New Scenery USA Product

[nudata 10]

Looks like they bought some satellite data and will be producing sections of the USA as sets of textures. It is impossible to determine the quality of the product from the screenshots. While they look nice they are from such a high altitude that almost anything would look nice. That is the problem with many products that mask low resolution with distant shots. Anyhow, if it is decent resolution for VFR flying I would be interested. Will take a lot of Autogen work to add that stuff so maybe if this catches on someone will automate that process for us.If this is VFR quality then thanks since I could not afford several thousands of dollars for the images. The only way satellite photos could see the light of day in the sim community is someone biting the bullet and buying them for commercial resale.http://www.sceneryusa.com/Dick KLBEDick

[Guest]

It's interesting that they mention the word Realistic but not Photo-Realistic. Because of the data structure hard coded into FS2002 the resolution cannot be any better than 4.8 meters per pixel so it will be more blurry at close distance none-the-less it's nice looking work and I'm sure someone will pay the price for a super huge amount of textures and autogen but it won't be me most likely.My two centsKen

[Guest PaulL01]

These clearly are not satellite. The product seems to be very similar to TarraScene. I for one prefer the accurate road and rivers of a product like this, the lack of AG is understandable given the size of this data, I'll bet the CD only contains a working program that does the work after it is installed on the hard drive.The questions remaining I think are:How accurately does it line up with.. the Geographic features of Good Mesh, such as mountains etc as well as airfields.Are there seasonal textures? what does the transition near the border of Canada or Mexico look like.

[Guest]

>it is impossible to determine the quality of the product from the >screenshots. While they look nice they are from such a high >altitude that almost anything would look nice. That is the >problem with many products that mask low resolution with >distant shots. >>Dick Just wanted to add to that, and join with Dick in his opinion. Sadly lots of payware companies promote their products with WAY too small or too distant screenshots, which can make even the lousiest of textures look knife sharp. :(

[arno 1]

True, but we know that this texture has a resolution of 4.8 meters/pixel, because that's what you get for photos you put on the terrain :).I think this technique might be nice for small areas, but for big ones it's just not usable. Assume you have all 5 seasons (including HW) and a night variant, that means you have 6 variants for each texture. Even for a small country as the Netherlands that results in the tiny amount of about 6 GB of textures.And besides that, when you come close to the ground the resolution of 4.8 meters/pixel is not really high enough in my opinion.So I think it looks nice from a certain altitude (above 5000 ft or so) and that doesn't weight up against the huge amount of textures.We'll just have to see what's the end result of it I guess :D.Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]

[Guest PaulL01]

>True, but we know that this texture has a resolution of 4.8 >meters/pixel, because that's what you get for photos you put >on the terrain :). >Somthing else comes into play here as well, the original image could have less resolution and they oversampled, and if the data was infact at least 4.8 meters if they used image tool instead of a program like Martin wrights tools the results are rather poor.What I hope Fs2k4 brings to the table is to be ablke to use 512x512 or 1024x1024 bmps so that we can use 2 or even 1 meter/pix textures as this has been achievable but only with using the old Texwith1mesh commands for large scale mesh type photoreal scenery.Here is what my old 1 meter scenery looks like and shows what it is capable of:http://www.frontiernet.net/~pleatzaw/images/ecto8.jpg