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Dear friends who are all still happy with P3D! Today I just wanted to introduce you to my work of the last few years - yes, years. Some time ago I even created a thread here - somewhere - but I can't find it anymore... 🤐 First of all the following: I'm not the type who likes to advertise his stuff. The reason for the post here is actually that I was told again and again (actually, also more than years now...) that I should do more advertising. For example here, because there are still many P3D fans active here who might be interested... That's why I'm just going to do that now! So, what have I done? Well, what many others have already done - created photosceneries. With autogen, of course! Very briefly, how does one get the idea to create photosceneries? Well, back then, nearly 10 years ago (remember the time back then, that was before ORBX released something like TE Netherlands!), I wanted to enhance the approach area for my home airport EDDM a bit. After a lot of reading, trying, deleting and trying again, I had created an area that covered about 40x20 km around Munich Airport. Everything was created completely manually, every autogen building was placed by hand. Many people were enthusiastic about it at the time and asked if I could create something like that for XYZ airport . And yes, in fact I wanted to do that. Shortly after, I visited Namibia (and that was really great!). But I didn't like the flights in the sim (remember, at that time there was no openLC Africa!). And that's when I had the idea to create a photorealistic Africa. It was a huge project, I never thought I could finish. I have to say the following about this: I was in my geography bachelor studies at the time. And an important part of it is, of course, the use of GIS software. I wanted to combine this so that the creation of the sceneries would be easier. And that's what I did, and created all of Africa photorealistically - in high quality and with accurate autogen. After I had 800 GB of photosceneries for Africa, I thought - why not other regions? In the meantime, a lot has happened here. I now use Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 OLI data to detect vegetation, which I refine with vector data, including OSM. For buildings, I have chosen an AI approach, so that I can also extract building footprints from the RGB images using a convolutional neural network (with the restriction that it only really works well in Africa, as I have trained the model here). Therefore, in the meantime there are more than 10 Python scripts á 1000-5000 lines of code with which I can create my sceneries - semi-automatically. In the meantime, I have created all of Europe and Africa, and I am working on South America. The server storage space is still a problem. Due to the increased costs, I had to remove Central Africa and all my Asian sceneries from the server - even though I am working on making everything available again. So, a lot of text... It's probably best if I just show pictures - across the world, so to speak. Athens Marrakech El Oued Algiers Cape Town Ouagadougou Somewhere in Ghana Somewhere in Sierra Leone Bulgaria Currently working on Brazil France Frankfurt Serbia Tirana Naples Poland Germany Namibia In the meantime, my sceneries - of course! - also come with comprehensive night lighting. Furthermore - and I think this is not unimportant: How big are the sceneries? Well, I have installed a 4 TB HDD for my sceneries (whole Europe, Africa, half of South America, part of Asia, altogether approx. 60 million km²), on which approx. 2.7 TB are occupied. A lot of information - including a current overview map - can also be found HERE and HERE. For questions regarding the download, please write me a private message (preferably in the FSXForum or at FSDeveloper)! Now, in conclusion, I have no other option but to wish you all a wonderful weekend!

Last weekend I tried doing a flight between KMIA (MS default) and SACO in FS9 (default, reworked AFCAD, default terminal buildings added and photoreal ground textures I generated in SBuilder 2). Keeping with Murphy's law, I was getting a CTD just at approach. After checking with AppCrashView, I saw it was a StackHash error, for which the CTD guide did not give me the best hope. I was fearing a reformat... After trying again (I had just saved 30 NM before the airport), I ran Process Monitor along with FS9, until it crashed. After weeding out all the DLL crashes (every single DLL in FS9 reported buffer error), I found the culprit was a missing winter texture (it's winter in Southern Hemisphere). Turns out that I only generated summer and night textures (and autogen), and forgot to generate all other season bitmaps. After generating all season textures, I could land with no issue. Hope this helps when you see this type of CTD.

Had a CTD due to constant mucking around with render options, so I didn't quite make it to Phoenix.

Amazing, the difference Photoscenery makes.

Still fooling a bit with photoscenery. Here's just one from the North Georgia mountains at Brasstown Bald. The image data looks to be from the middle of autumn, so I turned off the autogen trees so their green color wouldn't clash with the reds in the texture.

Mt. Adams, WA Mt. St. Helens, WA Near Phoenix, AZ Phoenix #2 Next 3 from Glacier Nat'l. Park, MT

Hi there, I have downloaded autogen from this website, made with scene proc and data from OSM. I've placed all .agn files in the texture folder of the Waffle Flight scenery. At first, it seemed to work and the autogen including houses appeared and looked great. However, not anymore after shutting FSX down for the night. Now, only trees appear sparsely, but no houses anymore, overall coverage is very low. I've already re-downloaded the files, tried several different configurations in the scenery.cfg, but nothing seems to work and to bring back the lovely autogen. Autogen for the Netherlands from the same developer on-top of NL2000 photoscenery works flawlessly. I'm out of ideas on how to solve this problem. Does anyone have any ideas, tips or suggestions on how to tackle this problem? Cheers

Just one screenshot today. I was flying the Cherokee into a randomly chosen private airstrip, only to discover that it doesn't exist in the simulator! The landing was a little hair raising. For those one want to find it, it is 2MT1.

Hello everyone! I am working on a photo scenery for Africa for 2.5 years now. Sounds megalomaniac? It is. In the meantime, the project is already well progressed, and many people told me to do some advertising for it. First of all the little story behind the project: After I bought the FSL bus, I noticed how bad the performance of the FSL bus was together with ORBX Germany. So I was searching for a solution, and I found it in Photosceneries. Since I didn't want to fly without autogen, I used my experience from my geography studies and programmed Python scripts based on arcpy. These are able to generate high-precision autogen for the sim based on OSM and Corine data sets, as well as water data, elevation data, population data, etc. and with the help of ScenProc. After Germany was finished, I created Belgium. Although the data for these countries was very good, I started writing Python scripts in parallel, which can also create autogen based on Landsat and Sentinel data, in regions where OSM data is hardly available - like Africa. And so, since Africa is a dark spot in the sim, I started to create african countries about 1 year ago. It took again more than 6 months, until my scripts - and the results - were good enough to post the first pictures. And yes, what can I say, the feedback was excellent! And while I'm still improving my scripts piece by piece, I've been releasing a country every now and then since half a year. At the moment approx. 30 % Africas are covered. Here's a small list of the features I've put a lot of effort on: - Good photo scenery with 2 m/px without strong visible color transitions and without many clouds - Accurate Water- (based on OSM) and Blendmasks - Color adjustments so that desert areas are not overexposed - Accurate autogen vegetation (based on vegetation classifications and land cover data), spatial resolution less than 10 m - Accurate autogen buildings (method introduced with Senegal), placement based on OSM and high resolution land cover data - Small file size (I expect to get whole Africa in less than 700 GB) - No performance impacts But I think I've written enough for now, so some pictures: More Information about my project you can find here: Project Africa - FSDeveloper.com and here: Project Africa - FSXforum.de Have a nice wekend everybody and kind regards! Matthias

Hi, I am new to the community and I am currently working on a photo scenery for Wick Airport - EGPC. I followed this brief tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M41bBEw7_OM And I have managed to get a brief photo scenery going. I know nothing about watermasks and/or blendmasks however, following a different tutorial, I used GIMP to create a watermask and blendmask. My blendmask doesn't seem to work - according to what I think it does, however, the water mask partially does I think. Basically, if anyone could help me solve this issue, I would be very appreciative. My next steps - after this is sorted - are to use ADE9X to re-align the AFCAD to the scenery and after that, use whisplacer to add houses/buildings etc. into the scenery. I would also like to create some winter, night, autumn and spring textures but, again, I have no idea how to do so. Any help would be much appreciated. Regards, TheFSFreak

I've first tried X-Plane 10 a while ago, when it was first released, and like so many others my first reaction was "it's nice, but..." which was followed by uninstalling it. Last year, I gave it another try, but once again decided that it was a "alright" but nothing more. Uninstalled it once again. Now it's the third attempt... and this time I can't deny that X-Plane is impressive in some regards. Most of all, and surprisingly to me, scenery. And all this is possible thanks to the awesome people who have created amazing freeware such as the SimHeaven photo scenery, World2Xplane, HDMesh and many others. The result, in my opinion, is not too shabby!