers of a sinlge hand. Best regards, Jean-Pierre

I doubt it. I think it's priced omptimally, even if it means it's in the "if you have to ask the price you can't afford it" range. When I think about about all the whinging about add-on prices I've seen over the years (some certainly justified, some not), I very much doubt the developers could have priced it down to any sort of "attractive" point where the sales volume increase would offset the lower price. In fact I think they would have to dramatically lower the price before there would be any material sales volume increase at all.If this type of thing were available for my country, I'd be happy to pay up to $500 for it, provided it was accurate, bug free and I had a sufficiently fast computer to run it (which unfortunately I don't).The point is that if you have enough money to own a computer powerful enough to run it without any performance degradation, then the last thing you are going to be worried about is the price of the software.

I think your point "if this type of thing were available for my country, I'd be happy to pay up to $500" is exactly my point. I love Switzerland-have been there several times-but can not really justify that amount of money for something I would use only casually. At a lower price I would go for it though. I am sure there is a world wide group of simmers who would also buy this package at a lower price. It seems like the remarks seen here and on other boards confirm this.At what point-does selling a product to that world wide market at a lesser price equal a smaller perhaps country only specific market at the higher price? I think Henry Ford came up with the answer... :-)By the way-I own Megascenery which is a similar product-I get better performance with it than the default fs textures-I would expect much the same with this package.Of course no one can make the decision but the developer-but if it was me I'd try to sell more at a lower price than sell less at a higher.http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

Hallo Wolfgang,You wrote:"I'm also afraid, that the scenery has neither got night nor seasonal textures. I guess also the lightning will be allways the same no matter what time of the day it is. Which is a pity, becaus I really love, how nicely FS9 renders mountain shadows etc. You probably will have sunny mountains allways, even if it is raining."I have seen a Beta of this package 3 weeks ago.There is no saisonal textures.I do not know if ther is a night texture.but what I am sure about is the shadows of the mountains move with the sun position during day time.This scenery looks great especially early morning and late afternoon.