Megascenery Question

[Zimmerbz 168]

I am a fan of photorealistic scenery.  I think that for US coverage, Megasceneryearth is the only thing out there.  However, I have heard their support is bad and it is pretty expensive.  2 questions... I see that they have "high altitude" series.  Given that photoreal is pretty bad at low altitudes, how much worse is the high altitude series at low altitudes? 

I see that you can buy the eastern or western half of the US at a discount.  Does anyone have any experience in buying these packages?  If so, how long is the install process?  I ask because I have Utah installed as a test and that took very long to download and install.  I'd have to assume half of the US would take days to download.  Anyone have experience?

[OzWhitey 3,353]

Eastern and western USA are v2, rather than v3. I have all the v2 states - when you buy the half-US pack, you'll just get download links to all the individual states in that half of the country. So the procedure is the same as you went through for Utah, repeated for each state.

Megascenery is now at v3, I'm not sure if that's the Utah that you have. I own quite a few of the v3 states, they're decent though the quality varies. I flew v3 Arizona last night for the first time, it's OK.,

The high altitude series is just lower resolution (I've got the Arizona version of that, too). I would personally just stick with the v3 states unless money is tight and you just fly tubeliners, I'd definitely notice the low resolution on takeoff and landing.

You said that photoscenery looks bad down low, but it really depends on what you do with it. Choose hilly terrain and use very high resolution scenery, and it's actually my favourite form of flying, particularly in VR. Covering it with objects detracts from the realistic appearance, unless the placement and selection is near-perfect. And landclass scenery is just a repeating, 'artist's impression', it has little direct link to the patterns of nature that you see when you fly with good orthoscnery.

Whilst I buy megascenery hoping for greatness, I think the source material is still second-rate. I tend to make my own scenery, using FS Earth Tiles which you can easily find online with a google search. I build large areas at 25cm per pixel, which looks great even down low. 

Then, you just need to add some buildings and trees at the airports and on takeoff and approach. I built 46A Blairsville today and am having great fun flying in and out of it using the A2A Comanche and Oculus at the moment (just taking a quick, 1:30am break to post this!) 

Megascenery Earth is certainly better quality, and a great deal cheaper, than it was until fairly recently. I bought all the v1 stuff, and you paid a lot of money for states that were not even complete. As I said, v3 is decent, but I personally think its a lot more fun building your own photoscenery, and the results are significantly better.