Since this is on sale, I'm considering it.  I currently use Blue Sky Scenery for photoreal coverage of quite a bit of the US southwest, but they have limited coverage of Nevada, and when flying jets out of NAS Fallon, you run out of photoreal really quickly if you fly in any direction but south.

 

However, is there anyone willing to share any opinions on this?  Decent quality?  Flaws?  Any mis-matched colours?  I've never used any MSE stuff before.

 

 

It's brilliant, a bargain, see my little overview of it here:

 

http://xsimreviews.com/2013/11/07/dawn-in-nevada/

Limited? They say they cover border to border

 

http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/cart.php?target=product&product_id=793

 

 

Limited? They say they cover border to border

 

I was referring to Blue Sky Scenery being limited, which I currently use in that area.

 

 

It's brilliant, a bargain, see my little overview of it here:

 

http://xsimreviews.com/2013/11/07/dawn-in-nevada/

 

Those are some nice screenshots!!

I don't want to be a sour goose, but I am not impressed by MSE 2.x scenery and I think the Nevada one was my last purchase. I am sorry if I am coming off harsh, and apologize if we are not supposed to post our real opinions, but here is my real opinion...

 

The houses, rocks, trees, cliffs looked smushed even from 8,000 feet AGL, this is unacceptable. The clarity of the mountains are good from like 10 miles away, but close up look pretty mediocre, in a few spots better than others.

 

To me it appears they are using USGS sources and throwing them together quickly with little or no hand-editing other than just compiling the graphics. I could make these sceneries myself at a higher resolution.

 

Tileproxy blows MSE 2.x away if you have a fast enough Internet connection, even Tileproxy's inconsistent loading still looks better than MSE 2.x.

 

Sorry, that is just my opinion, I hope I don't ruin anyone's enjoyment of this scenery, as I might still enjoy flying over the mountains at a very high distance, but it's hard to use this after seeing Nevada in Tile Proxy. Heck I flew into Reno in TileProxy using Bing maps and I could fly as low as 200 feet without any smushing appearance of buildings, it looked REAL. This does not look real it looks like a bad sample.

 

I am sure some of the problem is 50cm vs 30cm, but I think it really seems they are doing nothing to fix this problem, I mean come on, enough people have bought their stuff where they can kindly figure out how to resample the houses using aerial photos, at least of the major cities.

 

And... how about an option for them to provide us 30cm sampling at an extra cost, it would be worth it, 50cm does not do it for me.

 

I would at least expect 80% of TileProxy quality at 1000x the price, cause after all TileProxy is free!

dtmicro, thanks for your input.

 

No apologies needed - I asked for real opinions from users as I have yet to pull the trigger on this, and I guess as such, I'm looking for possible negatives.

 

I'll be honest - I haven't really messed with Tile Proxy that much.  The US southwest is the only place I run photoscenery, and the only thing I fly down there is military jets.  Which is kind of why I've never given Tile Proxy all that close of a look; while I have an okay internet connection, I'm really not sure that Tile Proxy could keep up at 650 knts, 1000' agl.

 

Anyone have any input as to how it compares to Blue Sky Scenery in terms of clarity of the image?  I've been very happy with that thus far.

Just for a taste, here is TileProxy flying near Tacoma, WA --- this is a real shot I promise

 

And some parts of the SW US look almost that good in Tileproxy, not quite, but almost.

 

 

The above takes a lot of tweaking to get it to look like that.

 

A shot of TileProxy flying through the Mt. Rainier foothills, look at the detail of the trees even in this LOW fly-over. I can't always reproduce this quality in TileProxy, it varies, but when the quality comes through this good, it is amazing, and IMO even Orbx cannot match Tileproxy sometimes...

 

 

The issue with Tileproxy is that every flight the quality seems different, to some degree.

 

I should qualify my post and note that I am playing on a 106" projector screen, if you are playing on an LCD monitor, it will probably look a lot better, depending on how big your monitor is. I think Orbx stuff looks good on my 106" screen (most of the time), but MSE 2 is blah.

 

Tileproxy is very tough at that speed, but it is all hit or miss. There are places and times I have flown at MAX 30cm quality in Tile Proxy at 1000+ knts, but lately I am having trouble replicating that as it seems after a while MS / Bing might limit your bandwidth. I have a 25Mbps connection.

 

I flew at that speed on a route that was already cached. Tile proxy will cache a route, but it seems to me what Tile Proxy does is only cache the lower resolution version and then re-downloads and re-samples it in real-time. If you fly a route in TP repeatedly enough, it starts looking as clear as those two screenshots (in certain places).

 

Really steep canyons like the Grand Canyon are about the only thing that gives TileProxy issues. Even flying into Reno I don't notice smushed buildings because by the time I am low enough to notice, I am already too close to the airport most of the time and not seeing the city anymore.

 

Also, some city add-ons do overlay on top of Tileproxy just fine, and most airports do as well, which can make for a mesmerizing experience.

I am a proponent of MSE by and large but Nevada is probably my least favorite scenery purchase. I own MegaScenery X Las Vegas as well, which is fantastic, but that same quality did not carry over to MSE (at least for Nevada). Parts of it look decent, but central Nevada is something of a hot mess and looks like a bizarre patch quilt of black and white imagery taken from a dozen different sources. I actually removed these BGL's from my library because they were so offensive to the eye - I'd rather look at FS default. Some of the water masking around Reno/Tahoe is a bit sloppy and created some bizarre texture blending with underlying scenery layers for me resulting in strange texture bands and submerged city textures.

 

If this is your first MSE purchase, Nevada would probably not be my first choice. Nevada really needs to go back in the oven and cook a bit longer. Arizona, however, is a really good alternative if you want a stunning VFR experience in the southwest Rockies and are looking for that mix of desert and mountains. Idaho just went on sale too at PC Aviator. I've heard that had good source imagery as well. Will probably be picking that up.

I did a flight to Las Vegas, I thought MSE Nevada was done VERY well.  My video:

 

Tile proxy vs. MSE 2.x comparison screenshot below, you be the judge... In that video above you are flying very high and the screen is shrunk, it is hard to judge FSX by videos sometimes because videos have different AGL's.

 

IMO, MSE is doing nothing more than re-distributing un-edited US GS maps that are provided as freeware by the US Geological Survey. I don't think MSE even has any licensing costs for what they are selling. I do not mean to bash them, but unless people are pretty well-off money wise and not willing to compile it themselves, I don't believe most of you should be bothering with MSE 2.x.

 

On a 106" screen MSE 2 is unbareable to me if flying below 15,000 feet. In Tile Proxy I can fly at 500 feet AGL.

 

In this screen shot, I apologize that one image is in another perspective. I will post some other TP screenshots if people want to see more comparisons, but it's not even close.

 

I think many people that try Tile Proxy do not set it up correctly, it is not simple to setup. Tileproxy is the only time I've ever seen true photo-real looking graphics thus far in FSX... Well with the exception of the sparse Orbx photoreal areas, like Orbx @ Stewart airport, but the problem with Orbx Photo-real areas is they are blended into the repetitive forest / tree texturing and it doesn't always look right. Orbx weakest area is the autogen trees (but at the same time the fact Orbx has autogen is also nice at times), but autogen is too repetetive after a while.

 

Again, you be the judge...

 

MegaScenery Earth Nevada 2.x vs TileProxy
 

 

The TP screenshot above was taken while flying at 1,154 KIAS, it was cached from a previous flight of course.

 

People could say I cherry picked the image, but I didn't, if I compare "non-custom" random city areas in TP vs. MSE 2, then MSE 2 loses even more so. In any city that you don't have a scenery pack for, Tile Proxy still looks good at 500 AGL, MSE 2.x looks bad above cities even around 6000-10,0000 AGL.

 

IMO, MSE doesn't know how to correctly apply LOD sampling in their scenery, they are using a single unsampled LOD and because of that it looks bad. That is why MSE 2.x crushes buildings so extremely. All Photo-Real will give a slight crush/flat effect at times, but nothing as bad as MSE 2.x does.

 

I use a special lod exclusion technique in Tile Proxy to speed up rendering, and the key to acheiving these results in TP is the 30cm at 7.5 LOD radius with custom vertical lod exclusions.

Nice video Rob!  I enjoy flying the Duke B60 too but I bought the full RAAS Pro package and, on the glideslope, it's telling me "unstable! unstable!!" yet I believe my landing looked just as good as yours.  Probably need to do some adjustments within RAAS. 

 

I think the Nevada MSE photoscenery was done well too.  I have not seen any flaws yet but I'm sure there are.  I have seen some mismatched colors going across borders.  Definitely not perfect but better than the default.

 

Best regards,

Jim

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Tile proxy vs. MSE 2.x comparison screenshot below, you be the judge... In that video above you are flying very high and the screen is shrunk, it is hard to judge FSX by videos sometimes because videos have different AGL's.

 

IMO, MSE is doing nothing more than re-distributing un-edited US GS maps that are provided as freeware by the US Geological Survey. I don't think MSE even has any licensing costs for what they are selling. I do not mean to bash them, but unless people are pretty well-off money wise and not willing to compile it themselves, I don't believe most of you should be bothering with MSE 2.x.

 

On a 106" screen MSE 2 is unbareable to me if flying below 15,000 feet. In Tile Proxy I can fly at 500 feet AGL.

 

In this screen shot, I apologize that one image is in another perspective. I will post some other TP screenshots if people want to see more comparisons, but it's not even close.

 

I think many people that try Tile Proxy do not set it up correctly, it is not simple to setup. Tileproxy is the only time I've ever seen true photo-real looking graphics thus far in FSX... Well with the exception of the sparse Orbx photoreal areas, like Orbx @ Stewart airport, but the problem with Orbx Photo-real areas is they are blended into the repetitive forest / tree texturing and it doesn't always look right. Orbx weakest area is the autogen trees (but at the same time the fact Orbx has autogen is also nice at times), but autogen is too repetetive after a while.

 

Again, you be the judge...

 

MegaScenery Earth Nevada 2.x vs TileProxy

 

 

The TP screenshot above was taken while flying at 1,154 KIAS, it was cached from a previous flight of course.

 

People could say I cherry picked the image, but I didn't, if I compare "non-custom" random city areas in TP vs. MSE 2, then MSE 2 loses even more so. In any city that you don't have a scenery pack for, Tile Proxy still looks good at 500 AGL, MSE 2.x looks bad above cities even around 6000-10,0000 AGL.

 

IMO, MSE doesn't know how to correctly apply LOD sampling in their scenery, they are using a single unsampled LOD and because of that it looks bad. That is why MSE 2.x crushes buildings so extremely. All Photo-Real will give a slight crush/flat effect at times, but nothing as bad as MSE 2.x does.

 

I use a special lod exclusion technique in Tile Proxy to speed up rendering, and the key to acheiving these results in TP is the 30cm at 7.5 LOD radius with custom vertical lod exclusions.

 

Don't want to sound harsh, but this is not a fair comparison. Your MSE textures are no where near fully resolved. What you show is not an accurate representation of MSE 2.0 at all in this case. Please PM me and I will offer some settings that you will need to properly display MSE 2.0 scenery. Once you have a more accurate representation of MSE textures, then everyone can be a fair judge of the comparison

 

Also, take a look at Rob's video above. This is the same MSE Nevada you have, and I am sure you can agree there is a big difference between what you are seeing and what Rob is seeing in his video. This leads me to believe its possibly just a settings issue on your system, which again, I am happy to help with!

It's because of how close I am to the ground and where the mountains are in relation to the direction of the satellite photo they used.

I don't think people are going to take someone posting from a store that sells their product seriously as a debunk (no offense). I am not trying to damage anyone's reputation that makes scenery or hurt anyone's sales, but at the same time MSE 2.x is using some pretty newb and cheesy Photo-Real techniques.

 

I was comparing closer shots, sure if I take the shot far enough away MSE 2 looks a bit improved but IMO still not good enough on a big screen. His video appears to be taken from about 15,000+ feet AGL plus his video is using horizontal distance perspective (so it's more like several miles), mine is taken only about 1000 feet in front of a mountain and relatively close to the ground.

I greatly appreciate all of the above input, both positive and negative.

 

I spent a few hours last night after seeing those Tile Proxy screenshots giving TP a try in and around NAS Fallon.  At 60cm resolution it's staggeringly good; I didn't even need to try out 30cm.  However, although it was brilliant for a quick jaunt around the area in the UH-60, upon loading up the F-18, it's obvious that at 60cm I don't have large enough internet pipes to keep up once I got out of the area that my previous flight had pre-cached.

 

Which of course creates an issue; I don't always care to pre-fly routes in order to build a cache.

 

Here's a question:  If one was to have a photo-scenery layer, either MSE or BSS, is there a way to layer the scenery so that Tile Proxy will only show at low altitude or within a certain distance form the aircraft, and beyond that have the static photo-scenery such as MSE or BSS show?  Any way to make the two co-operate?

 

Also, and this may display a lack of knowledge regarding LOD's and how Tile Proxy works, but if you have it set to 30cm or 60cm, and are flying at 15,000 ft, is it still trying to download the super high resolution tiles?