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Today's flight to Melbourne! Emirates flight UAE6548

Here is your first look at the nearly completed Molokai. Roads and airports coming soon. Enjoy

I certainly agree with Haui's comments and suggestions for promoting Hawaiian Photoreal to X-Plane users. I only became aware of the project after after reading of it in a recent notice of the Lanai Island release in the X-Plane.com web site. Support from more X-Plane users will surely follow Haui's marketing suggestions and those received from others. This morning I took the time to read the entire blog history on the Hawaiian Photoreal project in forums.x-pilot.com. The amount of time, energy and intellect you, Colin, have poured into this project to date is amazing, even more so when considering you are doing this while a full time university student. Thank you for your skill and your tenacity that you have put forth to pursue and complete this project. It reflects your love for the islands, which I share as a resident of Hawaii. Those of us fortunate to live in Hawaii, or as a visitor, who have personally experieced flying around the islands in and out of its major airports as well as its many small airports as a passenger, a real life pilot, or just as a simulator pilot, know first hand the diverse physical beauty of the islands. In spite of the improvements in scenery development by the X-Plane developer over the years, much still remains to be accomplished in this area. Colin, you are "pushing the envelope" in this regard, and for this I and others in the X-Plane community are grateful. Based on your progress and results achieved thus far with the project, I have decided to pre-pay for the Plus Version of project as an expression of my confidence in its timely completion. I encourage others to join me in this regard Mahalo, Paul Haring

About X-Plane.org: I'm not turning this into a rant post, but I disagree with certain aspects of that forum, and I am banned there. I recommend not mentioning my name there (just so no one gets mad at you). Thanks for the suggestion though, I wish I could get the word out but I don't want anyone being punished for being associated with me. Thanks for supporting my work. The free version of Molokai will be done before I head off to Spain in April (mid-month). I've started the preliminary meshwork for Maui and I'll be reworking Lanai and Molokini at the same time (since their mesh will interfere with Maui). I'm pretty much as excited about this as anyone, making these islands has been a dream since I first got X-Plane and I saw the absolute ugly mess that the Hawaiian islands were. Mahalo!

You're welcome. Yes, I have been a resident of Hawaii since 1966.

15 bucks for the Plus Version is totally fair. In fact, it's awesome! I'd immediately go for it. I'd even donate in advance, if I knew that the package would be released in the next 6-9 months. Concerning what you wrote about Hawaiian Photoreal and X-Plane users I'd say that the reason for the apparently low interest in your Hawaiian Sceneries is because of no one knows about it. A similar dev thread on the org-forum would definitely increase interest in your sceneries and probably donations, too. In fact, I know of an org-member that created a Lanai airport scenery because he didn't know about your great package. The X-Plane user mentality that you're referring to might be as it is, because we're used to getting good (not awesome) scenery for free. Unfortunately, we're also used to paying way too much for payware due to lack of alternatives. So most X-Plane users will stick to freeware and buy payware only if it really strikes them as worthy to pay for. So to sum up, spread the word, created the scenery and get rich. P.S. Maybe you could create a Hawaiian Photoreal banner for forum signatures? I'd gladly use it.

High-Res Imagery now in X-Plane. We are out of the testing of the terrain and into the perfecting of the lining up of the orthophotos. This is harder than it sounds (not just simple coordinates). When polygons go straight up mountains, they seem to diverge even if their coordinates have their corner vertices in the same location, meaning there will be some stretching and reshaping needed.

The entire chain won't be around for quite some time, but I hope you'll enjoy the freeware in the meantime. Thanks you two, glad to see some folks are interested in this product Just threw the first full-resolution demonstration together this evening, I have to share it with everyone, obviously.

Colin, count me in as a purchaser of your entire chain of "Plus"version of the Hawaii islands when completed.

$15 for the finished product sounds like a very good deal to me. Look forward to purchasing the 'Plus' version when its ready!

Major Update: March 20th, 2016 Happy spring! I have some good news. And I have some news that I know a lot of the X-Plane community, with their mentality, will consider bad news. Let's begin. I had a lengthy conversation with my partner in crime (who does all the original imagery editing and the FSX/P3D scenery), discussing the future of Hawaii Photoreal, as Molokai is nearing completion and Maui will be around three times the work of completing Molokai. As some of you know, for Flight Simulator and Prepare3D, there is a plus version that includes seasonal textures and autogen. Starting with Molokai and continuing for all islands except Kauai when we get there (and Lanai since it only needs updating), there will be a plus version. Our (X-Plane) plus version is very, very different than their (FSX) plus version. Below is a list of things each version includes (this might change in the future). What the heck is plus and how is it not payware? Well, plus is sort of like payware. Only we offer nearly the same product for free. If you donate around $15 you will get all the islands in their "plus" versions. If you're going to complain that we might as well make it payware, no, we mightn't. If you are complaining that the price per island that it ends up working out to is too high, then you clearly haven't donated. I can say for a fact that the number of people who have donated to Hawaii Photoreal this year can be counted on one hand, and I would still have enough fingers to eat my potato chips. Donations motivate like you wouldn't believe. Molokai wasn't going anywhere until we got a few donations. Currently most donations come from the FSX/P3D end of things - which is fine since we only have three islands available for X-Plane. Something discuss between myself and my partner is the different mentality between the communities. His scenery pulls in about 1 donation per hundred thousand downloads. The X-Plane scenery pulls in one donation per... well, it doesn't. All in all, I don't feel like anyone even wants this work (minus like four or five people who constantly provide wonderful feedback). Plus will be a bit different from the old stuff and different even from the FSX stuff. In one regard, the plus will be better than the FSX scenery with 0.3m/1-foot imagery in and around airports. Also included will be pavement textures like those found on Lanai, and much improved at that. As mentioned before, MeshTool rewrites mesh without road data (who can blame it, it's not like it knows how), and with the plus version, we'll bring back the roads. It'll still look pretty sweet in the free version, but at night the island will be pretty dark without the flowing traffic. Seasonal textures, as mentioned in yesterday's post, will be included in the plus version. There will also be little bits and pieces only in the plus version - rainforest helipads, streetlights, select autogen, grass at airports - that isn't significant enough to be on the chart below but should still be noted. In conclusion, the free version is like buying the cheapest version of the car. You have to manually roll the windows, it doesn't have air conditioning and there is no chrome on the radio stack. Plus gives you all that. Kauai is a story for another time. If you can't spare $15 for an entire chain of islands, pick an (available) island that you really want the plus version of, shoot us an email and we'll see if we can accommodate you... or something. We're not trying to rip you off. Following table subject to change. Feature Free Plus Full 1M Orthophoto Coverage Yes Yes Full UHD Custom Mesh Yes Yes 3D Airports by George Keogh Yes Yes HD Airport Textures No Yes 0.3M Orthophotos around Airports No Yes Roads No Yes Seasonal Textures (Wet, Transition, Dry) No Yes

In the middle of bug fixing I had to spend a little time repainting OK-UBA with citywing livery

Flying the JS32 from EKBI to EDDL

... yes, indeed I am currently not as active as at some other times (but really need some break from time to time, with family, real life etc. etc.) ... BUT I also have started work on my next little project. It wont be something entirely new, but it will be a welcome (I think, very welcome) update of a well know project. It will be the "X-Plane 10 Tree Lines and Farms v2" ... I will extend the coverage of the old project a bit, tune a bit here and there, and add a new (and I think this will be the most noticeable update) feature, namely tree lines along water features ... But don't ask me for timing, as i don't know. Something between a few weeks and a few months ...

I'm always interested making my OSM sceneries more realistic, so your tool will help to do so. First shots are impressive! There's much more information in OSM data, that we can use for more realistic buildings, e.g. color or kind of building, roof... or combine OSM with other data, like getting roof images from satellite shots. or to judge if OSM data is sufficent and set exclusions for autogen objects (smart exclusions in my and Bens term). Also regional facades are possible. I follow this topic, but if you need some assistance, please contact me.