What would you expect from payware scenery?

[OlaHaldor]

Some of you already know, I love modeling for X-Plane scenery. As of today, I have one airport that may be released at any time, and three in the making. And I'm sure there will be many more to come.

However, I have yet to publish any of my scenery I've started and done some work on.

- Why? Because I'm not happy with it. Sure, "it looks better than nothing", but is it really good enough?

I'm not gonna say what I'm not happy about, I'd rather know a little more what you as possible buyers would prefer from a payware scenery. What makes it worth the money? What would you expect when you first load the airport?

Let me know, whatever it is. And feel free to either discuss, request, or simply ask questions directly to me. I need to know what others think before I can make a leap and release anything.

[Kesomir]

Expectation is dependent on the price.

I buy Tom Curtis' sceneries because they cover a large area and make a big enough difference for me for the price.

I buy OrbX sceneries when on sale for the same reason.

A single airport would for me need to be somewhere I fly and that means flyable for my VA.

I would like beautifully textured 3d buildings, accurate layout and parking. Quality ground textures would be a plus (I prefer artisitc, not ortho, but that may just be me).

If we start going higher pricewise then FSX side payware has moving people, vehicles etc but x-plane is a different market.

[flyinhawaiian]

Well for me, I don't necessarily want or need all the buildings (unless they're significant landmarks) to be EXACTLY how they are in real life, but the airport layout needs to have the same feel and familiarity as the real thing.  Further, modeling two options, one for high-end systems, and one for medium systems (like mine) would be nice so we can still have custom scenery, but not take a MASSIVE frame-rate loss.  The KIAD scenery crashes my game once in a while, for example.  It looks great, but is too complicated to work well on my system.  

2.4GHz i5 Intel Macbook Pro, 4GB DDR3 RAM, Nvidia GeForce 330M 256MB VRAM

[FlorianR]

Location matters to me a lot. I would easily buy an airport in central Germany, England, and France, but I wouldn't buy some airport in a country where I will never fly. Also, detailed buildings, custom ground and runway textures, and high-res textures are important to me.

[MaidenFan]

I don't care about location as long as the airport is good. If I'm going to pay for a single airport, I want it to be really high quality. I wouldn't be able to make the decision unless I saw shot of it first...

[Simmo W]

Good that you're asking Ola. Given the incredible quality of some of the freeware out there, you just need to beat that and have a popular location. Im fascinated with the new Columbian scenery, but I'm not buying it as I'd never fly there or recognize the items.

I recently bought Tom Curtis' Boeing airports, 4 for $24. I'm reviewing it. I would not normally buy it, as I don't know the area that well and am not a true Boeing fanboy who knows the facilities. His work is massive, like his other large area packages. So good value for roughly $6 each. But bad value as I'll rarely use it.

If your scenery is as amazing and magical as Javier's Donateware LESA, I might pay as much as I donated to his. I have filmed/flown there so many times, and still see that as the benchmark to beat. Or Cork EICK? and that is free too. So price point will be very important.

[OlaHaldor]

Thanks for your input. It's very valuable to me.

Capnsully, I'll check them out.

So, let's say I cover all airports and helipads on Oahu which is made to fit the photo scenery that recently was released... ? Would that be something you would be interested in?

[karingka]

What Simon said is very important. The quality of the scenery is important, but so is the location! For example, Cami Di Bellis's files are very, very good, but who flies to Micronesia? Regarding your Oahu suggestion, I would buy it, the location is pretty good, but I would prefer a big european or american airport we do not already have, like EGLL or KJFK.

[OlaHaldor]

I just downloaded and tried Cork EICK. I'm impressed by all the details there - but it runs in an alarming 12fps on my system when I flew the BK 117. My point is - I'd like my sceneries to fly well even on a mid-end computer like mine (compared to what's hot today..). Sadly, loads of geometry eats more performance than good textures.

Noted, Karingka.

[YYZatcboy]

I can echo the same sentiments. Hawaii is nice to poke around in, but I don't fly there every day because of how remote it is. However JFK, LGA, EWR, DCA and IAD are begging for a top noch scenery. (How embarassing is it that we don't have good scenery for JFK and LHR yet?)

[fatherjack]

I just downloaded and tried Cork EICK. I'm impressed by all the details there - but it runs in an alarming 12fps on my system when I flew the BK 117. My point is - I'd like my sceneries to fly well even on a mid-end computer like mine (compared to what's hot today..). Sadly, loads of geometry eats more performance than good textures.

I'm on a four year old MacBook Pro and I get a bit better than that while flying an object heavy aircraft there.

I did have a lot of trouble with Cormack's Dublin scenery but eventually traced that to a couple of bad 737 OpenScenery objects with double sided faces in the middle LOD. The symptom was an obvious drop off in performance while that LOD was active.

I went away on contract unexpectedly soon after I fixed it and forgot about it. I never contacted the OpenScenery guys about it.

[hobofat]

I just downloaded and tried Cork EICK. I'm impressed by all the details there - but it runs in an alarming 12fps on my system when I flew the BK 117. My point is - I'd like my sceneries to fly well even on a mid-end computer like mine (compared to what's hot today..). Sadly, loads of geometry eats more performance than good textures.

Noted, Karingka.

I never bother with scenery because while I always seem to be able to make frame heavy aircraft work fine, even basic scenery sends my fps plummeting.  Would love some good looking well-made scenery that won't cook fried eggs on my computer case...

[fatherjack]

Would love some good looking well-made scenery that won't cook fried eggs on my computer case...

I've had three machines up and die while x-planing. Cooked.

[karingka]

Well Ola, what have you decided?

[woweezowee]

Some of you already know, I love modeling for X-Plane scenery. As of today, I have one airport that may be released at any time, and three in the making. And I'm sure there will be many more to come.

However, I have yet to publish any of my scenery I've started and done some work on.

- Why? Because I'm not happy with it. Sure, "it looks better than nothing", but is it really good enough?

I'm not gonna say what I'm not happy about, I'd rather know a little more what you as possible buyers would prefer from a payware scenery. What makes it worth the money? What would you expect when you first load the airport?

Let me know, whatever it is. And feel free to either discuss, request, or simply ask questions directly to me. I need to know what others think before I can make a leap and release anything.

I think it's in parts a very subjective question, who purchases what. There are some general things: Large Area for a cheap price, as has been mentioned like with Howdys scenerys, that's I'm sure interesting for a lot of folks, even if they don't fly the region often. That's why I bought the "virtual comumbia" package.

However, for example, I purchased http://www.eiresim.com/leal.html as you know. Single airport with what I would say standard features of high quality payware at nearly the same price than other complete packages. But for the wrong simulator, so I even converted it, and of course it's not perfect. So for me, for this airport, I would be willing to pay even more for an as good as or better native xplane version. Time is money, too.

Also, you might want to start with 1 or 2, later make that a package of 3-5 in a bundle. like howdy did KPAE and the surrounding area. Nice strategy.

I'd say: Release one airport that you have for a really a low price, like 4.99$, and collect as much feedback on this one as you may get.

[andyw248]

Here's what I would expect:

- A resolution good enough to show details of the grass areas between runways and taxiways. A grass surface that is not blurry is important not only when flying choppers but also adds to the depth perception on approaches and during the flare.

- Real 3D grass on the grassy areas. In case you haven't seen it Rise of Flight has some grass on their airfields. Since it's a WW1 sim it's essential for them but it would add to the immersion in XP.

- Better runways. Bill Womack has written a tutorial that explains how to do it for FSX. But the same principles apply to XP.

- Real buildings or facades. Sceneries based on orthophotos typically suffer from flat relics of buildings and yards. Ideally a scenery should be composed of fragments of different landclasses, just like XP does by default, but much more granular, and then you build your objects on top of that, rather than having them interfere with flat relics from orthophotos.

Just my 2 cents. If I ever had time to work on my many unfinished scenery projects I would tackle these first. And of course this is from a VFR and occasional chopper flyer's point of view, low and close:)

Cheers

Andreas