RealScenery

Here's an interesting photo album with descriptions of how the six A380 carriers have configured their cabins. Great pictures, too. http://www.latimes.com/travel/deals/la-trb-comparing-airbus-a380-photos,0,7651978.photogallery

These images are processed into the terrain just as the land-based images. However, like the other water areas, these have real water physics so you can land your amphibious plane in the ocean if you wish. These replace the water in the ocean only and are not animated. However, I think you really get the feeling of flying out over open water with these ocean textures.

Funny, most people complain that the screenshots are from too high an altitude, even though most are from 3000 - 4000 ft. These were taken from 10,000 ft.

Lots more work on the ocean/coastal areas this week. Some refined techniques also developed - but of course, that requires that you go back an redo what you've previously done! I feel confident that the road ahead should be much faster now because of some new techniques and scripts that have been developed. Some additional work was also done refining the ocean textures to make them look a bit more translucent. Another nice flight along the coast. These pics were taken off of Arcata, California, looking south. The airport is KACV, Arcata. Enjoy!

The NorCal scenery hit a big snag the past couple of weeks since my last update... The ocean in the imagery was only available in a very small area of the north coast, which is typical of much imagery. Vendors typically clip the images right offshore and/or blur the areas. You'll also notice this in many areas in which coastal imagery is displayed in online mapping services. Even where ocean imagery was available, there were many annoying quality issues such as bright sun reflections and very washed-out colors. So...I've been working to create a nice set of seamless ocean textures for use offshore. These textures are really incredible in-sim and nearly seam translucent in many areas, especially with the differing sun angles in-sim. These textures are seamless so you don't notice repeating wave patterns - just beautiful mid-latitude Pacific Ocean that is typical for the northern California coastal areas. In many ways, even though these are synthetic ocean textures, they are much more enjoyable to fly over in-sim because there are no lighting/coloration artifacts. You will also have the ocean textures extend well offshore, much farther than normal visibility, for a consistent ocean view as you're flying along the beach. Hope you enjoy these first images.

Just a quick update. The water, whether X-Plane-generated or image-based will have water physics. This means that you can land out in the ocean as shown in these screenshots and really get wet!

Hi Julien, Like any photo-based scenery, you will have more clarity at higher altitudes. The RealScenery Enhanced packages are designed for lower altitude flying. Currently the scenery available in the Enhanced series includes Reno/Carson City and Island of Oahu. Northern California will be very similar when it is released later this year. If you're outside the aircraft looking straight down, these look great at lower altitudes, around 1500-2000 feet. If your looking out the windscreen from in the cockpit, you can be even lower because the scenery you're viewing is in the distance and not directly below. All of the galleries are designed to give you a good idea how the scenery looks in sim. You should be able to judge the altitude above ground level and see if the clarity of the scenery meets your needs for the type of flying you wish to do. Make sure to check out the galleries at both RealScenery.com and X-Aviation.com. They present a different set of images and should give you a representative idea of each scenery area. Also check out the X-Pilot forums for more screenshots and discussions. As to which one to buy, that's a tough question. My personal favorite is Reno/Carson City, but Oahu is the best selling scenery. Reno covers a much larger area; one degree lon/lat. The terrain is totally different, high desert versus sub-tropical. We specialize in image-based scenery only, however, the scenery fully supports adding buildings and other 3D objects as desired.

I'm aiming for real water physics as you pass the beach and enter the water.

Lots of progress made in the short time since the last update! All of the processing tech is now developed to handle the oceans, with some further enhancements made over the Oahu scenery, which many people commented that they really liked.

Time for another update. Made huge progress over the past couple of weeks since the last update. I'm now working on the coastal areas and the ocean/beaches.

Glad that worked out, Bob! Just so you and others know, you can rename the folders that are in your Custom Scenery folder, however you don't want to go into any of those scenery folders unless you know specifically what you're doing, or you will create a load of problems... In fact, a technique I use, is to have multiple "Custom scenery" folders. For example, I have: Custom scenery Custom scenery_Oahu Custom scenery_Reno Custom scenery_Norcal You can then just rename the folder you wish to use to "Custom scenery" when you're ready to use it. This may help if you have tons of scenery and wish to organize it a bit. However, there is no problem with having all of your scenery loaded into the Custom scenery folder. This is the only one that X-Plane will see, so you can create other folders as needed for organizational purposes. Hope this helps! Eric

Another NorCal update for all of you that are anxiously awaiting this release... Everything is in place now to develop each of the NorCal scenery areas up to the standards of the new Enhanced scenery. Five scenery areas are now complete. (See the first post in this topic for a map of the scenery areas.) You can't believe what a difference the custom elevation and hand digitized water add to the in-sim experience! The airport smoothing of the elevation data is rock solid so far, too. For those of you that are more GIS data savvy, yes, I could use shorelines that are already available from a variety of sources. However, even the highest resolution data doesn't exactly match the underlying scenery as closely as I'd like. Depending when the imagery was acquired, the shoreline location of many lakes and reservoirs varies with year and season. The water for NorCal is all hand created, matching the underlying imagery in the scenery. In addition, I can control what becomes X-Plane water and what remains as natural water shown in the imagery. There are many smaller water features that have beautiful coloration in the imagery. Many of these features will be retained as they add a lot to the flying realism. This is really the biggest time draw for me now... As an example, I spent several hours just on Shasta Lake, the largest lake in Northern California. It has close to 20,000 vertices as well as several islands! The good news, aside from being done completely with five areas, is that all other aspects of the scenery creation are automated, thus requiring little manual labor from me. That's one of the biggest reasons for the timing of this project; making all of the tech to produce the scenery. Like all the aircraft devs at X-Aviation, the new tech just makes things easier, and much faster, from here on out. Eric

Hi Bob, Scenery packages have a priority order, defined by their file name alphabetically. Usually, you can get scenery package "conflicts" resolved by renaming the top-level folders (those immediately under your custom scenery folder). You might also take a look at this program: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=1668.msg14958#msg14958 Good luck. Let us know how it goes...

Thanks for the suggestion, Bob - always glad to hear of new ideas from customers! A lot of the decisions for new scenery come down to demand and availability/quality of imagery. Eric

Hi Bob, As far as I know, it should be fully compatible. The Boeing Country scenery should sit on top of RealScenery. Let us know if you have any issues and we'll help you work it out. Perhaps another X-Pilot member has both packages and can say how things worked out for them... I don't see any issues, though.

Hi dpais, With the quality of both Oahu and Reno RealScenery Enhanced releases, I wanted to go back and bring NorCal up to similar standards. Over the past several months, I have been working on automated techniques for processing custom elevation data and airport flattening/smoothing. In addition, a lot of custom programming has been done to automate much of the work that was previously done by hand for Oahu and Reno. Hundreds of hours have been invested in developing the technology to carry scenery development forward with the products after NorCal is complete and released. NorCal is just too big of geography to do things by hand! The great news is that these very time-consuming steps are now done and the first scenery area was put through the whole set of routines, start to finish, yesterday with great results! The only time-consuming part that has to be done by hand is the digitizing of the custom hydrography for each scenery area. I’m estimating late summer/ early fall (northern hemisphere) for release. I’ll post status reports here as the scenery gets closer to release, including estimated file sizes. These sizes won't be known until the full product is packaged and ready to go, but certainly "tens of gigabytes" will be in the final deliverable. Thanks for your interest and to everyone for their patience! This product has been redone two times previously and is now undergoing a major quality upgrade to be like Oahu and Reno. Using the default X-Plane elevation and hydrography would have been a major disappointment as they are very poor quality compared to the enhanced version that is being developed now. Eric

Hi Scott, Your previous screenshot shows a lot of missing imagery, which most likely are the zero file size DDS files. Everywhere you see the gray terrain you should also have imagery. Don't worry about X-Plane complaining about missing scenery. X-Plane looks for surrounding scenery areas and lets you know if it doesn't find any. This is normal and has nothing to do with your Reno scenery. Lots of Mac customers have successfully installed Reno without issue. Hopefully, the downloaded data and installer will work for you as it handles the unzipping and permissions for automatically. Eric

Hi Scott, Installation issues are handled by X-Aviation. I have sent an email to them on your behalf. You should be hearing from them soon. Thank you. Eric

Thanks, dhigginb! Glad you enjoy the scenery. Doing touch-and-gos at Dillingham on the far NW tip of the island is an awesome experience in the sim! Doing some island-hopping in regional airlines is pretty cool, too, especially coming into Oahu from the other islands. Have fun!

Thanks Scott, We try very hard to have excellent support. Thanks for your purchase! We appreciate your business and your interest in RealScenery. Eric

Hi Scott, X-Aviation is usually very fast at responding to support questions; usually within a few minutes. Please make sure your email is set to accept messages sent to you from X-Aviation. You might check your junk email folder to make sure their email wasn't flagged as junk. I have sent an email to them as well so you should hear from them soon, either via email or this forum. Eric

Some very nice screenshots have been posted of the Oahu scenery by a RealScenery customer. These are great pics! screenshot 1 screenshot 2 screenshot 3 screenshot 4

Hey Joe - Thanks for the nice comments. It is really amazing what high quality scenery coupled with a high quality plane can do to the simulator user experience. Your suggestions on scenery areas have been noted as well. If you want more like Oahu, Reno is the same quality (I actually like flying around the Reno area better) and it also covers a larger area. Have fun! Eric

Hi Ola, I am away traveling for a few days, but I will check this out. This is certainly something we can release as an up coming maintenance release. The difference comes in the higher resolution elevation data that was used for Oahu. Glad to hear you're working on airport/heliport scenery/buildings. That should really make Oahu jump to life even more! The shots of your PHNL objects look great! Look forward to seeing your final product! Eric