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Shhh! Don't tell anyone... MSE 2.0 England/Wales


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MH Exclusive info...

 

I just finished downloading MSE 2.0 England and Wales (the revision).

Boss wants screenshots for a possible release early next week.

 

But you didn't hear it from me! :)

 

Might have something visual to share over the weekend...

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Just finished a few flights...  Here's some initial screens as promised.  

MH Exclusive info...   I just finished downloading MSE 2.0 England and Wales (the revision). Boss wants screenshots for a possible release early next week.   But you didn't hear it from me!  

Good point Chris. I did a flight by pure VFR last night with the England and Wales Scenery. There was more than enough VFR reference points without having to look for smaller lakes etc. The larger la

Haha Chris, it was a joke, I think Jay knows me and Chris too well that we'll pick it up anyway ;)

But I don't mind reviewing it if necessary, GenX is kind of showing its age now :(

Did the water masks get updated ok Dean? :D

Cheers K

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oh no I am at work and the frickin company firewall is blocking the images!!! Now I have to wait until I get home to view these - damn you work!!

Don't worry, you're not interested remember? ;)

Lol very true - I just looked at them at home - not impressed ;) I think I need a trial version of the full product just to make sure hehe!

Seriously though they look fantastic very clear - great work guys!

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How high were you when you took those shots, Dean? Can you maybe get down to 1000 feet above the ground? That will give me a better idea of the quality of the textures when compared to PlayHorizon GenX. By the way (and apologies if I have asked these questions before)......is this photoscenery compatible with ES Treescapes, and does it include detailed water masks? Oh, and is Aerosoft's VFR London X compatible with it? In other words, do the buildings match the ground image?

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How high were you when you took those shots, Dean? Can you maybe get down to 1000 feet above the ground? That will give me a better idea of the quality of the textures when compared to PlayHorizon GenX. By the way (and apologies if I have asked these questions before)......is this photoscenery compatible with ES Treescapes, and does it include detailed water masks? Oh, and is Aerosoft's VFR London X compatible with it? In other words, do the buildings match the ground image?

 

Chris, most shots from 1200-3000 ft AGL in general. The quality of the source imagery is better than horizon etc. I think they used 1m/pixel source. This is 50cm/pixel source. Although that 50cm/pix source is resampled to 1m/pix for FSX (so as to not balloon out massively on file size for the package) there is still a lot more detail than the horizon source imagery. 

 

Compatible with ES Treescapes - should be! Photoscenery is pretty much compatible with most other add-ons (apart from other photoscenery covering the same area).

 

Detailed water masks... No. The original version we were going to release did have water masks, but this release version will not have them. The original watermask and discrepency between the accuracy of the underlying default FSX landmass/textures caused far too many issues in this case. So, it was decided to remove the watermasks from this England/Wales release. You will still note in some coastal areas/rivers there is a little bleedthrough of default landmass, but far less than the watermasked original release. I hope I have explained that fairly well (I am not the developer and don't have the same development knowledge).

 

Aerosoft London VFR X compatible. The objects should appear over the MSE phototextures yes. As for alignment, if Aerosoft used the same source data for positioning as the MSE phototextures, they should line up. If they didn't or we used a different placement, then they might not. I'd have to try that combination out to give a definitive answer.

 

Also, please note that since a single, consistent aerial image of 50cm/pixel source can't be found for the whole of England/Wales, this release, like some others in the MSE range will have drawn textures from many sources to provide that full country 50cm/pixel coverage. Expect some colour variations in patches across the country. This is standard-fare for photoscenery on massive scales like MSE offers. This is covered in the MSE manual and user guide in more detail. Existing MSE customers will know what I am talking about here. We do have a lot of US states which are lucky enough to have great and consistent source data throughout, but others have to be made up of a collage of individual areas. We place a higher emphasis on obtaining the higher-resolution 50cm/pixel source data to produce the scenery, and to get this for the whole of England and Wales (and other parts of the world), we have to pull it together for many different sources.

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Have to say I'm a little disappointed on two counts Dean, firstly (may be wrong here) didn't you say in an earlier thread somewhere that it would be 50cm/pix (actually 60/pix at this latitude) resolution? I was rather looking forward to a resolution improvement over GenX but if it's the same 1m (1.2m really) then even re sampled from 50cm there won't be much improvement. Secondly the water masking. This is the clincher for me and prob means I'll pass on the product completely. I know I will find default textures showing through anywhere to be an immersion killer :( I've done my own photoscenery so I know it's not technically too difficult to do. Yes the scale of the English coastline means it's some not inconsiderable work, but IMHO I'd rather it be done right and cost more than pushed out in a half hearted manner.

Sorry :( Feeling a bit grumpy now :P

Cheers K

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Kevin,

 

The watermasking is going to be an individual thing I guess. Personally I don't plan to land on water so I find the non-bleedthrough of default textures and the real colouring of rivers etc with non-watermasked photoreal textures to be far more realistic and immersive, for me. I understand there is going to be opposition, on both sides there. It is not my decision whether to watermask or not unfortunately. I am more the "messenger" in this case. I can say that the original watermasked version I looked at did look very bad in many places. There were a lot of problems, which is why I suggested it to go back and get changed. 

 

Re the resolution. Yes it is 50cm/pixel source. There is actually a big difference between 50cm/pixel source compressed/resampled to 1m/pixel and 1m/pixel source displayed at 1m/pixel. The higher res source resampled still carries much more detail in the textures. This has been the same for all the MSE 2.0 products to date... Only the Ultra-Res Cities remain at the native 50cm/pixel source in the sim (and obviously have much larger filesizes for the relative coverage area). 

 

Hope that provides some more info at least for you Kevin? :)

 

Also please note that the posted screenshots are compressed themselves to JPG 80 quality to reduce filesize for readers, so the actual scenery quality will be a level or two better/sharper in the actual sim.

 

I don't have/use the Horizon stuff. I have seen screenshots in the past, but if you have some comparable shots from the Horizon scenery, I'd be interested in taking a look. For the ones I have seen on the internet (via a basic image search), MSE textures do show a few degrees more of detail (to my eyes at least).

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As a non-photo scenery kind of simmer I must say this looked very good (but I think I'll stick with my ORBX-scenery for now though).

 

As Joe said the colors are great, with very nice saturation. The photo scenery I've tried previously tend to have a more washed out feel to it. Are you using any HDR plug-in for the shots, or is this the "out-of the box" look?

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