fscottee

Folks, its quite obvious that seasons will have to depend upon whether Bing satellites have taken seasonal photos. If you browse google earth as an example, most of the satellite imagery is of summer textures, with many exceptions however. Sometimes you come across an older texture that shows trees without leaves (obviously these satellite images were taken during autumn or winter). But rarely if ever do you see imagery of snow on the ground unless its an area where there is... always snow on the ground... So, its very safe to say that Bing has textures of say, New York state, with snow on the ground, roads, trees. The difficulty will be in transforming the imagery from say brown leafless tree imagery, to snow cover, utilizing the atmospheric engine, (simulating gradual snow cover accumulation). I think if you just want winter snow covered imagery, yup its easy peasy because Bing has those images.

Thinking about porting some of my excellent high rez scenery over to FSW. Can't imagine how this would look with FSW weather effects. This is Burlington, VT from P3D

Ya know I dont fly anymore, but I got about 100 gb of various great scenery like this. Who can send me a 100 gb drive and get this uploaded somewhere? Its been sitting on my hard drive.

Yup, it's been beaten to death, but you'll always know the resolution detail by the size of the download. To go from 1 meter resolution to say 60 cm resolution would be 4x bigger. So if Tennessee was 30Gb at 1.2meter resolution, then 60 cm resolution would be 120Gb. It doesn't make much sense to sell products that size, to MSE is simply gouging customers with veiled claims of increased resolution. They've been doing that since v2. Look I have some amazing scenery of Chattanooga and surrounding area, full blown true to life buildings, etc... I have so much scenery that I did myself, even the entire town of Lowell Mass, which was amazing. Lots of other places as well, But the size of the download makes it impossible to distribute.

Well I did it too.. switched to DCS (meaning that I finally purchased a module and upgraded to v1.5). Bought the Mig-21bis and what a crazy good sim this is. I am so tempted to buy NTTR but for now flying around the Caucus area is sufficient as I learn to fly this beast. In my early impression of DCS, I think it is really two different aspects that are so appealing: The feeling of real flight over the terrain, and operating and taming the plane of choice. I went with the Mig21 because I've heard so many good things about it, and I like early "modern" aircraft, the origin of radar and such... I haven't started P3D since...

If you like cookie cutter pieces of land that only represent the type of scenery, with sprinkles of actual scenery, then ORBX is for you. There is no personal identification to the land like you would have in real life. OTOH, if you like the real stuff with great looking building representations of the buildings, then XP is the future. FSX/P3D is stuck in the past - it's an old engine that version 3 has finally shed light on that fact. Think about it for a moment... version 1, version 2, version 3 - all costing as much as brand new sim, and version 3 still basically looks and acts very much like FSX.... XP has some similarities to the DCS 2.0 engine. It's because they are newer technology.

Is it me, or has there been an unusual shift towards these combat sims? IL-2 was amazing when it came out BTW... long time ago.

Actually the right formula is XP+10=

Before and after at KLWM:

I think I'm gonna upload this to Google Drive and just let folks use it for now. There is so much small work to be done and I can only do so much at a time. For the time being it should be fun for low flyer (helos or small GA) to fly from KLWM to Lowell, and then back. I hope people at least take a look at it. KLWM has been completely revamped. Not a default autogen building left. Custom placed trees and custom buildings all the way around. I added lots of detail to the field. To be honest, I love flying this airport more than anything I've ever purchased. Maybe cause it's mine. It's almost 3 GB in size. I'll post the link here and then update the package as I go along.

Heh, my thoughts exactly. I'm thinking he just got educated.

It may be system dependent then, as I suspected. Myself, I've been tweaking flight sims since 1994. I know how to make them look clean, or blurry. Version 3 wasn't bad... but the overall look was just fogged over. Perhaps more powerful systems would be fine, but I don't have one. So you have to try it yourself.

Yes, I found 2.5 cleaner and sharper as I mentioned earlier. 3.0 was "blurry" and foggy looking no matter whether I had HDR on or off.

I think his VFR scenery is the most consistent out there. Very nice full state coverage. I'm a little concerned about the full state tree coverage however. I don't know the process he is using, but little things like trees on roads, or sitting in areas where there would be water or a building is sloppy. I know it takes time and manual corrections to get trees out of the way. Otherwise, just having massive amounts of trees statewide is counter-productive to the point of having photoscenery.

X-Plane needs to really really revamp its trees. It's bad when an ancient sim like Falcon 4.0 BMS 4.33 has better looking trees than XP.