It's not for FU, but there is the photoreal scenery for FS - LAX & San Diego now available. For the SFO it will be on March and it will be bigger area then for FU. You may see more :www.megascenery.commain page andwww.megascenery.com/title-sfo.htmfor SFO. There is a video for Lax.I'm going to buy both.Third is NY.B.Adamski

I have the SoCal scenery... looks pretty... frames are ok... but load times are horrible. Start the load and put on some coffee... go use the facilities... check the TV schedule... call your mom... pour some coffee... and it should be just about ready. :-( They offered all owners of the SoCal stuff a 10% discount on NY... me no think so. ;-)

I wonder if this would've been the trend FU would've taken into the new millennium? The load times, though, seem to be setback.Then a small spark touches the nerves again - I shudder to think what it would eventually cost, maintaining a simulator this way. After a calculation to ship it down to my country, a shuddering US$53, $15 more than I paid for the whole of FS9 only now for a small region! Imagine the cost if one wants to cover the world in this simulated manner.I really miss the times we did all this for the fun only and not with every one wanting to turn into a commercial business giant. I remember the days when FS scenery was finally hacked and I put down my very first own airport (on a very flat world), just so that we could practice ILS approaches. We communicated and helped and exchanged ideas and files and had the utmost fun. Paid for the program and exchanged all the rest for free: scenery, aircraft and panels. Pity the simulator world has changed into this hunt for money. Again I'm totally convinced that FU2/3, this forum and its people (those also long-gone and some who even passed away) are the diminishing breed of unselfish simulator fans still exchanging ideas and files for the shear fun of it. Me hug group

Pieter,To be honest, I enjoyed the old FS4 days. The simple, uncluttered polygon graphics of FS4 were far nicer to look at than the horrible, shimmering mess that was introduced with FS5. Quite how anyone could consider that ugly kaleidoscope of horrors to be anything close to "photorealistic" just baffles me to this day :-eekThe Mallard Hawaii and Tahiti expansion packs were a joy to explore in FS4, but the most impressive scenery that I used (and I still have it today) was Gemini's UK scenery. The complete set occupies eight floppy disks, and includes scenery for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (including the Shetland Isles, Orkneys, Outer Hebrides, and most of the other islands scattered around the coast of the British Isles). Other scenery details include virtually every airport and airfield in Britain, masses of landmarks (bridges, castles, cathedrals, mansions, historic monuments, radio telescopes, lighthouses, football stadiums.....the list goes on forever), and a pretty impressive rendition of the mountain ranges in Scotland and Wales. It was always interesting to fly around in this scenery, because there was always something to see, something that was REAL (in other words, not automatically generated). There were no ugly textures to spoil the view either ;-)Chris Low.

The most interesting in this, is that the SFO will be 195x195 miles (38 000 sqare miles), so I'll see what is beyond the FU SFO limits. I wonder if it is possible to conver it to FU scenery. It's illegal but made personaly should be possible.B.Adamski

Looking at the screenshots (they posted some at the Megascenery forum) the scenery looks better than FU3. This scenery is only 5 meters/pixel while FU3 is 4, but FU3 scenery uses a rather limited 256-color palette which causes some weird things like lime-green fields and brown cities.Flight simulation scenery has really evolved backwards since FU3. With the FU series, the scenery was realistic, with somewhat dull and toned down colors, and of course, 100% accurate. 4.5 years later we have the generic scenery in FS2004 which looks like something taken from Super Mario with the bright colours and funny looking fast food houses that randomly pop up all over the place (and thay KILL framerate BTW). It's also incredibly inaccurate with most smaller cities missing, replaced by a generic forest texture. Kind of funny that FS2004, this highly advanced, modern sim, takes several minutes to load the scenery while FU3 can load Seattle or SFO in a matter of seconds. That's what happens when competition dissapears I suppose.I ordered Megascenery Socal some time ago, still waiting for it. Will be interesting to see what it looks like compared to FU3 and to default FS scenery.The Northern California scenery, at 38,000 sq. miles is almost four times the sie of the FU3 SFO region so that will be interesting to explore. Don't think it's awfully expensive. For $30 you get 38000 sq. miles of photo terrain (in the case of SFO), which isn't that bad. The Socal scenery is a bit worse in that it also costs $30 but you only get 14,000 square miles. The UK scenery is still bigger and chaper per square mile. Remember that these satellite pictures are VERY expensive for the scenery developers to buy. You can't just buy 40,000 square miles of 5 meter satllite pictures and give them away for free.

Yes, but it would be nice (as Bogdan has suggested) if the satellite images could be converted and used for FU3. If we were all prepared to pay the price of the scenery package itself, then I see no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to do this (assuming that it is even remotely possible).I would certainly pay good money for an expanded SanFran scenery region.Chris Low.

Chris,To be honest with you I enjoy the COF thing and also the FU3 thing for different reason's, even though I have to look at what you call crap like this in Cof once in awhile :-lolhttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/58930.jpgI'm almost sorry that I spent $40 bucks to see this kind of craphttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/58931.jpgIt's like not a real world scene, Right? I mean it looks fakehttp://forums.avsim.com/user_files/58932.jpgI realize that all flight sims are just games to have fun with, I enjoy more then one of them, I have enough space on my hard drive to do this.http://forums.avsim.com/user_files/58933.jpgHave a good day :-newburnAllan and Puppyhttp://avsim.com/hangar/air/bfu/logo70.gif

I see no reason why that shouldn't be possible. Extracting the textures from the FS scenery should be possible. Then you'd need to manually place them on the mesh which would take some time.Allan, is that Super Mario or Zelda? :-lol ;)

Allan,It is the old versions of MSFS that I have the greatest issues with. I am well aware that some of the add-on airports (and certainly the planes) in FS2004 look far superior to anything that is available for FU3.Chris Low.

Yeah I remember those shimmering textures from FS98. Was afaid I'd get an epileptic attack from watching it :-lol It got a lot better after I went out and bought an awesome, super high end 6MB (!) Voodoo 3D accelerator :-eek

Jimmi,Yes, but do you remember the ULTRA UGLY shimmering textures from FS5 ? Christ, it gives me the shivers just THINKING about them.....Chris Low.

I would certainly pay good money for an expanded SanFran scenery region.glidernut

Jimmi,The question is.....would we be able to use the mesh itself ? High resolution textures are all very nice, but they aren't much good on a completely flat world.Chris Low.

Well we know that it's possible to modify the mesh in FU3, as well as making an entirely new one from scratch. At least those who have developed addon regions for FU do ;) That has been done with the UK and Switzerland regions. So, even if it's not possible to extract the actual mesh from the FS bgl files, the elevation data should be available elsewhere for purchase and/or download.If someone actually does this, the best way to do it would probably to make some kind of "installer" or script that more or less automatically does:-Extract textures from the FS2004 scenery-Convert those to FU3 compatible format-Import and convert the mesh to FU3 formatThat way anyone who wants to use it has to buy Megascenery first.