RealScenery

I've been working on this area for the past several weeks and just finished it tonight! This will be released at the same time as NorCal and Oahu. Expect an announcement soon!

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

The data is 10m.

Yes. Please see this post for an example of the amazing difference between the default terrain and the new enhanced terrain in the Oahu scenery: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=833.msg7282#msg7282

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.

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!

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.

We're still finalizing the pricing, but it will be VERY reasonable and an incredible value for the quality and effort that has gone into this package.

Check out some of the new screenshots by X-Aviation and a full description of the product and how it will be released! http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=917.msg7618#msg7618 http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=748.msg7616#msg7616

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

Without a good mechanic, I have no incentive to get out my can of polish and Cameron can't get out of the driveway! Nice work!

You really shouldn't notice a huge difference, especially with the later X-Plane releases (9.2 and later). X-Plane has become quite efficient at handling large imagery-based scenery packages. As usual, your video card memory will really benefit you here. Version 9.5 of X-Plane is the version that I'd recommend since it will increase your load times substantially. X-Plane will process scenery in the 6 scenery files (DSF files) surrounding your aircraft. You can think of a scenery file as a 1 degree block of longitude by 1 degree of latitude. In earlier releases, ALL of the imagery was loaded, and for high-res packages, you often ran out of system memory (those were the good old days :-\ ) That really dictated how scenery packages were put together - based on what the sim could handle (as well as hardware.) With 9.5, when you start up X-Plane in an area that is covered by RealScenery, only the images within about 35 miles (56 kilometers) are loaded. As you fly, more imagery is loaded in the background, which really makes for a much nicer experience. With the NorCal release, images are structured a bit differently than previous packages. Load times with 9.5 are only about 3 minutes with ALL of the NorCal scenery files installed - and that is on a very modest system. Disk I/O is really what chews up the time when loading large scenery packages when starting up X-Plane. You can often hear your disk thrashing heavily when loading a scenery package when the sim starts up. (Might have to get one of those 15,000 rpm drives!) With 9.5, even if you have all of NorCal installed, only the scenery that is near you is loaded. No more waiting for X-Plane to process images that you'll never see because they are too far away. WooHoo! To answer your question, it probably won't slow down X-Plane, but it will take a bit longer to load than with the default scenery. Also, depending on your video card and memory, you may have to adjust some of your rendering options. I have updated the user guide with NorCal to include some suggestions on maximizing your sim performance with the scenery. If you can fly the sim with high framerates now with higher-res rendering options, you should have no problem with RealScenery. Hope this helps! Eric

Thanks, Gene, Yes, a lot of thought certainly goes into what will be included in a specific package. While political boundaries, like states, are convenient, they don't work very well in X-Plane, which is really oriented toward geographic blocks of lon/lat. One of the earlier posts mentioned Reno, Nevada as an extension of NorCal. This is certainly true and the Reno/Tahoe area will be done (it's on our list) ;D. At some point you have to draw the line and say "OK, this is what will be included in this package. It could go on forever, but we need to cut it off here." The NorCal package is really somewhat misnamed... It really should be the Northern AND Central California scenery as it extends about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of Monterey, well south of San Francisco. It really covers about 2/3rds of this huge state. I think this will be an incredible value for anyone that likes to fly with image-based scenery - especially with night textures and every airport aligned with the imagery. Thanks for the nice comments! They are always appreciated. Eric

It's all in the hands of X-Aviation now. I know that this is a very high priority for them and they are still working on a new high-speed downloader as well as the product pages. We'll post an announcement here as soon as it is ready. Believe me, I'm as excited as everyone else, and am looking forward to having all of you finally be able to download and fly with this scenery! Eric

Thanks for your suggestion. Yes, I plan to work on Reno soon, and I agree that this is really an extension of NorCal. Look for this later on this year. Airport buildings and other 3D objects are fully supported on top of the scenery if you have them. Eric

As Cameron mentioned, RealScenery products do not use any data from Google, nor would I want to. Over large areas, the imagery is a patchwork of varying sources, dates, and scales. Aside from the legal issues, this is not a good data source for quality add-on scenery. This is not to say that you won't find some of the same data in Google that I use, but Google also has a variety of other imagery that they use as well. If you have not seen this post, I'd recommend reading it with specific attention paid to the example image links at the bottom of the post. http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=655.msg6151#msg6151

Hi Shimpy, Welcome to X-Pilot. I think most of us are here because this is a friendly X-Plane site. It is growing very fast largely due to the attitude and also the developers here that all share the same vision for X-Plane. Those are the two reasons that I'm a member of these forums. Nice to see someone that also enjoys rotors! I know that X-Plane has continually been improving the physics of helos in the sim. Hope you can post some screenshots of your helicopter adventures in X-Plane. Eric

Thought you may be interested to see the difference between the default elevation and the enhanced elevation used in the Island of Oahu scenery. Note: The imagery you see is not the final processed imagery. It's in a pretty raw form just for testing purposes. Enjoy! Default from X-Plane Global Scenery: :-[ Enhanced elevation with test imagery: ( yes, this is really the same area! ;D )

Hope you can find an instructor and plane to rent - I'm sure that would be a blast! I've spent several weeks developing a lot of the new technology that is going into this release. This will be the new standard for the high-resolution (HR) scenery. Just like NorCal, it will feature: - Full airport edits to runways/taxiways/ramp areas 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) It will feature higher-resolution imagery than NorCal. It will also feature new transitional water effects and a higher-resolution elevation model. This will be done very soon (I'm hoping within the next week, as all the major work is now finished -although you never know when you'll run into an unforeseen problem! ) - I would anticipate this being released ahead of NorCal due to the new distribution system that is currently being developed by X-Aviation to handle that release. The sure way to know I'm done with a project: The release of the official gallery on RealScenery.com. I'll announce the gallery here when it is complete and ready for viewing.

You are correct! PHDH - Mokuleia, Hawaii. It is located on the far northwest tip of Oahu.

All clouds have been removed - spent almost a week hand editing lots of imagery! Here's a sample of what you'll find in this new scenery. Warning - this image is 4096 wide! You can right-click the image below and save the image to your computer if you don't wish to view it in your Web browser. Note: This image has not undergone final processing yet... Enjoy!

More recent versions of X-Plane have introduced a gamma setting. If you are not familiar with this setting, it is located under the Settings menu > Rendering Options. The default gamma value is 2.5. Gamma is a control of the overall brightness, or luminance, of an image. Images which are not displayed at a proper gamma setting may look either too washed out or too dark. To make my scenery look the best that it can in X-Plane, I try to use the default gamma, or even a bit lower, with values of 2.3 - 2.5, and develop my images at these settings. Two factors which affect the quality of the entire X-Plane application, both aircraft and scenery, are the time of day, and also the gamma setting. You may notice that with photo-based image textures, there is a large variation in the luminance of the image at mid-day and also with increased/decreased gamma values. With that background, I'm curious to know what gamma setting you use and why. How does the gamma benefit, or detract from, the quality of the entire X-Plane application window? My real motivation here is to find the gamma values used by most people and use those values more heavily when evaluating image quality during development of new scenery. I look forward to hearing how you use this setting to hopefully enhance your flying experience. Thanks! Eric

Awesome! Best of luck with it, Goran!

Northern California status can be found here: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=655.msg7080#msg7080

Northern California is done from my end of things. However, the distribution system is being built now at X-Aviation. This product is much larger than any of the existing RealScenery packages due to the higher image resolution. Also, this package will be sold a bit differently than the existing packages. All of the Web site and database coding is now being done to support this release. We'll post here and at X-Aviation when it is available. I am just as anxious as all of you and I appreciate your patience while all of this behind-the-scenes work gets done! It will definitly be worth the wait...