A few Q's

[JimmiG]

I'm considering buying either the Oregon or Washington scenery but I have some questions first..

-What's the resolution of the textures in meters per pixel? How low can you fly before the scenery becomes blurry? Most of the screenshots are taken at very high altitudes making it hard to tell.

-I've never used large-scale photoscenery in X-Plane, only in MSFS. How does X-Plane behave with these types of sceneries installed? FS suffered from blurries and longer loading times, but an increase in framerate. Same with X-Plane? How would the scenery perform on a Phenom X4 at 2.7 GHz, 4GB of RAM and a 512MB Radeon 4850?

-How long will the scenery be supported and fixed in case X-Plane breaks something? For the life span of X-Plane 9?

-Are small airports aligned with their photographic counterparts or will you see double runways like you sometimes do in FS?

-Which one is most beautiful? Oregon or Washington  

[Cameron]

Jimmi,

The screenshots are taken at a mix of altitudes. Very high altitudes is a bit of an overstatement.

X-Plane uses texture paging, so there is no blurry effect like you have seen in FS. The load time for scenery is generally not as long as FS is with a product like MegaScenery either (I can load up an airport in Oregon in about 20-25 sec.), but it does increase load times in the end. You can expect the scenery to perform just about as well as it does with your default scenery settings. Your setup is more than capable.

The scenery will be supported for a long time to come. Part of this is that the X-Plane scenery format is very solid these days, and we don't anticipate much change over time. Ben and Laminar have done a great job with that.

Most airports are aligned as best they can. As you get into the HR series of sceneries, the alignment becomes even greater. I will say, however, that when I'm flying around RealScenery, it never bothers me. The misalignments at most are quite minor.

As to which is better? Both! It's a matter of preference I suppose, but the mountains are fun to fly around!

I would suggest that you download the demos available for each scenery. On each products page on X-Aviation, you'll see a link to the demo in the description tables.

Hope this helps, and happy flying!

[RealScenery]

Hi Jimmi,

Lots of good questions here. Let's see if we can get them all answered for you. Cameron's post hit most of them and I'll provide a few more details which I hope you find helpful.

First, let me say that both OR and WA are equally beautiful places to fly. Oregon is a bit more rural with Portland being the only large urban area. However, WA has the entire Puget Sound area which is highly urbanized. Both feature the Cascades Mountain range and the high-desert lands of the east side of the state. The eastern side of WA is more agricultural that Oregon is.

Pixel resolution is only one parameter on which to evaluate scenery. Our state series has pixel values of around 3-5 meters which of course varies with latitude. Our state series scenery is meant for cross-country VFR flying at altitudes above 4000 AGL.

I'll defer to Cameron's previous post about MSFS scenery performance. Generally, you should get very good performance with the scenery, especially with your system that has 4GB RAM and 512VRAM. The scenery will take longer to load initially, but you should have very good framerates.

Cameron also mentioned that X-Plane's scenery architecture is very stable. I have been involved in making scenery for X-Plane since 2004 when X-Plane was at version 7. There have only been a few major changes in the scenery environment since then, both of which were huge benefits to scenery capabilities and performance. Nearly all of the additional capabilities with new X-Plane versions (both major and minor releases) have to do with aircraft and don't affect the scenery system at all.

Overall, the runways at larger airports, and even smaller municipal airports, are aligned very well with the imagery. However, smaller private strips may not align correctly due to their positional information often being interpolated from map sources and not through actual survey measurements. With different X-Plane addons, available for free, you can certainly modify any of the airports and add buildings and static aircraft to customize your home field if you wish. Many X-Plane customers have already edited many airports in the default X-Plane database, so you may find that your airport of interest aligns very well with the underlying imagery.

Cameron also mentioned our HR (High-Resolution) scenery. This scenery is meant for low-altitude VFR flight, including touch-and-goes, pattern work, and just flying around the city. Currently we have HR packages covering both Phoenix and Tucson, with more in the planning stages.

I would also encourage you to view two of our HD movies which area currently linked through our home page at RealScenery.com. This will also give you a good idea of what to expect when flying with RealScenery.

Only you can be the judge as to whether the scenery would meet your needs and expectations in X-Plane, depending on the type of flying you do. I would encourage you to download a demo of any of our packages (they are all available through X-Aviation). We can give you all the specifications, but ultimately it is up to the end user to decide if the scenery is going to enhance their flying experience.

Hope this helps!

Eric

[JimmiG]

Tried the demos. Still not sure. The default textures in X-Plane are very vivid and realistic IMO. I like them. There's also autogen that looks decent. The problem is that there just isn't enough variety. Mountains, cities etc. look the same pretty much anywhere in the world. You couldn't tell if you're flying over switzerland, new england or canada... Photo scenery is flat, but very varied and detailed, making exploration more interesting. Your prices are very reasonable however, so I might just go for it. A certain Washington scenery for another sim is over three times as much...

[john82088]

Just to let you know, I purchased them and have not regretted it one bit.  It adds a new dimension to flying.  I just wish they had more of the states. 

John

[Cameron]

Just to let you know, I purchased them and have not regretted it one bit.  It adds a new dimension to flying.  I just wish they had more of the states. 

John

They'll continue to be produced. Be on the lookout for new one's soon!

[JimmiG]

Well I did buy the Washington scenery in the end, and I have to say I'm satisfied.

Quality is very consistent with no abrupt color or resolution changes between tiles (like you see in Google Earth etc.). You do need to reach a couple of thousand feet before the scenery starts to look realistic, but for cross country and just exploring, it works very well. Instead of seeing the same field tile, suburban tile etc. repeated over and over, each city and even small town gets the correct street layout and there are no missing towns obviously, since it's a photograph. Washington is my favorite "sim area" ever since Flight Unlimited III so it's good to be able to fly there in high detail again.

Loading times are almost the same and framerate is actually better since you normally turn off roads and other features with this scenery (since they're part of the photographs). I find that if I keep the object density at the lowest setting, the 3D objects make it easier to visually determine my altitude around airports etc. At higher settings, the objects look out of place. Also forests look out of place and inaccurate on top of the scenery, even with USA Forests installed, so I just disable them.

Many smaller airports are indeed not aligned with the photographic textures. I'm a complete newbie to X-Plane scenery editing, but it would be nice if I could just get the airport layout overlaid on the photographic scenery and then just manually drag and drop the runways and taxiways until they align. Not sure if that is possible or if it's more involved.

I would love to see California, but in the meantime I'm also considering the Arizona scenery.