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It would be nice that the city lights could be reflected on the clouds. Like xenviro does

Colin, thank you for all you have done on bringing Hawaii to life! The reefs are probably the best I've seen in X-Plane! The mesh looks fantastic! And now seasons! I'll definitely be donating when I get a chance. Regarding Haui's suggestion of promoting your scenery, maybe you could post on Avsim or try to get an interview with someone such as flightsim.com? Anyways, best of luck with university. Enjoy Spain. And keep on doing what you're doing with Hawaii. Thanks again, Jon

Hardware is guaranteed to get faster. People are guaranteed to get slower. It's not fair to expect that ancient hardware is specially catered for on a multi year project. Having said that; hundreds of hours have been poured into Gizmo in the last year or so to make it perform as fast as possible and more time will be invested in the 737 to ensure that your modern hardware is utilised where and when we can. It's more prudent and beneficial for all our customers to focus on making any product run as well as we can on modern and future hardware than it is to spend time making it run on ancient hardware that is, relatively speaking, the cheapest part of the development chain and the only one certain to be thrown away eventually. This becomes more and more important as we start moving into the age of VR. Modern VR latency requirements and old legacy hardware support are simply mutually exclusive options. I don't think there are any current X-Plane payware products truly technically suitable for use in a VR sim at every level. It's very easy and very tempting to use legacy GL features to provide features that users want today while getting us into a bit of technical debt for features people are going to want tomorrow. (200 fps, VR immersion, full use of modern GPU's etc. etc.) The sanest course is to set the GPU resource usage as high as possible because by the time your product is eventually released the hardware will be there, or be there shortly. ...a bit of a rant, but please, over five years plus, it's impossible to set a legacy hardware target. I think everyone will be able to find a happy medium. It's an experienced team building the product on a varied set of hardware.

Yes, it mostly has to do with the time of day and the thickness of the cloud. Skymaxx Pro 3.1 will also brighten them up a bit more.

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

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.

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

To me as a desktop driver, it's Airbus' design philosophy in general. While they were clever at some points, they tried to be very consequent in the fly-by-wire design and did some things that give some pilots headaches. I am thinking about the sidestick which isn't interconnected, the non-motorized thrustlevers that do not give you a valid feedback on thrust setting and other stuff (just think about the LH A320 that did a 4000ft dive because of frozen sensors - the pilots had to turn off a few systems to regain control) and other stuff. Proper reaction to errors which were not described in the manuals takes longer, as systems are more complex and more interconnected. Much more A320 pilots say they do not understand all systems/functions than any 737 (including NG)-pilot would do.

It´s starting to wear on me that we only have 5 or 6 737s left at Lufthansa. Last flight is planned for something like October, and I really hope they will throw a farewell party, but for some reason I doubt it. I start taping and taking pictures of all the 737´s I see, my Copilots think I am crazy . Just yesterday I saw our newest model, D-ABEF! (Only a little over 20, still a youngster!). And what do we get to replace them? NEO´s... what a nightmare. Jan

lucky to be a beta tester for this