A few days ago I received an email from Robert Ferraro, who invited me to buy his new MegaSceneryEarth 4x at a discount, as I had bought some of his sceneries before. That was a nice gesture I thought, so yesterday I bought the two new 4x scenery titles that are so far available: Massachusetts and Florida. As Mass. was a smaller download and as I was excited to explore nice places like Nantucket and surrounding islands, I started with Mass. first. I had also hoped that they had fixed the water masking issues. Well...see for yourself

 

I have P3D 2.5 with ORBX Global and Vector installed, MSE 4x is in the scenery folder above those entries. All following pics are unedited

 

As you can see from the following picture, as long as you fly above land, it does look really nice

 

But as soon as you come closer to the coast or any body of water, the problems start. Here you can see that default scenery comes through

 

Here again, the center of the picture is default scenery (which incidentally looks quite nice)

 

This is above a small lake

 

Now over Nantucket, a big portion of it is default scenery as can be seen from the next picture

 

And its coastline is just plain awful

 

 

 

 

I wonder if you have similar issues or whether it is just me. As it looks now, I am not really keen to try the Florida scenery, as it might look as bad. Strange thing is, I also have photoscenery from other vendors installed, none of it comes with these problems.

 

I haven’t contacted Mr. Ferraro yet, as whenever I tried that in the past, I never ever received a reply from him.

That's the all new 50cm super-duper high resolution extra special 10x coastline detail they were advertising...

Coastline issues are a big negative aspect of the MSE2 Northern Ireland photoscenery. The interior coastline of Strangford Lough looks even worse than your examples

Yikes...glad you shared this.

That's rather discouraging as I was hoping to improve some 1x states by their 4x successors.

 

Strangely, the ultra-res city of Boston is 4x as well, covers Massachussets almost completely, but has better watermasking and coastlines, IMO. If they can do better with the 4x cities, why haven't they done so with the 4x states?

 

I guess they can't be bothered.

Wow that looks bad.   I got the email too as just bought some of the standard 2X stuff a couple weeks ago.  Was tempted by 4X but not until we know that those awful anomolies are resolved.

It appears they may have used a shapefile of the state's borders.  Most of the available shapefiles are rather crude around water edges.  It takes a long time to make an accurate border along waters edge, and states are huge.  If they are getting their shapes from a source it can vary.

Real shame, thanks for making us aware of how poorly implemented the new MSE stuff really is :( They just haven't learned apparently....

I guess they can't be bothered.

Yes, Christopher, that's my impression too. Too bad, it could have been a fantastic product.

 

Bernd

Oliver, it looks like somthing is way off in your landclass!

It appears they may have used a shapefile of the state's borders.  Most of the available shapefiles are rather crude around water edges.

 

Perhaps they should use the coastline from OpenStreetMap which is available for free. This has been used for great-effect in tools like Ortho4XP for X-Plane to produce water masking around the coast.

They certainly need to do something with respect to coastlines and watermasking. I really don't understand how a payware developer could release a product in that kind of shoddy state.

 

 

 I really don't understand how a payware developer could release a product in that kind of shoddy state

 

It's easy to understand Christopher ..... all the time people keep throwing money at them, they will continue to produce sub-standard products.

 

Dave.

It's easy to understand Christopher ..... all the time people keep throwing money at them, they will continue to produce sub-standard products.

 

Dave.

+1

 

It must have been over a year ago, when Robert Ferraro mentioned either here on avsim or somewhere else, I can't remember, that MSE2 had given his company over half a million $ in sales. That's a lot in our kind of market, I guess. That was before he added the hyper-real cities to his offer. Now he tries to repeat this success again. For him his business model works, as long as we as customers keep on buying this kind of products.