I remember a thread about MegaScenery Earth England & Wales on this forum last year, and two of the criticisms were the rather poor coastlines and water masks (with default scenery appearing at the edges in places), and also the relatively small amount of hard drive space required when compared to the PlayHorizon scenery (30GB versus around 70GB), leading to the conclusion that it couldn't be 50cm per pixel resolution (or 60cm as Andy Digital would correct me) :smile:

 

Bearing this in mind, I would be interested to know user opinions of the other MegaScenery Earth Europe products (particularly Belgium and the Netherlands), since I am considering extending my little area of flightsim nirvana (currently the UK and Ireland) to cover those European countries that are just a short hop across the North Sea or English Channel. Obviously I would like to know if these have any water mask problems (I really don't want to see default scenery of any kind on my travels; it might upset my tummy), or any other issues (low texture resolution, poor colour saturation etc).

 

On a side note, does anyone know if MegaScenery Earth are intending to release Denmark, Norway and Sweden in the near future?

 

Responses from P3D or FSX users will be gratefully received :smile:

Christopher, the Freeware NL2000 is far better than the Megascenery Netherlands

 

 

http://www.nl-2000.com/nuke/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=247

That does look rather good, Glynn. What is the texture resolution of the photoscenery? The water masking looks very nice.

Hello Christopher,

From the very good manual:

 

Surface
The surface is based on aerial photographs originating from 2005, and they have a resolution of 1m/pixel.
For some of the airports we could even use 40 cm/pixel photographs. FSX's specifications allowed us to
deploy this resolution.
VFR flight over The Netherlands has become more realistic than before. We took special care to present the
visible water areas in The Netherlands in a unique way, while retaining it's properties as a water mass, so
you can still land on it.

 

The Manual is available here:

 

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&ved=0CDwQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nl-2000.com%2Ffiles%2FManual_nl2000_v4.01.pdf&ei=fvzgVJvoEOOZ7AantoCgDg&usg=AFQjCNEDz64Jn7yoV56mvaivNu4fx-lRWw&bvm=bv.85970519,d.ZGU

That sounds excellent, Glynn. I will have to take a closer look. Many thanks for the information.

Several weeks ago I switched from the NL2000 photo underground to MSE NL.

All Nl2000 objects and airports are active.

 

The reason is that other European MSE scenery are to bright compared to NL2000 or NL2000 is to dark compared to MSE scenery.

Now the transition to Germany or Belgium is way less obvious.

I made an SweetFX file and a tweaked HDR file to get the best look with the photoscenery I have from Europe.

 

Perhaps NL2000 had the best colors but it was an isle in the photoscenery sea....

Is there a difference in texture resolution between the two?

I've got Ireland, Portugal, Switzerland and Italy. Run them all in P3D v2.4

 

So, they're OK. Not even close to home-made scenery with FSET at 0.5/pixel, though. I use them as a cheap way to cover large areas, but the European source imagery is not nearly as good as the hi-res US cities (now that's actually pretty good).

 

If you get them, add Aerosoft night environment and Open VFR autogen - works nicely with the MSE base imagery.

Hi Chris,

 

Whatever you decide about Europe, please, please give DSR x 4 a try in Nvidia control panel (no smoothing), honestly it works wonders for photoscenery.

 

Enjoy!

Phil (Bakewell UK)

Where is DSR located in Nvidia Inspector? I was looking for it after I installed the latest 347.52 drivers. Do I need to update Nvidia Inspector to see it?

Chris, DSR is dynamic super resolution. Accessed via NVIDIA control panel if you've got one of the newer GPU drivers.

 

If anyone is wondering how to do this:

 

Right click your desktop, then select NVIDIA control panel from the menu (if you don't see it listed, you've got an older driver that doesn't have this feature)

In control panel, go to 'mamange 3D settings'

Select the 'global settings' tab

Under 'DSR - Factors' select a resolution e.g. 2x, 4x

 

What it's doing is upsampling the visuals to a higher resolution, then downsampling them again to your monitor's resolution.

 

You'll also notice the tab for 'DSR - smoothness' - this defaults to 33%

 

I'm still experimenting with this whilst using ultra hi-res (25cm per pixel) photoscenery. Not convinced it makes much difference so far - seemed to introduce some minor stutters - but I'm going to keep trying it until I'm sure either way.