Announcing RealScenery Enhanced - Previews!

[Cameron]

Hello, all!,

It is with great excitement that we are ready to release more info on our upcoming Northern California release. This release will be the first dubbed as a RealScenery Enhanced product. In brief, our Enhanced series of sceneries will introduce many new and exciting features (many of which have been long time requests). Here's what you can expect in RealScenery Enhanced products:

• Airport/Runway/Taxiway alignment - All airports within Enhanced packages will now line up right over the imagery!
  
• Night lighting - As has been seen here in some earlier previews, Enhanced products will include night lighting produced by our own custom software to match the underlying terrain. This includes, but not limited to: Roads, Sports Parks, Parking Lots, proper differentiation between urban and rural areas, and more!
  
• Road Alignment - We have gone the extra distance here and created custom roads that are extremely accurate to true life, and we have enabled it so the underlying imagery is the road surface you see. No more flickering roads...just a lot of cars, and very little FPS impact...go ahead and crank up those roads to "Totally Insane!"...you know you want to!
  
• More to be announced...
  

It wouldn't be proper to announce this and not show some more progression screenshots...

Note the cars on the roads:

Higher resolution imagery than all of our previous standard state packages:

Custom night lighting to bring out the night owls in all of us!:

Great for sight seeing! Race the cars if you want to!:

We'll see ya soon!

For those of you that wish to see a quick sneak peak of the cars in action, I have compiled a SMALL video clip in the evening showing how much more realism they add. It really is fun to fly around in the sim with them!

A suggestion: View the video in HD on youtube's site, and in full screen to get a better feel!

[Simmo W]

Fanstastic screenies and a teasing vid! Puhleeeze, when out?

[Cameron]

Hi, Simon,

Thanks for the compliments!

The release date is soon...very soon!

[Kesomir]

Very nice Cameron - now if only there was one of the United Kingdom upcoming (or europe)

[crs]

Hi there,

As Kesomir said. UK, Europe would give you a another customer.

Friend of mine was trying to convince me to switch to FSX this afternoon. I let him to install it on my Windows 7 partition and show me some stuff. But I think I will start another thread about it.

Once again. Europe == another client.

Kind regards,

Kamil.

[Jack Skieczius]

I wish the Florida version had the night textures. I just finished my night flight training here in real life and now i find it so cool to fly at night. Are there any plans to update the Florida scenery to this new enhanced version that you are doing with Norcal?

[RealScenery]

Hey Jack,

Congrats on your night flying! My plans for the existing scenery packages are to upgrade them to the Enhanced scenery standards over time as new imagery becomes available. These upgrades will include:

- New higher-resolution imagery

- Improved image processing techniques

- Edited airports that match the underlying imagery

- Enhanced road network

- Night textures

Thanks for your interest!

Eric

[maxter]

Wow, fantastic stuff.  One question though, do you have seasonal variations in your textures and are there any 3D objects annotated to the textures?

Once again, wonderful stuff and thanks for sharing.

[RealScenery]

Hi Maxter,

Our textures are not seasonal and are from late spring / early summer. All of the normal X-Plane overlay objects are included and supported with RealScenery. As you saw above, the new transparent roads will also be included, allowing for X-Plane vehicle traffic to travel on the roads in the imagery.

Thanks for your interest!

Eric

[maxter]

Hi Eric, thanks for the reply. Looking forward to the release.

Hopefully we can have a similar quality of scenery for Australia one day  Cheers and all the best with it.

[Nils79]

Hi Eric,

great work and i'm looking forward to the release!

Do you plan to upgrade the existing State packages? I recently bought the State of Arizona and i would love to buy the other packages, but i do like flying at night and the XP roads are flickering sometimes.

Thanks for your work!

Nils

[RealScenery]

Hi Nils,

Thanks for the nice comments! Yes, our first-generation scenery will eventually be brought up to the standards of our new NorCal scenery, with newer, higher-resolution imagery, night textures, and transparent roads. I know that night textures are important for a realistic simulation and I really like flying at dusk/dawn as you can probably tell from a lot of my screenshots! For this reason, I have spent a lot of time developing the night textures for this package.

[RealScenery]

Here are some more previews of the transparent roads. We are generating the final roads network and testing them with the imagery.

Enjoy!

[Simmo W]

Hi Eric, tonight I downloaded your Nevada demo. I've forgotten- will your norcal scenery be significantly higher res than the state packs? I hope so, as I prefer to fly at 2500 to 3500. Just want to know so I can buy as soon as available:-)

[Cameron]

Hi, Simon,

State packages are traditionally 5 meters per pixel. With the introduction of Enhanced scenery packs and NORCAL, the scenery is 1.5 meters per pixel, and looks very good at the altitudes you wish to fly at.