Not very happy with the "new" MSE 4x

[bernd1151 334]

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.

[fscottee 10]

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

[Christopher Low 1,101]

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

[1st fltsimguy 195]

Yikes...glad you shared this.

[Don t moderate me this way 882]

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?

 

[Christopher Low 1,101]

I guess they can't be bothered.

[JYW 547]

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.

[fscottee 10]

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.

[kevinfirth 177]

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

[bernd1151 334]

I guess they can't be bothered.

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

 

Bernd

[Chris Bell 165]

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

[tonywob 2,112]

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.

[Christopher Low 1,101]

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.

[dave belsey 7]

 

 

 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.

[bernd1151 334]

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.

[Silver0066 0]

Very sloppy on MSE's part.  I will not be buying anymore scenery from them.

[JiBrady 1]

I was interested in the new 4x scenery, until I viewed your photos.  They need to do a better job.  Don't release it until it looks good.

jim

[tttocs 213]

Before people start saying things like "I'll never buy their stuff again", it would be nice to know if this is a real problem with the scenery as released of if it's something unique to the OP's install.  If the former then shame on the developer for releasing a shoddy product - if the latter perhaps there's hope and a fix for the OP's system.

 

While I certainly have had a gripe or two with the MSE V2 products, they're generally not THAT bad when it comes to water masks, so I'm hoping this is simply an install or config issue.  I'm not QUITE ready to throw these guys on the trash heap yet pending further information.

 

BTW, no disrespect meant to the OP as what he's seeing is clearly awful.  It's just that we don't yet know WHY it's so awful.

 

Scott

[Clutch Cargo 100]

All I can say is "Buyer Beware"! 

[fscottee 10]

Before people start saying things like "I'll never buy their stuff again", it would be nice to know if this is a real problem with the scenery as released of if it's something unique to the OP's install.  If the former then shame on the developer for releasing a shoddy product - if the latter perhaps there's hope and a fix for the OP's system.

 

While I certainly have had a gripe or two with the MSE V2 products, they're generally not THAT bad when it comes to water masks, so I'm hoping this is simply an install or config issue.  I'm not QUITE ready to throw these guys on the trash heap yet pending further information.

 

BTW, no disrespect meant to the OP as what he's seeing is clearly awful.  It's just that we don't yet know WHY it's so awful.

 

Scott

 

 

It's not the installer's fault.  Photoscenery is created by a very simple process, and water masking is just as simple - draw a line that distinguishes the water from the land, and smooth it out so the transition isn't noticeable.  After all, its just a picture, nothing complex about it. 

 

The issue seen above is shoddy outlining of the water/land edge.  Think of it as tracing a picture with a pencil.  If you get outside of the lines it looks like crap.  I'm guessing either "artist" in this case didn't care, or they used an automated process based on some very rough "drawings" of the water's edge.

[Chris Bell 165]

Scottee you're mixing two things here,
your description of water line process is simplistic but fairly outlines the process,

what everyone here are neglecting to acknowledge (and I’m not saying this is the case yet)
landcalss waterline has to match Photoreal line roughly!

in a more simplistic way; if your landcalss water lines are elsewhere;
it doesn’t matter where you blend your coastline if there's no landcalss water there;
you must place landcalss water there as well through landcalss descriptions first!

if his landcalss is messed up; it doesn’t matter what you do it won’t align
here's an example of what I’m talking about

here's a new development area that doesn’t exists in default landcalss



to add it properly; you can see i first add default water where they should be
(if i just draw water and blend over the new Photoreal section it doesn’t give you water there just because you draw it)







now that we have water in the new development area; we can now blend the water below to the image above

[fscottee 10]

Chris, it's obvious from the pics and others, there isn't an issue with landclass.  I've seen it myself in some of the MSE2 stuff.  And there's not a thing wrong with my landclass.

[kevinfirth 177]

Im not sure there arent two separate issues at play here the OP is suffering. I agree with fscottee that it _looks_ like there are some serious issues with the pr scenery.

 

Having created my own pr sceneries both manually and through FSET, I'd make a couple of comments. Even FSET cannot do a complete job by itself, I've used GE to create watermask lines, then imported them into FSET to produce the pr element of the scenery. But ive still had to use that vector element in SBX in order to get the correct water lc underneath the pr water.

 

If the OP has some scenery which has different lc it can affect how the scenery looks.

 

It may also just be an issue with blending of the pr. I cant tell from my phone whether the water goes up to the shoreline but the pr element in MSE definitely isnt blended out into the lc water from what I can see?

[Chris Bell 165]

expect a response from Robert shortly,

[bernd1151 334]

First of all thank you very much gents for all your input.

expect a response from Robert shortly,

And a special thanks to Chris for his valuable input and obvious contacting Robert for a response.

 

 

Before people start saying things like "I'll never buy their stuff again", it would be nice to know if this is a real problem with the scenery as released of if it's something unique to the OP's install.  If the former then shame on the developer for releasing a shoddy product - if the latter perhaps there's hope and a fix for the OP's system.

 

While I certainly have had a gripe or two with the MSE V2 products, they're generally not THAT bad when it comes to water masks, so I'm hoping this is simply an install or config issue.  I'm not QUITE ready to throw these guys on the trash heap yet pending further information.

 

BTW, no disrespect meant to the OP as what he's seeing is clearly awful.  It's just that we don't yet know WHY it's so awful.

 

Scott

No worries, Scott.

 

Let me just tell you again my system: I have a newly installed P3D 2.5 which is completely vanilla except the installation of FTX Global/Vector and photoscenery from France VFR for the French Med. coast, Blueskyscenery for California and Oregon and now MSE 4x for Mass (and ev. Florida). All those sceneries are installed above FTX and disabled in case I fly instead of in Mass. in France for example. That means I have only that kind of photoscenery enabled that is the region of my respective flight.

 

I have no issues with France VFR or Bluesky. Everything is displayed properly with no default scenery replacing photoscenery (or let us say, at least I haven't found any yet). I only have the issues as can be seen in my previous screenies with MSE 4x. Which means only here default scenery replaces part of the photoscenery and only here I have the dreaded water masking problems.

 

That is why I don't think (of course I can be wrong) that this is related to my system or set-up.

 

 

Bernd