Information on the NORCAL release

My bet is no.

However I would be curious to see how big the NOR/SOcal scenery will be. I know it's probably not exact, but are we talking around 60gb for each?

Hi dpais,

With the quality of both Oahu and Reno RealScenery Enhanced releases, I wanted to go back and bring NorCal up to similar standards. Over the past several months, I have been working on automated techniques for processing custom elevation data and airport flattening/smoothing. In addition, a lot of custom programming has been done to automate much of the work that was previously done by hand for Oahu and Reno. Hundreds of hours have been invested in developing the technology to carry scenery development forward with the products after NorCal is complete and released. NorCal is just too big of geography to do things by hand! The great news is that these very time-consuming steps are now done and the first scenery area was put through the whole set of routines, start to finish, yesterday with great results! The only time-consuming part that has to be done by hand is the digitizing of the custom hydrography for each scenery area. I’m estimating late summer/ early fall (northern hemisphere) for release. I’ll post status reports here as the scenery gets closer to release, including estimated file sizes. These sizes won't be known until the full product is packaged and ready to go, but certainly "tens of gigabytes" will be in the final deliverable.

Thanks for your interest and to everyone for their patience! This product has been redone two times previously and is now undergoing a major quality upgrade to be like Oahu and Reno. Using the default X-Plane elevation and hydrography would have been a major disappointment as they are very poor quality compared to the enhanced version that is being developed now.

Eric

Another NorCal update for all of you that are anxiously awaiting this release...

Everything is in place now to develop each of the NorCal scenery areas up to the standards of the new Enhanced scenery. Five scenery areas are now complete. (See the first post in this topic for a map of the scenery areas.) You can't believe what a difference the custom elevation and hand digitized water add to the in-sim experience! The airport smoothing of the elevation data is rock solid so far, too.

For those of you that are more GIS data savvy, yes, I could use shorelines that are already available from a variety of sources. However, even the highest resolution data doesn't exactly match the underlying scenery as closely as I'd like. Depending when the imagery was acquired, the shoreline location of many lakes and reservoirs varies with year and season. The water for NorCal is all hand created, matching the underlying imagery in the scenery. In addition, I can control what becomes X-Plane water and what remains as natural water shown in the imagery. There are many smaller water features that have beautiful coloration in the imagery. Many of these features will be retained as they add a lot to the flying realism. This is really the biggest time draw for me now... As an example, I spent several hours just on Shasta Lake, the largest lake in Northern California. It has close to 20,000 vertices as well as several islands!

The good news, aside from being done completely with five areas, is that all other aspects of the scenery creation are automated, thus requiring little manual labor from me. That's one of the biggest reasons for the timing of this project; making all of the tech to produce the scenery. Like all the aircraft devs at X-Aviation, the new tech just makes things easier, and much faster, from here on out.

Eric

Sounds great, looking forward to the release!

Cannot wait! I have been doing part of my flight training out of KRHV and have been longing for any scenery for the San Francisco Bay Area! Anxiously awaiting the finished product.

Time for another update. Made huge progress over the past couple of weeks since the last update. I'm now working on the coastal areas and the ocean/beaches.

Amazing!

Keep up the great work!  Hopefully, someday we will have all of the US with scenery like this.

John

Lots of progress made in the short time since the last update! All of the processing tech is now developed to handle the oceans, with some further enhancements made over the Oahu scenery, which many people commented that they really liked.

Is the water water? Or is it a hard surface textured?

Is the water water? Or is it a hard surface textured?

I'm aiming for real water physics as you pass the beach and enter the water.

Very Nice!  I learned to fly in northern california.  Did most of my cross countries to the coastal areas like Ft. Bragg. 

Looks just like i remember

Just a quick update. The water, whether X-Plane-generated or image-based will have water physics. This means that you can land out in the ocean as shown in these screenshots and really get wet!

The NorCal scenery hit a big snag the past couple of weeks since my last update... The ocean in the imagery was only available in a very small area of the north coast, which is typical of much imagery. Vendors typically clip the images right offshore and/or blur the areas. You'll also notice this in many areas in which coastal imagery is displayed in online mapping services. Even where ocean imagery was available, there were many annoying quality issues such as bright sun reflections and very washed-out colors. So...I've been working to create a nice set of seamless ocean textures for use offshore. These textures are really incredible in-sim and nearly seam translucent in many areas, especially with the differing sun angles in-sim. These textures are seamless so you don't notice repeating wave patterns - just beautiful mid-latitude Pacific Ocean that is typical for the northern California coastal areas.

In many ways, even though these are synthetic ocean textures, they are much more enjoyable to fly over in-sim because there are no lighting/coloration artifacts. You will also have the ocean textures extend well offshore, much farther than normal visibility, for a consistent ocean view as you're flying along the beach.

Hope you enjoy these first images.

Amazing!

Lots more work on the ocean/coastal areas this week. Some refined techniques also developed - but of course, that requires that you go back an redo what you've previously done! I feel confident that the road ahead should be much faster now because of some new techniques and scripts that have been developed.

Some additional work was also done refining the ocean textures to make them look a bit more translucent.

Another nice flight along the coast. These pics were taken off of Arcata, California, looking south. The airport is KACV, Arcata.

Enjoy!

Very nice! But how do they look from high altitudes?

Funny, most people complain that the screenshots are from too high an altitude, even though most are from 3000 - 4000 ft.  

These were taken from 10,000 ft.

Wow, looks really good! So are these just textures that overlay an area or a replacement for the default water textures. The reason I am asking is if they will be animated and will be seen not only in SOCAL. Cheers 

These images are processed into the terrain just as the land-based images. However, like the other water areas, these have real water physics so you can land your amphibious plane in the ocean if you wish. These replace the water in the ocean only and are not animated. However, I think you really get the feeling of flying out over open water with these ocean textures.

I really can't wait for this scenery.

I think San Francisco - Honolulu is going to be my most favorite flight with both RS Enhanced products!  ;D

Just need some good airport scenery to go along with them...

Almost done with the NorCal coastal areas! Just have the Monterey area left to complete, then some areas over on the east side on the California/Nevada border.

Here's an image just south of Half Moon Bay airport. California Hwy 1 is main road in the image.

The NorCal coast is all done! Here are some images around Monterey Bay and its famous golf courses.

You'll have over 500 miles / 800 kilometers of Pacific Ocean coastline and beaches to enjoy!

Monterey Peninsula Dunes Golf Course. Forest Lake is the green lake in the background.

Cypress Point Golf Course.

The far south coast of the NorCal scenery.

Looks amazing. And I love how the water textures blend with the waves breaking on the shore .I can't wait for it to be finished!