I dunno, I think making scenery acceptably perfect is more important that just pumping it out. If you just wanna fly around anywhere and everywhere in the world, go fly Google Earth, they have a flight simulator minus the cockpit, and scenery that is super detailed in most places, much more detailed than you'll find in any megascenry. It's actually quite fun if you can forego the cockpit graphics.

 

But creating a believable photoscenery environment I feel is more important. There's more to believability than just "yet another photoreal" map.

I dunno, I think making scenery acceptably perfect is more important that just pumping it out. If you just wanna fly around anywhere and everywhere in the world, go fly Google Earth, they have a flight simulator minus the cockpit, and scenery that is super detailed in most places, much more detailed than you'll find in any megascenry. It's actually quite fun if you can forego the cockpit graphics.

 

But creating a believable photoscenery environment I feel is more important. There's more to believability than just "yet another photoreal" map.

Mega Earth Scenery v 2 took the correct approach for the USA try to get 100% perfect we still have only 3 states if that available to buy. 

I dunno, I think making scenery acceptably perfect is more important that just pumping it out. If you just wanna fly around anywhere and everywhere in the world, go fly Google Earth, they have a flight simulator minus the cockpit, and scenery that is super detailed in most places, much more detailed than you'll find in any megascenry. It's actually quite fun if you can forego the cockpit graphics.

 

But creating a believable photoscenery environment I feel is more important. There's more to believability than just "yet another photoreal" map.

 

In an ideal world where customers would be happy to pay several hundred dollars per state and where flight sim wasn't essentially a niche market, this would probably work. But in the real world we are currently in, you have to make compromises and take a different approach or you will get no where fast. gizmosellsbunnys is on the right line of thought. While we would love to have everything perfect, if we did that, we'd have very few products to offer at all, and not enough people to buy them, and it would all end pretty quickly. It's unfortunate yes, but its the reality of it.  

Thanks Larry for your detailed answer. Makes perfect sense. I follow you since the good ole simsavy days and the only reason for not have bought at that time your product was the fact that I live in Germany. Shipping and custom duties would have been to expensive. Ok, nuff said.

 

Please allow me to come back to the water masking issue one more time. I do not plan to land on the water, but as someone else had said here already, I like to see proper coast and lake lines, when flying over them. France VFR and blueskyscenery can do the water masking pretty well. The first one is not more expensive than MSE, and the second one is for free. I agree that both do not offer the wide range of states you do. 

 

So there seems to be an inexpensive way to do it. Otherwise they would NOT offer it. As you said, there is no class on the internet, teaching you how to do it, But would it make sense to knock on the door of the friendly competition (France VFR is not really a competitor, as they concentrate on just one country) and ask them how they have done it?

 

Btw, they have just added autogen for their photoscenery, You can download it from their website for the states you have bought. What do they know, that you might love to know too?

 

Just my 2 cents,

 

Bernd

In an ideal world where customers would be happy to pay several hundred dollars per state and where flight sim wasn't essentially a niche market, this would probably work. But in the real world we are currently in, you have to make compromises and take a different approach or you will get no where fast. gizmosellsbunnys is on the right line of thought. While we would love to have everything perfect, if we did that, we'd have very few products to offer at all, and not enough people to buy them, and it would all end pretty quickly. It's unfortunate yes, but its the reality of it.  

 

By and large, I am generally pretty happy with MSE (thrilled about some states / less so about others) and can accept some limitations for the price. There is no way I could justify any of my photoreal purchases it if the added development costs amounted to $79US per state. As it is, I tend to wait for the deal-of-the-month and coupons before I buy.

 

Water masking aside, there are some global color-corrective actions that could be made that would really improve a couple areas. The over-saturated Northern Utah (the forested areas in the mountains are lime green in places to the point of looking cartoonish at times!) and the completely desaturated "Area 51" location north of Las Vegas come to mind. I've seen similar criticism WRT to Switzerland though I do not own this product. These seem like obvious areas of improvement - color balancing 101 really - that should not incur excessive cost to do for any texture artist worth his salt. This kind of color adjustment along source edges, for example, would also go a long way toward creating a more seamless blend - especially between states. Again, an 80/20 effort would pay dividends IMO.

 

(On a completely unrelated note: I'm very happy with MSE NY Ultra - gone is the horrible banding on Long Island!)

I describe myself as a hacker, not a geek, nerd or guru. MSE required watermasking and night scenery and I managed

to deliver one of these items. There is no one website or person who can tell you how to watermask, blend and create

scenery. So I gathered all I could and hacked out a product. I am the first one to see the shortcomings of my efforts.

Being a simmer, if I'm not happy with it, no one else will be either. So please let me tell you what I would like to see done

better with MSE. Better watermasking, better coloring, better flow with Autogen, and of course night scenery.

 

So why can't I just do that?

 

Starting with the water, Microsoft used water data current when the FSX program was created. Now the data is better

and that is a problem for photoreal. Basically, the old data places land where there is water and water where there is

land. To fix this would require re-creating the entire watermask within FSX. That's that, and believe it or not I'm actually

considering doing it assuming I can learn how. But currently I just do a wide blend (Gaussian blur) in production and it

does it's best to blend the default scenery with the aerials where this problem occurs. Is it good enough? Visually No,

but with over a half million dollars in sales behind us, I guess it was good enough for someone.

 

 

WOW!

 

Yeah it was good enough for the people who thought they were getting water masking at least comparable to a freeware scenery.

 

If sales are so good, why is there all this talk about how much it costs to produce and how more should be charged to fix it up the way it should have been?!

 

Honestly, I have purchased a number of payware add ons for FSX recently that are really despicable and should not be allowed to be sold as payware.  The one and only aim of these "developers" seems to be to make a quick buck, and anyone who happens to be unlucky enough to spend their HARD EARNED money on it can just suffer the consequences.

 

I think I'm done paying for FSX products for now.

I love MSE scenery even though there are a few glitches.  There are two problems identified at the beginning of this thread by bernd1151:

 

Problem 1 - FSX default scenery shows through MSE photoreal scenery where water is masked.  There seems to be no immediate solution.  Thanks SimSavvy (Larry) for taking the time to write a detailed explanation.

 

Problem 2 - MSE Massachusetts is showing through the MSE Boston scenery at the coastline (See Bernd1151's third photo).  The Massachusetts scenery has green foliage, and the boston has none due to the different seasons when the photos were taken.  I find this far more distracting than the FSX scenery showing (problem 1 above) since every patch of water has a green foliage "halo" surrounding it.  Is there a solution to eliminate this problem?  Why does the MSE Massachusetts scenery bleed through the MSE Boston scenery?  I would expect that they use the same water masks?  My only short term solution is toggle the scenery options on and off depending where I am flying.  This tends to be a problem for me since my home airport is KBED which is on the western board of the MSE Boston Scenery.

 

@SimSavvy:  Any ideas on how to fix problem 2?

 

Thanks Larry for all your hard work... GREAT PRODUCT!  You've made FSX far more fun to fly!

Any ideas on how to fix problem 2?

I had to remove the offending MSE2 BGL's that underlie the area covered by Boston UltraRes.

 

It appears that Ultra-Res does not provide a full set of LOD's (only the highest ones); FSX appears to be selecting LOD's from the MSE 2 set and blending them with the higher ones from UltraRes (probably attributable to trilinear texture filtering). I wish MSE would address this issue, but suspect they won't due to size distribution constraints.

I had to remove the offending MSE2 BGL's that underlie the area covered by Boston UltraRes.

 

It appears that Ultra-Res does not provide a full set of LOD's (only the highest ones); FSX appears to be selecting LOD's from the MSE 2 set and blending them with the higher ones from UltraRes (probably attributable to trilinear texture filtering). I wish MSE would address this issue, but suspect they won't due to size distribution constraints.

 

Jason,

 

How did you determine the MSE2 BGL's that underline the area covered by Boston UltraRes?  In other words, what's the best tool to determine locations of BGLs, etc..

 

Thanks

I removed the doubled files from Massachusetts normal res manually by using TMF viewer to open the High res Boston BGLs to get the coordinates where both photo sceneries existed.  I then renamed the lower res bgls (.off at the end) that were within the coordinates I had noted.