Colin S

Not sure what's more hilarious - how corny this is or the fact that that is the Area 51 shuttle 737 livery, which I doubt any "every passenger" would ever be on board.

I had the same problem, it's been solved now A big thank-you to the admin(s)

A major update to Niihau (which brings mesh from simply HD to serious UHD) is coming. Just for example, the resolution of the mesh on Lehua is around 4 metres. If you look at the map shots in the following pictures, you'll see the detail of the sea cliffs... that actually surprised even me. I wasn't expecting them to show. It will also make the entire scenery on consolidated package without the need for separate installation of UHD Mesh. Just one simple installation. Looks like that last point isn't happening, because mesh is not overlay and orthos are... which don't get along in one single DSF as far as I can tell. It also might include a Windows installer as an experimental preview of what the plus version will offer. The installer will simply ensure that you are putting it in the right place. There are two main reasons for the installer: I am so sick and tired of how non-user friendly X-Plane is. Having finally mastered MeshTool, I understand why there is such a lack of super high-end scenery for X-Plane. It's just a pain in the rear end to do. I want new users to get an amazing scenery file, and be able to simply press "install" and hey presto, scenery. No messing around making sure you unzipped it to the right level or that you have put the mesh in the right folder. The plus versions use the installer, so I need a trial run of this with actual users. At this time I'm not sure about the plus versions for Mac. If anyone knows of a good free installer utility for Apple machines, please let me know. EDIT Niihau won't have an installer. I was lead to believe that the utility I was given for creating installers had a comprehensive GUI. It doesn't. And I am not learning a whole programming language just for writing installers, that is an absolutely ridiculous waste of time. My statements about the lack of user-friendly programs continues to be validated.

Hey folks, I tried to update Niihau's mesh today but the website is throwing error after error at me. I'll try again tomorrow probably.

Fatal error: Access level to IPS\nexus\_Customer::$loggedInMember must be public (as in class IPS\Member) in /home/xaviat/public_html/x-pilot.com/forums/applications/nexus/sources/Customer/Customer.php on line 504 That is the error which I get (and all that shows up on the entire screen) when I try to visit any part of the downloads area. Further information can be provided at request, I just don't know what else you'd need to solve this. Cheers

Thank you Jon for the kind words! I will definitely consider getting this stuff on Avsim, but their system is so clunky and 90's-ish that I have had trouble in the past trying to get anything onboard with them. I'll try again thought Colin

I only have that knowledge thanks to the combined help of Ben and Andras, the god and the prophet Thanks Looking forward to what you have up your sleeve next as well.

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

We will add your name to our file of people who will be sent the plus version immediately upon completion. Thank you so much! I'm assuming from your post that you live in Hawaii. Lucky you!

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!

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.

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

Major Update: March 19th, 2016 First of all, I won't be using my donations from last month for overdue books at the UVIC Library. Got them in on time. But no one cares. This is what you do care about, though: Molokai will have seasonal textures.* *Eventually. The "Eventually" of this will only be an offset of a day or two as I will have to cut every single orthophoto tile a second time from its parent for the two available seasons, West and Dry (Winter Spring, Summer and Fall respectively). Below is an early look at the difference between the seasons. Something to note is the significance of these seasons on future islands (such as Maui and Hawaii), where snow at higher altitudes in the winter is fairly common (I have seen it myself and have in fact had plans cancelled due to a snow storm in Hawaii). On the left is dry, on the right is wet. The reefs for Wet have not yet been finished. As you will see in following pictures, the reefs for dry have been finished, but finished incorrectly. They need to change with the seasons too. SEASONS? IN X-PLANE? No, not really. It will require one of two things: the first would be for you to decide whether you want to fly in ugly Hawaii or lush, tropical Hawaii, the second would be installing SimpleSeasons (I'm currently experimenting with this). Anyways, here are a couple of more shots of summer only shots with wet reefs. Wet reefs. Okay, wet season reefs. Reefs are always wet. In the dry seasons, however, there isn't as much runoff, meaning that the reefs can chance in appearance due to that and also changing temperatures. Science aside, the change just looks cool and that's mostly why I care about it. Something to note is that I have severely darkened the water around Hawaii using the water.lua script that I picked up somewhere along the way, and I have no idea where it's from but I will try to find out so that I can actually have custom water colours by the time we get to Maui. Bathymetry data has been destroyed by MeshTool, sadly. I'm experimenting with line files to draw the gradient in water colour change. Something else that was destroyed by MeshTool that I'm working hard to solve: roads. Because MeshTool only works with elevation data, it therefore redraws everything... without roads. With the help of St. Andras himself, I will hopefully be able to bring back road data that will bring the highways and dirt tracks of Molokai alive with blinking lights of traffic (not to be confused with traffic lights, of which there are none on this island). If there are any questions, please feel free to ask, although I have no idea how long an answer you really want to read because, as those who have asked in the past can confirm, I am not not particularly skilled at saying things quickly. And as always, please consider a donation. The $75 I received for the last two months is the biggest motivation I've gotten in this whole project (as sad as that sounds) and the main reason why Molokai went from being "barely moving" to "almost done" in a matter of weeks. Please visit the Hawaii Photoreal website to make a small but important donation to help this project along. Hawaii Photoreal/ FlightSim Jewels (FSX/P3D/XP10) FlightSim Jewels/Hawaii Photoreal

Time for Molokai airport. I have closed QGIS and MeshTool and hope not to open them again for a few weeks. I will not be starting Molokai until I get back from Spain, but I will hopefully be updating Niihau and starting work on the improved Lanai and Kahoolawe. Molokini will be updated when Maui is released, as I will be removing the XP8 quality SketchUp model that is a blemish on the reputation of Hawaii Photoreal. Considering pulling the file outright until we have Maui ready to go. Anyways, here's Molokai from a different angle than usual. It's looking pretty sweet.

This makes me happy. I won't have to open QGIS for at least another three weeks and MeshTool for another month. HD Mesh is done, update to the Hawaii UHD pending. Warning: It removes all roads, but if flightseeing is all you're after, this might be the thing for you.

There are moments of victorious accomplishment... And moments of utter defeat...

Thank you for the enthusiasm! We are encountering problems at every step but learning and coming out ahead with every failure. I'm glad someone is looking forward to Molokai as much as I am! The cliffs are mind blowing and without the UHD mesh they aren't work even looking at. Cheers

As with every product, each bug that is resolved leads to two more bugs appearing (heil hydra!). Now that I have finally successfully created true UHD scenery - that is, stuff where there are barely any jagged corners at the top of hills and even bumps in the runway are fairly smooth - I have another problem: hols in the mesh. Well, actually, they are holes along the tile boundaries, where MeshTool used one type of logic for one tile and other logic for the next. The best way of visualizing this is as follows: MeshTool only draws a new triangle once you've gotten past a certain change in elevation - that way you don't have a big open flat area filled with millions of pointless triangles. As great as this is, it sucks for places like narrow valleys along DSF tile boundaries, because this is what happens: Along the west boundary of the east tile, it draws a triangle at the average altitude of a midpoint of elevation in the valley, making it not look so pointy at the bottom and effectively cutting the valley in half. Along the east edge of the west tile, it draws a nice sharp V-shaped valley because it just happened to be right in line with putting a triangle in the right place at the right time. Wonderful! But what about that valley on the next tile that was flat at the bottom? MeshTool doesn't know what is happening next door (in my opinion one of the biggest shortcomings of the tool) and therefore is extremely finicky when trying to get complex terrain - like on Molokai - to line up flawlessly. I'm experimenting now to see what I can do to avoid this now and in the future.

Just a quick comparison of pre-HD Mesh and post-HD Mesh... you guess which is which.

Finalizing the coastline alignment on Molokai before packing it up and starting work on PHMK and PHLU. ETA < 1 month.

Hey Everyone, Just want to apologize for the lack of an update to Molokai (or even the apparent existence of the file in the download library): It still needs approval, I'll shoot Cameron a message once I've updated the last file and fixed the terrain around PHMK Molokai Airport.Cheers