I have all the Playsims VFR scenery for Scotland and England/Wales and have been eagerly waiting on the last scenery for Scotland Central .

It has been on pre-order since December last year and the delivery date has been pushed back month on month. Now Its latest delivery date is 15th of May.

Does anyone out there have any idea what is happening with this software?

 

cannylad

 

Hi.

 

I imagine there are a good many of us waiting. I'm looking forward to the FS9 release... that is likely to be a couple of months after the initial FSX version. Patience, I suppose. I'm sure it will come in time-- the fact that there is a date at all suggests that work is underway.

 

I wonder if it will cover Skye.

 

Regards,

D

Cannylad,

 

As far as I am aware, they have taken criticism of one or two areas in previous Scotland photoscenery releases seriously. I think this refers to the "bland" colouration in certain areas (most noticeable around Glasgow and one or two other areas in Scotland South), and they want to try and avoid this with Scotland Central if possible. That's fair enough, although I am afraid that pushed back release dates is "par for the course" where Horizon scenery is concerned. Hopefully, they will meet the new release date, and that Scotland Central does not have any of those "bland" areas that make flying around Glasgow rather difficult for me in broad daylight.

Just had an email from Flightstore saying Scotland Central is on finals and will keep me posted when it is at the printers !!!!

I must say I have not seen the bland areas you mention but I am using SweetFX so maybe that is the reason.

 

Cheers, cannylad

Zoom out from Glasgow airport in Top Down view until you can see all of southern Scotland. The strip of "bland" looking scenery is obvious. It is also easy to see the difference when flying "low and slow" in this area.

 

By the way, what is SweetFX and what does it do?

Hi.

 

Just read your post Chris. I suppose the effect illustrated below is what you're referring to. I expect I'm preaching to the converted, but in case anyone else wondered why some photoscenery is a bit rough around the edges, this pic is from the Edinburgh area and shows the mismatched colours between a variety of AP runs in the same area. There are a few patches in Mid-Wales that suffer the same problem, at least in Flash Earth, even to the extent of having summer photos adjacent to autumn photos.

 

I suppose it's rare (and expensive) for a commercially available national set to have the same colouring- the weather isn't that stable and in any case there usually isn't enough time in one day to complete a full set.

 

The result is that accurate photoscenery needs a good deal of manual adjustment before it looks good in a simulator, and you can imagine how long it takes to re-colour so many images by hand...

 

Best regards,

D

 

 

All of those images have a decent amount of colour in them, Dave. In complete contrast, the large strip of scenery around Glasgow (and a couple of other areas in Volume 8) looks extremely bland (no contrast, and washed out colours). I would like to think that the Glasgow area in particular could be upgraded at some point in the future, because it does not look all that impressive in daylight.

I'll have a look this evening. I wonder if they were made from manually coloured black & white images, like Seattle in FU3?

 

D

Zoom out from Glasgow airport in Top Down view until you can see all of southern Scotland. The strip of "bland" looking scenery is obvious. It is also easy to see the difference when flying "low and slow" in this area.

 

By the way, what is SweetFX and what does it do?

Christopher,

Have a look at guru3d.com There is a very detailed description of SweetFX along with download. Its basically a shader program.

 

cannylad

Thanks, mate. I would need to see what a difference it can make in FSX, particularly to bland areas like VFR8 Scotland South Glasgow.