SlowFlyer, the MSE UltraRes cities offers quite a good 3-D feel when you fly around at fairly low altitudes. It's all about scenery resolution vs altitude. Obviously it gets too blurry down at 200' but its not bad down to about 500' AGL. Here's west of Boston (Arlington?) just under 1000' MSL or about 650' AGL.

 

First MSE Massachusetts x4:

 

MSE Boston Ultra Res

 

MSE Massachusetts 2.0

 

Default FSX textures

 

Here you can really see the much better resolution in MSE UltraRes Vs MSE x4. All due to that 'optimized' compression. The same source data clearly gives way less resolution in MSE x4 even though they are both advertised as 50cm... Never the less, MSE x4 is still a lot better than MSE 2.0.

 

You can also see the results of the different way they do water blending, but the MSE team have announced that they are gonna change how they do it in x4 and are holding further releases until they've sorted that out and they will update Florida x4 and Massachusetts x4 with the new way as well. Gonna be interesting to see how that looks.

 

The MSE 2.0 stuff is too low res for a good feeling at 650' AGL, but higher up it doesn't look too bad actually. I've had hours/days of fun with it. The default FSX textures are not too bad resolution wise, unfortunately their not very accurate to the real world.  

 

I'd love to get the MSE x4 scenery with the same actual resolution as the Ultra Res scenery. The source data clearly is there and yeah, it will be taking up much more space, but I rather have the resolution please. As it has been said, the size of the scenery seems to be very much in line with the resolution. More compression leads to worse resolution. MSE Massachusetts 2.0 takes up 5.8GB on disk while MSE Massachusetts x4 'only' takes 8.8GB. There's the reason for not getting the 4x resolution.

 

Boston UltraRes in the meanwhile takes up 14.6GB but it doesn't cover the whole of MA, but covers parts of NH, CT and RI as well. The .bgls in MA, NH, CT and RI fully covered by Boston UltraRes take up 4.21GB.. The UltraRes scenery clearly takes up more space than the x4.

 

Did you want any more shots of the Lowell area fscottee?

In addition to decent photoscenery of Northern Ireland, I would also love to see properly watermasked (and more consistently coloured) 60cm resolution photoscenery of England and Wales. The difference in resolution between the current 1.2m per pixel England/Wales scenery and the 60cm Scotland scenery can be quite dramatic at times.

 

Just out of curiosity, is anyone here running the UK2000 VFR Airfields packages with the MSE2 England and Wales photoscenery? If so, how well do they align? When I download higher resolution photo base images from Bing, there is a slight offset when compared to the VFR GenX scenery that results in me having to adjust most of the elements of the airfields/airports that are affected. Rather annoying to say the least.

No I'm good on the shot you posted. Just wanted to see how it compared.

SAAB340, thank you for the detailed information and screen shots. 

 

I'd love to get the MSE x4 scenery with the same actual resolution as the Ultra Res scenery.

 

Me too. Thanks for the comparison. 

Thanks for posting those.  It's a shame that MSE can't just be honest about the resolution they advertise.  The MSE4X looks like 1 meter and the MSE2 looks like 1.5 meter.  The bing is 50cm, (but FSX only displays at 60 cm).

 

But the biggest indicator of resolution is the download size of the scenery.  ALl this stuff about special compression techniques are hogwash.  When you compress textures, you lose quality, period.  So if you compress 50 cm textures, they are no longer 50 cm.

FSX only displays @ 60cm? Complete rubbish.