RealScenery

Can't add anymore beyond what John said!

A pleasant afternoon flight heading back to Sacramento from the Napa Valley. Lake Barryessa is in the background to the northwest.

Flying southwest over the small community, and airport (KRIU), of Rancho Murieta.

Overflying Auburn Municipal (KAUN) and the city of Auburn to the southwest. Folsom Lake is in the distance to the south.

A beautiful afternoon flight over the countryside northwest of Sacramento.

Overflying the town of Rohnert Park, between the cities of Petaluma and Santa Rosa. The coastal valleys and the Pacific Ocean are visible in the distance to the west.

We are, too!

Flying north over Death Valley. The Amargosa Range is to the right, with Tucki Mountain and the Cottonwood Mountains to the left.

Google resolution varies according to location and their imagery source, generally from 1 meter to half meter or better, especially in popular urban areas. NorCal uses several resolutions and data sources, but in general, the displayed resolution is between 1 and 2 meters, which a compromise based on the size of the geographic area and the need to control bandwidth costs, which keeps the product price reasonable for everyone.

From Ben Supnik: "I told you earlier that the “Framerate-Lock to Monitor” setting should ALWAYS be on “Do Not Lock”. This is a tiny white lie. If you’re an advanced user, if you know what VSync is, if you know how it works and if you have enough performance to spare and you want to stop scene tearing, go ahead and turn it on. Even then, don’t turn it on until you are done tuning framerate, because VSync will obscure changes in fps, making it impossible to tell what effect a rendering setting has on your hardware. If you don’t know what it is or what problem it’s meant to solve…please leave it off and forget it exists. It will NOT improve your performance." I always turn VSync off with nVidia cards and get much better frame rates.

Death Valley, one of the hottest and driest places on earth. This flight is crossing over Furnace Creek (L06) with Badwater Basin, the lowest elevation in the United States, in the distance to the south.

Flying northwest over Pine Flat Lake Dam. You can see the water coming over the spillway on this afternoon flight about 30 miles, 42 kilometers, east of the city of Fresno.

Thanks, Sopwith, for the kind words about flying with photoscenery. I'm glad you're enjoying your Arizona and Oahu scnenery. You can certainly add OSM buildings on top of any of our photo scenery, Mario. I have used OSM2XPlane to create buildings for NorCal. Also, there are many screenshots on several flight sim forums of this being done for Oahu as well. You are correct that the default OSM that comes with X-Plane 10 will not render on top of RealScenery, but you can certainly create your own.

California's spectacular Central Valley. Yes, it's flat, but it's incredible to fly over!

A beautiful afternoon flight over the colorful high desert of northeastern California. This image was taken about 100 miles, 160 kilometers, east of Mt. Shasta.

Afternoon flight overlooking the Harry L. Englebright Lake in the steep and rugged Yuba River canyon of the Sierra Nevada foothills. The Englebright dam is in the foreground with Lake Wildwood in the distance to the right.

Morning flight over Comanche Reservoir, northeast of the city of Stockton. This screenshot provides an example of the detailed custom water found in the NorCal scenery.

Flying over the dry, arid landscape southeast of Sacramento.

Hi Manny, To keep this forum mostly just a collection of screenshots, I have answered your question here. Please feel free to continue the discussion in that forum. Thanks!

Hi Manny, My system is very similar to yours. Keep in mind that RealScenery is often more efficient that the default X-Plane scenery, which results in faster framerates. Back in X-Plane version 9, I worked with Laminar to develop load specs for image-based scenery. When you load an area in which RealScenery is installed, only those scenery images within about 20 miles of the aircraft are loaded (I don't recall the exact value we came up with). My understanding is that X-Plane also has some additional processing that determines whether an image is in front of you or behind you in order to make the loading of images more VRAM efficient. The bottom line is that there is a lot of behind-the-scenes processing going on to determine which images to display, and load them into the sim quickly. Another efficiency is that only the images closest to you are loaded at full resolution. Those images many miles away are loaded at a reduced resolution. You may notice this when looking at some of the screenshots. Fortunately, X-Plane doesn't have to do this resampling of the images on the fly. These multiple resolutions are actully built into the image files that RealScenery produces. X-Plane just needs to determine how far away the image is from your location, and which resolution of the image to display. The images far away in the distance have very few pixels compared to those close to you, so many images can be rendered in the sim with very little additional VRAM resources. My system where the NorCal screenshots are taken has the following specs: Intel i5 @ 2.67 GHz 4 GB RAM ATI Radeon HD 5800 series / 1 GB VRAM Windows 7 64 bit Keep in mind, I do not fly the sim with any 3D objects turned on. No forests, roads, buildings, etc. Turning these on, and loading additional custom scenery will certainly impact your framerates, although you will typically still experience better framerates than running these objects with default X-Plane scenery. For best image quality, I fly with X-Plane's Extreme Res setting. Hope this helps!

Hope you don't mind another image of the beach! This one is where the Mad River enters the Pacific Ocean at the town of McKinleyville, north of the city of Arcata.

A mid-morning flight over the city of Shasta Lake, just north of the city of Redding. This flight is overhead of privately owned Tews Field, CA53. Tierra Oaks Golf Club is visible next to the airfield. The interchange below the Cessna is Interstate-5 and California Highway 151.

Thanks Kris!

Just approaching the beach north of the city of Arcata. Little Bulwinkle Creek can be seen flowing through the beach sand and into the Pacific Ocean. U.S. Highway 101 is the main roadway along the beach. Highway 101 a major north–south scenic route along the Pacific coast in the states of Washington, Oregon, and California.

I've been working with Laminar to get some fixes to some scenery creation tools. Laminar was very responsive and helpful in getting me what I needed in order to have the scenery render correctly in version 10. The problem was the edge matching along the seams where the scenery areas come together. These seems were very visible in version 10 - so much so that we couldn't have released the way it was... I've been working in upgrading all the scripts to output the final scenery and bring them up to the standards of our Oahu and Reno scenery. This is now complete and I'm just running the scripts on all of the NorCal scenery areas. As soon as this is done, they will be uploaded to X-Aviation for sale and distribution. It's my intention to keep posting a screenshot every day until release. Hope you area enjoying the images while we wait for all the work to be completed! Eric