Megascenery Earth

Not much flying time the last few days. Still stuck in Madison, but I decided to download and try out some scenery from megasceneryearth.com The default scenery in FSX is generated from a set of standard ground textures, and looks OK I guess. Probably better at higher video settings, but the folks at Megascenery Earth are working on downloadable aerial imagery that can be used in FSX in place of the default scenery. At this point they have Washington State and California done, plus most of Utah, some of Colorado, the area around New Orleans, some parts of New England (Long Island, etc.), most of the way around Lake Michigan, south Florida, and an odd little section on the North Carolina/South Carolina border. Eventually the plan to cover the whole US and then the whole world.

While the western states no doubt have more dramatic scenery, I wanted to fly over something familiar, so I downloaded four tiles along the east coast of Florida, from Daytona Beach down to about West Palm. My in-laws live in Titusville, near the Kennedy Space Center, so I figured I could try to find their house. The imagery is billed as 1 pixel = 1.19 meters, which aught to be excellent. Each tile is $7.49, but the more you buy the cheaper they get, plus I took advantage of a promotion, so I got the four Florida tiles, plus a freebie from Washington for about $20.

I switched by to the Cessna and took off from the Shuttle landing facility. Actually, I did a short flight without the scenery and took some screenshots from that for the "before" views. Here's a shot of the Shuttle Landing Facility runway with normal scenery:

I then loaded the scenery, and tried to fly roughly the same flight path for the "after" shots, but I mostly failed at that. I'll have to get a lot better at precision flying to do any more before/after photography. I did get an "after" shot of the same runway, but from a lower altitude and slightly different angle. Also, installing the MegaScenery made other changes to the display settings, like turning on more 3D tree objects and such, so it's not really a fair comparison:

I did manage to find the golf course where my in-laws live, but not their house. The imagery is nice, but to really appreciate the detail you have to fly low, and when you fly low, the illusion is broken when it becomes obvious that you're looking at 2-dimensional photography painted on the ground and not actually 3D houses. I think if you were using this for the Grand Canyon, or mountains out west, it might work better, or trick your brain better, than for flying over cities. Alternately, at higher altitudes it would probably still be better than the default scenery, but then you can get lower resolution aerial imagery for a lot cheaper and it should still look fine at high altitude.