RealScenery

Sorry, is there plane in those pictures? I don't see it!

Another nice shot, Florian. Make sure to use the enclosed sectional chart PDF if you wish to do some "island hopping." Have fun!

Sweeeeet! Is that a photo?! ;D

Awesome screenshots, Morgan. Glad you're enjoying looking out the window. You picked a good plane for sight-seeing, too - low and slow. Thanks for your purchase! Eric

That's about "as real as it gets" Ola. Awesome photo! Hope you're having fun!

Wow! Not sure which I like better; the plane or the terrain! Well done. Hope you and Theo are having fun with it!

Awesome, Ola. ;D Can't believe how fast you're putting that together... Look forward to seeing more.

Thanks everyone for the nice comments. I'm glad that everyone really likes the scenery. It is truly an amazing experience. I fired it up again this morning - you never get tired of it! Let me address some questions that have come up... The installer is a great feature of the scenery, but you can certainly manage the folders on your own if you're familiar with the directory structure of custom scenery packages. There is a user guide included with the scenery if you wish to manage these folders on your own. I would strongly suggest using the installer when you first get the scenery so you are certain everything is installed correctly. Once you are up and running and are familiar with the folder structure of the scenery, you can certainly manage this on your own. For this release, the water does not have the physics of the X-Plane water. You can certainly land on the water, but it will will behave as a hard surface. The new tower looks awesome, Ola. We all will look forward to see this scenery develop. Good luck finding some reference photos. I know those can be difficult, but I'm sure they are out there. *********** For those of you that want more of this type of scenery, all future development will be of this same quality. If you want more now, checkout Reno / Carson City, Nevada. Same quality and an even larger area in which to fly! For those that have purchased, if you get the chance, please leave a review on the X-Aviation Oahu page here. I'm sure others would enjoy seeing your comments.

There is a lot to take in. While it is an island, Oahu is over 600 sq. mi. / 1500 sq. mi. It will take a while to fly around the island perimeter. I have many hours flying around this island and always see something new. Oahu is the most populated of the islands so there are lots of developed areas to explore in addition to the incredible natural features. Make sure to explore the islands two parallel mountain ranges, too; the Waianae range in the west and Koolau range in the east.

The Island of Oahu is the second in the new RealScenery Enhanced series. Full screenshot gallery can be viewed here This release features all of the following enhancements for an incredibly immersive experience.

Enjoy Rush! I think you'll really enjoy this scenery in paradise. Aloha!

Looks like you have a fun new friend there, Steven!

Landing has been delayed until 2:20 local (21:20 GMT). Takeoff was great! You can catch the videos later at http://www.newairplane.com/747/incredible/

Even if you miss the live stream, you can still watch online afterward. All the 747-8 videos are available at the above website.

The live webcast of the takeoff showed the 747-8 takeoff from Payne Field in Everett, Washington this morning at 10:00 am (17:00 GMT). The landing will be streamed live when the plane lands at Boeing Field in Seattle, Washington, about four hours after takeoff on today's first test flight. The landing can be watched live at http://www.newairplane.com/747/incredible/ The live webcast is scheduled for 14:00 local time in Seattle (21:00 GMT) Video of both events will be available on the web site for later viewing. Enjoy!

Hey Rush, Told ya ILS approaches were the way to go... http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=533.msg14618#msg14618 What scenery is that?

Very cool Simon - Love the graffiti on some of the buildings. Is the American flag animated? I couldn't quite tell in the video, but is almost looked like it was moving... That scenery will be a nice addition to NorCal - definitely a destination airport!

Hand me that bag in the seat pocket, please!

Thanks, Simon. I thought the delivery system might be a disappointment for many - having to wait for DVDs and not developing a system to handle the downloads. That is one of the main reasons I distribute with X-Aviation. I have only seen a few screenshots, so I'm looking forward to your review. I believe these are aerial photographs and not satellite imagery. The former being very difficult to have consistent image quality over a larger area. However, I'm sure this 1m scenery is still a big hit with X-Plane pilots in the U.K. and elsewhere.

All the distribution details have been developed by X-Aviation, so that is a huge step forward... This release will be a bit different to deliver since you can get everything, or only selected areas. It's very large in byte-size, too, which has made the development of a brand new distribution/installation system critical to allowing delivery by download. This scenery covers a larger area than the new U.K scenery, uses much more recent imagery, includes night textures, and will be available for download - no easy task to put all this together. I'm not disparaging this scenery at all. I was disappointed in the lack of a better delivery system, however. Any high-quality photo scenery is welcome in our X-Plane community and will be greatly appreciated by many X-Plane pilots. I'm sure the X-Planers in the U.K. are very appreciative for its development! Personally, I think it's great when any large-area photo scenery packages are released. I certainly can relate what these folks went through to get this developed. One huge advantage of X-Aviation for me is the resources spent on getting products delivered to customers in the most efficient way possible, especially large scenery packages which are several gigabytes in size! With the size of this release, I would highly advise getting the DVDs as both backup and convenience for re-installing later if necessary. I believe the Island of Oahu, Hawaii will be delivered first, however, with NorCal soon thereafter. Eric

Fixed! Thank you, sir!

Many of the RealScenery forum discussions have discussed image quality. Below is a brief, but pretty complete, overview of why you sometimes see a lot of quality differences in imagery in online mapping sites and the challenges when working with imagery covering a large area. As envious as I am of the fine aircraft developers here, creating scenery is a whole different animal. I can't start with a blank canvas in a 3D program or Photoshop and start painting a picture of the landscape. I have to start with something (imagery) and then see how to best enhance it for X-Plane. There are two types of imagery: 1. Aerial photography 2. Satellite imagery Like most things, there are advantages/disadvantages to each. Aerial photography is flown with specially outfitted aircraft that have that as their sole mission in life; to take pictures. My flight instructor flew a King Air for a state transportation department that was designed for taking aerial photos. Here in the USA, much of this imagery is available at low cost, however, the tradeoff is that the imagery is much more difficult to obtain over a large area that offers consistent quality. Satellite imagery has the benefit of having tonal consistency over a broader area, but is very expensive to license. The cost of NorCal licensed from one of these vendors would be well over $100,000USD. However, even an area as large as NorCal would essentially be a "patchwork" of imagery, even from a satellite vendor. There are many factors that affect the quality of the aerial photography. Imagine an airplane flying back and forth across an area (called "flightlines") capturing images. As the day goes on... ...the sun angle changes. ...clouds can appear causing shadows (or sometimes even appear in the imagery!) ...middle and high level clouds can cause widespread changes in image quality compared to direct sunlight. ...changes in humidity/smoke can add to more/less scattering of blue light in the atmosphere, causing coloration changes, sometimes significant. Seasonal differences and rainfall also contribute to vegetation differences in imagery, both aerial and satellite, if an image's neighboring images are taken months apart. Now imagine covering an area as large as northern California (this package really covers 2/3 of the state). You can't possibly fly this area in one day capturing all of the imagery. Even if you had several aircraft, you would have different weather conditions over the area which would make the imagery from one aircraft not necessarily match seamlessly with the imagery from another aircraft, especially if the flightlines were flown several hours apart in time. Even satellite imagery from the major online mapping sites covering NorCal is a total patchwork of images. Not all areas are being continuously captured. Most imagery is captured based on a specific order from a government agency or private company. This is especially true for aerial photography. Since much of this imagery is only acquired "on demand," imagine creating a seamless set of imagery for an area as large as a state! As you can imagine, it is very difficult to do. The bottom line is that imagery covering a large area, whether satellite or aerial photography, is typically made up of many different image sources covering different times, sometimes even different seasons and different years! The NorCal scenery for X-Plane is no different. However, I've spent a lot of time making it as consistent as possible. What you see in the NorCal gallery is representative of the image quality throughout the entire NorCal area. I think I can say with a good degree of confidence that this is probably one of the most consistent set of images covering northern California that exists today, especially from aerial photographs. Now that's only one factor - the source imagery. The other major factor affecting your perception of the images is your computer's video hardware including your video card and your monitor. I use two machines in my scenery production and they have different monitors and video cards, which, of course, render the images differently, as well as all of my other software. How about X-Plane? I mentioned above the difference in sun angle and time of day. X-Plane also does this, as we all know. Hold down the "K" or "L" keys and watch what happens as the day goes by in just a few seconds. If you have clouds, notice what happens to the imagery in the shadows versus sunlight. X-Plane will render most scenery bright and washed out at high-noon. X-Plane will render scenery textures best at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. X-Plane now has the ability to change gamma. I design scenery with the gamma setting of 2.5. A lower gamma will make the images look more saturated, but overall, the sim will be darker. You'll have to experiment with the gamma to get the best balance of image quality, and aircraft rendering quality. You may also consider adjusting your monitor for the best X-Plane experience. Just for fun, I picked an area in Google Maps and Bing Maps and compared it to the imagery I have acquired for this RealScenery release. I think you may be surprised at what you see here. Keep in mind these are small-scale images to give you an idea of the quality differences over a larger area. The actual images used in this release are much higher resolution than you see here. Look at the gallery link posted earlier to see the actual detail you will see in X-Plane. This is for an area north of San Francisco in the Napa Valley, home to California's famous wine country. Overall, I think you'll find this scenery is spectacular, as I've tried to show with the examples in the gallery. Like all scenery, it's much nicer "in sim" than any still screenshot can portray. Enjoy! Bing Maps Google Maps RealScenery source image Keep in mind, this source image above is shown at a much lower resolution than was actually used in NorCal in order to show a large area. Also, this image is our starting point, not a processed, finished image. Eric

Hi Bob, Glad to see you got your image registered. I wrote a WED tutorial posted here. You can glance through that and see if it helps. I have hand edited nearly 400+ airports for the upcoming release of the Northern California scenery package so they all match the underlying imagery - same for Oahu and Reno scenery packages. I can PM you and discuss or we can keep it here for others to learn as well. Eric

Just noticed that this group will be creating new X-Plane scenery: http://www.vfrpoland.com/

I can also vouch for Goran saying that the price will be very fair. All of the X-Aviation developers believe strongly in giving our customers incredible value for price, period. The decision as to the price-point of all X-Aviation products is not taken lightly. The Saab will be no exception!