ON SALE NOW! Ultimate VFR Photoscenery Crazy 75% Off

[Gregg_Seipp 565]

 

 

Hi Gregg, autogen right now is only version 1, I do have plans to provide better coverage for autogen as well, but have some hurdles to overcome with roads and urban areas with vegetation. I have the process figured out, and the routines ready to start making that happen, but I need to upgrade my software to be able to make that happen.

All being well in the next little while I should be able to provide a free update for the autogen that gives 100% coverage for vegetation and a handful of more buildings as well. The scenery addons are based on a continual improvement cycle with software as a service. Right now the goal is getting the imagery for all of the USA complete, followed by upgrades to the other layers such as water, autogen and much more.



With the blend masks for the edges of the states, those are also on the radar moving forward. I've just been re-writing my software tools to be able to make that happen, however adding blend masks do add about 1/3 more time to processing of the imagery, but I did have a brainwave this morning that I'll be looking into today that may not increase production time.

In terms of downloads, once I can afford the $600 to purchase new installer software I'm expecting to be able to simplify the download pulls that a) saves time and effort and B) runs MD5 checksums to ensure files don't break in the download process.

In the meantime there's a great Firefox extension that is called DownloadThemAll which can help download all the files with one click. It's a free download available at https://addons.mozil...on/downthemall/

 

Downloadthemall...thank god for that!  I'll get it.

[Gregg_Seipp 565]

I installed Arizona today and flew in different places...Phoenix, Grand Canyon, Tucson.  The color of the scenery is nice.  There is some autogen but the cities are pretty bare.  VAS usage was low.  Is there any way to identify which bgl files are over the larger cities (Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tucson, etc)?  I think I'd be inclined to disable them so that can judge altitude better when coming over them.

[denali 74]

I have every Sectional in the US at 5m resolution, 6 sectionals worth of 1m, and about half a sectional of .3m, all downloaded using FSEarthTiles.  In spite of that abundance I saw this price and I bought Colorado and Utah, ... because I saw the city lighting in some of the screen shots, along with trees and autogen buildings.

 

This is by far the BEST photo scenery you can get, and I've sampled them all, because of the night lighting.  It is the most realistic I've seen, and the distance you can see the lights is not limited like roads are in all the other products.  And so far I think I've seen some seasonal work too, snow!  very enjoyable flying at night in this product, and he's just getting started.  Please support this project, at these prices YOU WILL NOT REGRET YOUR PURCHASE (even if you already have over 2TB photoscenery).

 

Nice Work. 

[JiBrady 20]

I have both colorado MSE V2 and this ultimate VFR  Colorado scenery.  So I am able to compare both.

 

So far, Ultimate VFR seems to have better consistent color matching.  With MSE Colorado, there are great color differences in some areas.

However, I find the color saturation very "weak" with Ulitmate VFR scenery, MSE colors are more saturated, less faded out (weak).

Also MSE is sharper, more detailed.  Small buildings, trucks ETC. are easy to spot in MSE because of the improved resolution.

 

So, I see benefits to both.  Also as mentioned Ultimate VFR has night lighting, MSE does not.

 

JIm

[denali 74]

The night lighting is better than UTX, which I have.  I have it turned off presently, so I don't know how they combine.  But from what I see it is also better than the other road set which I looked over extensively before going with UTX.  The night lighting is glorious because it has some depth to it, meaning it shows up far in the distance as you come to a metropolitan area.  UTX doesn't do that at least for me.  

[denali 74]

Here are some useful links for those who downloaded.  If you hover over the 2 letter county name abbreviations (obviously improvised) in the maps to the left you can figure out where the counties are.  Wikipedia stuff is free to use FYI.  

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_Arizona

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_Utah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_Colorado

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_counties_in_New_Mexico

 

I have all four now.

[=Hollywood= 0]

I have both colorado MSE V2 and this ultimate VFR  Colorado scenery.  So I am able to compare both.

 

So far, Ultimate VFR seems to have better consistent color matching.  With MSE Colorado, there are great color differences in some areas.

However, I find the color saturation very "weak" with Ulitmate VFR scenery, MSE colors are more saturated, less faded out (weak).

Also MSE is sharper, more detailed.  Small buildings, trucks ETC. are easy to spot in MSE because of the improved resolution.

 

So, I see benefits to both.  Also as mentioned Ultimate VFR has night lighting, MSE does not.

 

JIm

 

Hi Jim,

 

There's actually a very good reason why the colors aren't oversaturated, and that is because of my professional film and television color correction background of over 24 years.  I'm aiming for the type of realism color wise you see out the window whilst flying in the real world (I'm also a pilot and literally grew up on 727's and 767's not to mention many other types of aircraft) if the imagery is too oversaturated it can end up looking very game-ish which detracts from reality.

 

The other issue with over processing imagery is that it can increase production time significantly.  For each county there can be upwards of two thousand images at 10,000 x 10,000 pixel images, that's a massive 200,000,000,000 pixels that require editing and that's for one county alone (in other words 2000 files x 1-2 minutes to process).    We already run about 10 different processes to the imagery improvement process.  Adding any extra processing to each image could mean each state takes twice as long to render and twice as much cost in terms of electricity and computing power, which would then increase the cost of the product to be outside of the reach of any of us, including me.

 

Also a lot can actually be done with shaders within the sim to tweak how everything looks, including increasing the terrain saturation at run time for those who prefer a more saturated look, however no one has yet tweaked the FSX terrain shaders to do this as yet.  We discovered this when Lockheed Martin brought out Prepar3d v1.  As time goes on imaging technology will continue to improve which lead to improved imagery on our part and if no one else comes up with a DX9/DX10 shader tweak to the terrain I will get to it when time permits.

 

Also in terms of comparison, I'd say a better comparison is in looking outside at the real world.  Remembering there are limitations also within FSX as it does not fully model color temperature like in the real world.  Sunrise and Sunset are both around 3200 degrees Kelvin, and a bright summers noon day is about 6500 degrees Kelvin.  For the night lighting we've actually matched the night light effects to real world color values for Sodium Vapor, Mercury Vapor, Metal Halide and High Pressure Sodium.

 

The thing we need to share with the community is that I am working with Petabytes of data to process.  I'm already using super computers to process this imagery and scenery and all on a cash basis.  To generate all of the USA is going to end up costing me about $12,500+ and my wife is actually keeping us afloat at the moment.  I'm operating the business on a measly grant of $250 per week which doesn't even cover the bills as yet.    This is my full time job and this has all been done with 8 years of research and development and it's only the beginning.  I'm actually considering taking on full time work to help speed things up.  

 

Thanks so much to everyone for the awesome feedback, what matters to you matters to me and if anyone has any questions or comments I'm here to help out.  

 

Aloha nui Loa,

(with much Aloha),

Dean.

[=Hollywood= 0]

I installed Arizona today and flew in different places...Phoenix, Grand Canyon, Tucson.  The color of the scenery is nice.  There is some autogen but the cities are pretty bare.  VAS usage was low.  Is there any way to identify which bgl files are over the larger cities (Phoenix, Flagstaff, Tucson, etc)?  I think I'd be inclined to disable them so that can judge altitude better when coming over them.

 

Hi Gregg,

 

Arizona unfortunately didn't have a lot of public domain data available for buildings in the cities which is what I need to generate autogen buildings, unlike Colorado which had huge amounts of data from numerous sources that I was able to compile.  Over time I will be providing free updates to help fill in the missing autogen building data as it becomes available.  The thing to remember with this is if the U.S. Government with all it's money doesn't have it, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to obtain from a commercial vendor.  However I do undertake a huge amount of data mining to find building data and have significant tracts of data for Utah, Colorado, California, Washington State and other cities.

For finding out which scenery is in a certain area, I use tmfviewer.exe which is included with the FSX SDK's which have installers that can be found on the FSX installation disks.  All Ultimate VFR coverage is broken down into county and rows and segments.  

 

e.g.

 

uvfr_v_az_coconino_01a, uvfr_v_az_coconino_01b, uvfr_v_az_coconino_01c <- indicative only)

uvfr_v_az_coconino_02a, uvfr_v_az_coconino_02b, uvfr_v_az_coconino_02c <- indicative only)

 

I'm a little unclear on your last question and would love to help.  May I ask what you're trying to accomplish a little more specifically?  I really want to provide you with an accurate answer

 

Sincerely,

Dean.

[Gregg_Seipp 565]

 

 

I'm a little unclear on your last question and would love to help. May I ask what you're trying to accomplish a little more specifically? I really want to provide you with an accurate answer

 

Dean,

 

I'll look at tmfviewer.  I have the SDK so, I guess I have that.  What I want to do is to disable just the tiles that cover the significant parts near airports and the cities that I'll be landing at so I can see buildings and trees.  That's a short list for Arizona...it's fairly barren of cities IRL except, mostly, for the cities I mentioned (which makes photoreal so good for those states).  So, if I could see the names of the tiles in just those areas then I'd know which ones to turn off.

 

I've yet to install the rest of Colorado, Utah or New Mexico (or Guam). 

[metalmike 34]

Can anyone comment on how much the night lighting/autogen affects performance? I turn autogen off (when IFR/flying into big airports) since I have a fairly old PC. Is there less performance impact than traditional FSX autogen, or more? 

[=Hollywood= 0]

Hi Mike,

I personally run with autogen on, and it's ok on my system.  I have an old system as well, a Q8400 2.8GHz system for my personal computer and an ATI 5700 series videocard.

The night lighting system has numerous density options for users to select what works best for their system.  There's 100% realistic down to a lite version.  I'll be also be re-working some code this month to make also make a super light version as well for low end systems like mine.  I haven't had anyone say they've had performance issues, but most users have very recent hardware for FSX.  The current version of the autogen is not as hard on performance as default FSX.  Los Angeles will be a different matter though as there's over 5 million buildings in L.A. county.

If there are any performance issues I'd love to know so I can help optimize the night lighting further for those systems.

 

Cheers,

Dean.

[Pugilist2 878]

Dean,

Do you plan on making Nevada and California anytime soon?

[Jim Young 2,356]

Still on sale as of 3/10/2015

[denali 74]

Last I heard from Dean, he is just about done with Wyoming, and some of the other NW states.  He is just about ready to start cranking out scenery at pretty good rate, about a couple states a week.   I like his approach because the lighting is separate as is the water and autogen.  AFAIK there is no other product that has autogen trees over photoscenery.  For those that are interested in a deeper discount, to help him get things up and running he has a "Starship Plus Membership" available for $250 - which is about $5 per state as they become available!  About 40 memberships gets him to his operating costs to produce the entire US.  Then he can begin with other regions.  He has been working on his methods for about 8 years on and off, and has some really neat methods for how to get accurate placement of autogen in the workings.

[CrownCityMisfits 58]

Going to take advantage of this, thank you much. I have my eye on at least 3 of these...