I would go with the boxed SoCal for FSX. I own it and it's great! The best part is that it covers the area I fly around in real life. It's much more of a finished product than those tiles you buy as desired will ever be.

With megascenery earth you can buy only the tiles you want and you do not have to buy the whole state.

How about the entire 50 states in photoreal? Looks like it is just around the corner at double the resolution or better of MegaSceneryEarth. My understanding is it will be realeased state by state starting with Arizona in the next few weeks. The files are large and there are lots of them so it comes with a 500 GB ver 3.0 USB drive and includes updates. You might want to check out the Salt Lake City demo in 50 cm/pixel. AVSIM review should be published any day now.http://www.sim-savvy.com/Screenshots/Screenshots.htmlRay

How about the entire 50 states in photoreal? Looks like it is just around the corner at double the resolution or better of MegaSceneryEarth. My understanding is it will be realeased state by state starting with Arizona in the next few weeks. The files are large and there are lots of them so it comes with a 500 GB ver 3.0 USB drive and includes updates. You might want to check out the Salt Lake City demo in 50 cm/pixel. AVSIM review should be published any day now.http://www.sim-savvy.com/Screenshots/Screenshots.htmlRay

I bought the Sim-Savvy scenery a few days ago. Compared to Megascenery, I find that it has better color but resolution seems a bit lower. Also you get strange looking coastlines (lack of watermask) Also, Megasceney has autogen and night textures, Sim-Savvy doesn't.So far I am not impressed, but for the price you get a nice 500GB USB 3.0 hdd, the whole USA photoreal plus Canada and Alaska at 38m/pixel.I came to the conclusion that this scenery is better suited for tubeliner pilots. For low and slow ORBX is unmatched.

How about the entire 50 states in photoreal? Looks like it is just around the corner at double the resolution or better of MegaSceneryEarth. My understanding is it will be realeased state by state starting with Arizona in the next few weeks. The files are large and there are lots of them so it comes with a 500 GB ver 3.0 USB drive and includes updates. You might want to check out the Salt Lake City demo in 50 cm/pixel. AVSIM review should be published any day now.http://www.sim-savvy...creenshots.htmlRay

The only problem I have with having the whole USA in photo scenery is the size and load times. If they install state by state so you can turn off what you don't want that will be great. This is what I don't like about Megascenery you have to turn off each tile and it is a pain in the butt. If I have the whole of California Installed that is about 120 tiles, it takes FSX 5 min to load into a flight. Right now I have only the tiles that I like and FSX loads in about 30 seconds.

The only problem I have with having the whole USA in photo scenery is the size and load times. If they install state by state so you can turn off what you don't want that will be great. This is what I don't like about Megascenery you have to turn off each tile and it is a pain in the butt. If I have the whole of California Installed that is about 120 tiles, it takes FSX 5 min to load into a flight. Right now I have only the tiles that I like and FSX loads in about 30 seconds.

I wouldn't expect anyone to load more than 5 or 6 states at any one time. How fast can you fly? It is just a matter of a check mark to load or not load from the scenery library for fsx. All inside FSX without stopping your cross country flight from LA to NYC or other flights. No night stuff though.I use MegaSceneryX for Hawaii with some other custom scenery and it is an improvement over the fsx default. Still not great, but an improvement. I don't think it has night textures that I am aware of.I was referring to the next release of Sim Savvy's Photoreal - 50 cm/pixel of the full 50 states.Ray

Today is you lucky day! Just got an email from PCAviator stating all Megascenery products are on sale 50% off over the July 4th weekend. So that should mean that Southern California would be $19.95 instead of the regular $39.95. That's what I started with but then added the entire state. May have to go back and pick up a few more states! (what can I say - I'm hooked on good photoreal scenery).Clutch

Thanks for the heads up Clutch. Even though I already own all the MegaSceneryX titles minus Hawaii and Tahoe, I used it as an opportuntity to get the NYC and Chicago MSE titles to test. I just bought one tile in each area where JFK and ORD reside, but for $3 and change it's not a bad deal if it ends up being no good. Florida was horrible, southern AZ (Tucson area) isn't bad, and the Washington state was pretty good, so I though I would try the 2 areas above for the low price.

Mmmmm - I'll have see what Florida offers as I just ordered Florida, Michigan and Utah. I got it to go with my new FSDreamteam Ft. Lauderdale airport plus I like to fly to places I have visited (Key West, Orlando, etc.). Yea, there can be some spots where the colors or resolution may not be at it's best. I have seen that for some remote parts of Cali. But other parts can be quite stunning. Same with Arizona - WoW at dusk or dawn. The difference between Megascenery X and Megascenery Earth can be the aerial photos used. I noticed they are quite different for SoCal. In SoCal X it looks like it was taken during the Summer while I have parts of Cali in Mega Earth X taken during the Winter. Can be cool. I can see the Big Bear (San Bernardino Mountains?), in Winter snow or summer heat.As far as installing and loading photo scenery can be quite massive. Just for California you are looking at over 100GB at 1.2m (have some extra hard drives at the ready!). D/l and installing, they come in 1GB sizes on average. Your right, if you leave them in their original install folder method it could take forever to activate and/or de-activate areas. Cali would have some 120 folders.I am doing a few tests, I put all of California in one folder - a whopping 90+ gig! Got to be a record for an add-on package, ha! I am surprised how well FSX handles it. No crashes and the load times seem no different than smaller photoreal packages, say like MeagsceneryX SoCal. For Arizona I divided it up into three folders: Arizona - North, Arizona - Central and Arizona - South, just to see if one method works better than the other."I was referring to the next release of Sim Savvy's Photoreal - 50 cm/pixel of the full 50 states."Not sure how they could achieve that as the entire US has not been captured at that resolution plus the size would be unyielding!?Clutch

AVSIM review should be published any day now.http://www.sim-savvy...creenshots.html

Looking forward to that review, Ray.

Mmmmm - I'll have see what Florida offers as I just ordered Florida, Michigan and Utah. I got it to go with my new FSDreamteam Ft. Lauderdale airport plus I like to fly to places I have visited (Key West, Orlando, etc.). Yea, there can be some spots where the colors or resolution may not be at it's best. I have seen that for some remote parts of Cali. But other parts can be quite stunning. Same with Arizona - WoW at dusk or dawn. The difference between Megascenery X and Megascenery Earth can be the aerial photos used. I noticed they are quite different for SoCal. In SoCal X it looks like it was taken during the Summer while I have parts of Cali in Mega Earth X taken during the Winter. Can be cool. I can see the Big Bear (San Bernardino Mountains?), in Winter snow or summer heat.As far as installing and loading photo scenery can be quite massive. Just for California you are looking at over 100GB at 1.2m (have some extra hard drives at the ready!). D/l and installing, they come in 1GB sizes on average. Your right, if you leave them in their original install folder method it could take forever to activate and/or de-activate areas. Cali would have some 120 folders.I am doing a few tests, I put all of California in one folder - a whopping 90+ gig! Got to be a record for an add-on package, ha! I am surprised how well FSX handles it. No crashes and the load times seem no different than smaller photoreal packages, say like MeagsceneryX SoCal. For Arizona I divided it up into three folders: Arizona - North, Arizona - Central and Arizona - South, just to see if one method works better than the other.Clutch

I have all my mega scenery in different folders like central, northern and so on. But what I find hard is that in your FSX scenery folder they are all listed as separate tiles. So what I would like to do is compile these into separate folders so I only have to tick the area I want and not have to un tic hundreds of tiles. I don't know if this can be done as you have to install every tile separately. I have posed this question to Robert at PC Aviator with no response. So let me know what you come up with on your experiments. I have tryed a few things myself but ended up messing things up.Question: If I un tic everything in my FSX scenery folder that is MegaScenery and remove it, and then add the area folders that I have created, would that work ?Josh

Hi Josh,You can pretty much install them any way you wish. For me, I have my own way of naming my add-on scenery folders which I prefer. So what I do is download/install each .exe file into a temp folder. I keep a copy of this default setup as a backup (yes, you need a lot of extra hd space). I then copy them over to my FSX drive (or where ever I am adding scenery) and combine them into how many folders I want for that state, or area. Yea, I don't want 120 different folders to click on and off. So for example I used one folder for Southern California and one for the rest of the entire state. For Arizona, I broke it down into three areas, North, Central and South. Actually I just mimicked how it was shown at the MegaScenery website for Arizona. So it's just three clicks instead of 50-60 clicks. The backups come in handy in case I discover it's better to break them into something different - say I always fly West-to-East or mainly South-to-North. Or if I somehow miss a tile. But I really have not had the need to change anything.Be prepared, d/l, installing and setting this up can take literally hours the first time around if you are installing an entire state. But I would rather set this up the way I like it and then make it easier to activate/deactivate areas. I am always switch on and off places so for me it was worth it. Can't imagine how this would work with Sim-Savvy or they divide their territories up.Happy 4th!Clutch

Hi Josh,You can pretty much install them any way you wish. For me, I have my own way of naming my add-on scenery folders which I prefer. So what I do is download/install each .exe file into a temp folder. I keep a copy of this default setup as a backup (yes, you need a lot of extra hd space). I then copy them over to my FSX drive (or where ever I am adding scenery) and combine them into how many folders I want for that state, or area. Yea, I don't want 120 different folders to click on and off. So for example I used one folder for Southern California and one for the rest of the entire state. For Arizona, I broke it down into three areas, North, Central and South. Actually I just mimicked how it was shown at the MegaScenery website for Arizona. So it's just three clicks instead of 50-60 clicks. The backups come in handy in case I discover it's better to break them into something different - say I always fly West-to-East or mainly South-to-North. Or if I somehow miss a tile. But I really have not had the need to change anything.Be prepared, d/l, installing and setting this up can take literally hours the first time around if you are installing an entire state. But I would rather set this up the way I like it and then make it easier to activate/deactivate areas. I am always switch on and off places so for me it was worth it. Can't imagine how this would work with Sim-Savvy or they divide their territories up.Happy 4th!Clutch

Thanks Clutch I did just that last night. It took about 3hrs but was worth it. Do you know if in the future, I have to re install FSX is there any files I need to add to FSX besides adding my scenery to the library, does Megascenery add anything to other FSX folders like effects, autogen or anything else.Josh

Yeah I picked up FLA and 3 sections of CA on sale this weekend. Some areas near KFLL/KMIA have clouds in the base image (cloudy day when the sat images were shot?).CA on the other hand looks awesome. I did some scenic flying aorund the Bay area and it felt like I was really there.Real video of my Beaver flight here....http://youtu.be/JjeN29ONDzQ

Yeah I picked up FLA and 3 sections of CA on sale this weekend. Some areas near KFLL/KMIA have clouds in the base image (cloudy day when the sat images were shot?).CA on the other hand looks awesome. I did some scenic flying aorund the Bay area and it felt like I was really there.Real video of my Beaver flight here....http://youtu.be/JjeN29ONDzQ

I picked up some stuff Sat night and thru the day on Sunday and have been downloading all day. At first I was a little hesitant due to my first experience with Florida when the line first launched and I bought the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale tiles and was severely disappointed due to the reasons you mentioned. Then I tried the the Seattle area tile amd was ok with it until PNW came out.So I started slowly with the sale and boughtSan Francisco area tiles 08,09,10,24,25Lake Michigan (Chicago area) tiles 001,002,003New York tiles 001,002,004,005Colorado Denver area tiles 001,002,003,004Out of all that I am so far most impressed with the New York work as the colors are really good and not washed out, plus it goes well with FSDT's JFK airport. The San Francisco area is not bad either, but the concrete area is a little overly white looking but not bad and goes pretty well with Flightbeams KSFO. I am not as thrilled with the 3 Chicago area tiles however, but they aren't too bad like Ft. Lauderdale and Miami were. The only problem wiht the Chicago tiles is that the colors between some areas vary a bit and they could have done a better job with the color corrections, if they did any.I haven't installed the Denver stuff yet since I am still in the process of downloading it, but from some user vids I have seen it looks pretty good.Personally though, I think the MSE stuff really shines with the night textures. Even if I dont care for Chicago in the day, I would definitely use it for night time as the textures look better than anything available in my opinion. What I will probably do is use the NYC, Chicago, and Colorado stuff in the spring, summer, and fall, then disable it for winter since it doesn't have any seasonal textures.Overall I am pretty happy with the 16 tiles I bought and at $3.50 a crack it was a lot of scenery for little money. Since the sale ends Tues morning at 9et I may give the Salt Lake stuff a shot as well.

Agreed NY area is really well done. I got that on sale in May. Too bad they don't do winter textures.I also love the MSX titles (KDFW/KLAS/KPHX/PHNL).

Looking forward to that review, Ray.

Online now. Enjoy. http://www.avsim.com/pages/0711/SimSavvy/USA.htmlRay