New scenery project

[RealScenery]

Almost done with all of the airport editing for Oahu. Here is part of Honolulu Int'l, PHNL in World Editor.

[GlowWorm]

Woa! Another nice one.

Any rough timelines for the release?

[RealScenery]

Looking at days, not weeks or months, from my end of things. Once I'm done, X-Aviation needs time to build the commerce database and product pages. Should be later this month, I think.

[RealScenery]

The beautiful Island of Oahu scenery is ready! I am in the process of getting all of the data uploaded to X-Aviation. Expect this to be released very soon. This package is the second in the RealScenery Enhanced series and features the following:

High-resolution elevation data that is very frame-rate friendly.

Water transition effects from the X-Plane water to the beautiful tropical ocean water.

Transparent road network allowing the vehicle traffic to travel on the roads in the imagery.

High-resolution imagery.

The entire island is cloud-free.

Night textures.

All airports aligned with the underlying imagery.

Heliports in their correct positions, too!

Until the official gallery is ready on RealScenery.com, I have posted some sample images here. Enjoy!

[MaidenFan]

WoW!!!

[Simmo W]

Very impressive Eric, should have been your first release!

Next project please? Switzerland/Europe for a change? I can see a paid site visit coming up!

[RealScenery]

Thanks Simon,

It would have been nice to have released this as a first project, but this is put together much differently than NorCal. I've used this project to develop a lot of new technology for custom elevation, water (rivers and coastline and transition effects) and further enhancements to the night textures. Future scenery projects will really benefit from all this new technology. 

[Shrimpfarmer]

Congratulations on producing an exceptional scenery. Oh how I wish we had something of that quality for the UK. I will certainly be buying it, looks like a beautiful place to fly. I can learn all about the island before I visit the place in real life.

Shrimpy

[Ben Russell]

...on that note, I showed a friend who had recently come back from Hawaii the game "Test Drive Unlimited" which is based in Hawaii.

The maps in that game are about 80% realistic (concessions made for obscene arcade game speeding) and he was able to recognize several neighborhoods from both the building structures around and the general layout and feel of different parts of the island.

Pretty amazing stuff really.

[Axelb9]

Hey, I am pretty new here with my copy of X-Plane lying in front of me unpacked.

Hawaii though is my favourite flying area as I have done a detailed landclass for all of the islands back a few yeasr ago during my FS2004 days. I have two questions if I may:

1/ While Oahu must be truly amazing to be had in X-Plane however it has been done and redone for years now in FS2004 and FSX. What is totally missing though is a similar photoscenery coverage of the whole island chain. It simply does not exist and since Hawaii is such a favourite flying area for so many I would imagine it would be a real attraction to pull over people from MSFS just for this. I know I would grab my card in an instant. So are there plans to release the rest of the chain?

2/ Is the scenery from ground level totally flat and lifeless or there are trees and other features visible as in the global scenery.

Pardon me if these have been answered before - this is my first post.

Thanks,

Alex

[RealScenery]

Hi Alex and welcome to the X-Pilot forums!

At this point Oahu will be the only one of the Hawaiian islands released, due to both image quality and image acquisition costs. The scenery features the following:

- Full airport edits to runways/taxiways/ramp areas to match the underlying imagery

- Night textures

- Transparent roads so the X-Plane auto traffic travels on the actual roads in the imagery

- High-resolution hydrography (coastline/lakes/rivers and other water-ways)

The default X-Plane overlays, trees/roads/etc. will not be used for this release. However, even if they were, the default landuse classifications in X-Plane are not of sufficient resolution to match well with the underlying imagery. I find they are more of a distraction than a benefit when flying with image-based scenery.  :-\ Just my opinion, but I know of many people that fly with photo-based scenery that turn off the object rendering...  

Thanks!

Eric

[RealScenery]

The official RealScenery gallery for the Island of Oahu is now available. Look for release of this package soon after the big Oshkosh airshow.

http://bit.ly/9Tw5ZY

Enjoy! 

[MaidenFan]

On the website, it said that it would be released in July 2010. Just wondering if it's coming soon. I will without doubt purchase this scenery package when it comes out.

[RealScenery]

Hey Rush,

My understanding from X-Aviation is that all three packages: Oahu, NorCal, and Reno will be available shortly after AirVenture at Oshkosh. I would anticipate that all three packages will be released about the same time.

Thanks for your interest!

Eric

[MaidenFan]

Pardon me, but what is AirVenture at Oshkosh?

[RealScenery]

Oshkosh is the world's busiest airport this week.

www.airventure.org

Check out this X-Pilot post about Oshkosh.

http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=1048.0

[MaidenFan]

Thanks real scenery. I'm thinking about buying NORCAL and Oahu, but I was wondering if you had a price set for both of them yet. There are a lot of add-ons coming like the CRJ 200, so I've gotta make sure I have enough for both. I will at least purchase one of the two sceneries when they come out. Thanks again.

Rush

[RealScenery]

Hey Rush,

Good questions - yes pricing has been pretty-well nailed down, but not absolutely finalized yet. However, I can tell you that NorCal will be available in two ways: you can purchase the whole package, or just selected scenery areas. If you have limited funds, you may want to just purchase the part of NorCal in which you're most interested. For example, if you want the San Francisco area, you could just purchase the one or two scenery areas covering the greater S.F. urban area which would include SFO, OAK, and SJC (San Francisco Int'l, Oakland Int'l, and San Jose Int'l) as well as many smaller GA airports.

However, you'll find that if you want four of the scenery areas, you'll be better off just purchasing all of NorCal since the price will be about the same as four individual areas. The individual NorCal areas that may be purchased separately may be viewed here: http://www.realscenery.com/images/norcal_index.jpg

Both Oahu and Reno are special high-resolution areas that have both higher-res imagery and elevation terrain data than the default X-Plane scenery. They also feature custom hydrographic data as well. These areas will be priced higher than the equivalent NorCal scenery sections.

Also, Reno neighbors the NorCal scenery, so if you want to do flights in and out of Reno Int'l to some of the NorCal airports, this might be something else to consider.

A new product map and full descriptions of the scenery as well as gallery links are now available on RealScenery.com. X-Aviation will have their own product pages with galleries and ordering info soon.

Hope this helps.

[MaidenFan]

Thanks for the detailed reply, RealSCenery.

[cw7]

an interview with Eric at RealScenery has been posted at:

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/