If you haven't yet discovered this then you are in for a real treat(and it's free)!I have seen airports as I never imagined them before eg I always thought that Big Bear City airport was in the middle of the wilderness not in the centre of a township. I now know better. Go and see for your selves.Sorry if this is the wrong forum but I wanted to hit as many of my flight sim buddies as possible and this is the place.The biggest disappointment was realising how far our beloved flight simulator has to go particularly as I now in my twilight years!!!!

Theres an outstanding freeware tool thats similar called World Wind that NASA put out. Great stuff. I've had it for a few months and its trip to play with.Eric

I've been using it for a little over a week and I've been pretty impressed by it over all.Most areas are not as high resolution as the popular big cities (once you zoom right in) but oh well, its free. I remember having to pay quite a bit to get the same thing from KeyHole last year.One interesting thing I found and I'm not kidding about this, you can see a jetliner on about a mile final Rwy 34 at Calgary International, in Alberta (Canada). Its right over the golf course south of the runway.

This scenery is spectacular, but in its own way I like the landclass/texture approximation of the real world MSFS provides. There are glaring errors, but we have landclass tools to correct them. What the current MSFS scenery system offers I think is a good compromise between disk storage and performance. Add to that add-ons, like USA-Roads and similar, and with a pretty small footprint you can have a pretty nice VFR environment. In areas I know which I've "landclassed", it's uncanny how real MSFS can look at altitude. I hope Microsoft embraces these high res. images in their next sim, but I hope they also offer the "old way" which in its own way can still look stunningly real, for a fraction of the disk space.-John

have you tried the 3d building in Boston or other big cities?Kilstorm