1. How Does MegaScenery differ from default FS2004 Scenery?
2. How much hard disk space does MegaScenery use?
3. What kind of frame rate reduction will I experience with MegaScenery?
4. What speed system do I need to run MegaScenery?
5. Tell me more about night scenery?
6. What about bodies of water? Can I land my float plane?
7. Does MegaScenery Also Support AUTOGEN?
8. Will There Be Other MegaScenery Areas Available?
9. Will MegaScenery be available in stores?
10. Who Makes MegaScenery?
11. Does MegaScenery Run With FS2002?
12. What's the Difference Between the "Lite" version and the "Full Kit" version?
13. Is There A Downloadable Version of MegaScenery?
14. Why are some titles on DVD format?
15. What is MegaScenery’s compatibility with other scenery products such as terrain mesh?

How Does MegaScenery differ from default FS2004 Scenery?

Flight Simulator scenery is divided into 3 types, polygonal, texture tiles and autogen. All 3 dimensional buildings in Microsoft flight simulator are polygonal scenery objects. The random trees and buildings you see scattered throughout your Flight Simulator world are autogen objects and are also at the same time polygonal. The cross country textures such as urban textures, farmland and anything else you see on the ground as you fly cross country are repeating texture tiles. These are created and placed by the program based upon the land type. These textures guess at the actual land type and place these generic repeating textures down accordingly. So if you are in a city area, Flight Simulator places repeating urban tiles and so on. Also underneath the textures is DEM (Digital Elevation Model) data also known as terrain mesh. This has the elevation data and these repeating tiles are placed over the DEM so that altitude information is represented in the scenery. Nevertheless the textures are generic and you are not flying over a real representation of that scenery but a very rough approximation.

MegaScenery on the other hand is created from an actual satellite image. Satellite images of the area covered are mosaiced to produce one large satellite image of the area. The scenery is not created "from" the image but instead the actual satellite image is "chopped up" and is "draped" over the Flight Simulator elevation mesh. The image is draped as tiles (just like the flight simulator repeating tiles), but each tile is unique and actually a small photograph of that real world tile. So what you are seeing when you fly over MegaScenery is what you would see from a real aircraft. Because of the high resolution nature of the satellite photograph (5 meters per pixel), very fine detail is noticeable down to individual trees and rooftops and fine crevices in mountain terrain.

To compare some images of Flight Simulator 2004 default scenery and MegaScenery, CLICK HERE.

How much hard disk space does MegaScenery use?

Because each individual tile is unique, MegaScenery takes up more hard disk space than FS2004 default scenery. That's the tradeoff you make for visually spectacular scenery. A general formula to use is each square mile takes up 150 Kb of hard disk space. So if we advertise a title as being 14,000 square miles it will occupy about 2.1 Gigabytes when installed. If you are running low on hard disk space and are running Windows XP, Vista or Win 7, you could always compress the folder, although you may then experience a slight reduction in performance depending upon your processor speed. With 200 Gigabyte hard disks becoming readily available we expect that upcoming PC's will ship with these bigger hard drives and 2.1 Gigabytes is a small amount of disk space relatively speaking nowadays.

What kind of frame rate reduction will I experience with MegaScenery?

The answer in short is.... NONE! In fact the opposite is true. MegaScenery gives you faster framerates than default FS2004 scenery! The reason is that FS2004 default scenery consumes processor power to render vector based objects over the landclass tiles such as roads, rivers, etc. This can consume significant processor power. Since MegaScenery does not need these objects (as they are already part of the scenery image), frame rates are faster. How much faster? Well depending upon the landclass type you are flying over it can be up to 300% faster. In some testing over Palm Springs, MegaScenery was getting over 37 fps while the Palm Springs default scenery was getting around 9 fps with autogen and scenery complexity settings set to normal..

You will experience a slightly slower loading time when you go to a MegaScenery airport since there are thousands of tiles/files to load but when you are actually in the simulator flying over MegaScenery the frame rates are faster than if you were flying over regular FS2004 scenery. FS2004 frame rates are also impacted by other things such as 3D clouds and other scenery detail settings.

What speed system do I need to run MegaScenery?

See the answer to the above question. Generally speaking your simulator will perform just as with default FS2004 scenery. What is of benefit is a higher performance video card since it does need to load each texture into memory as a tile and not as a repeating tile. Of course the latest, fastest video cards such as the ATI Radeon 9800 will give you better performance with higher quality settings, we have found Megascenery to be almost as visually spectacular on even an 8Mb video card. So your hardware needn't hold you back from running MegaScenery if you are already able to run FS2004 satisfactorily.

Tell me more about night scenery?

This is one of the things that sets MegaScenery apart from the other photorealistic scenery that is available for Flight Simulator. MegaScenery has unique and highly realistic night time scenery and other photorealistic scenery doesn't. FS2004 default scenery uses the same technique as for daytime textures which are generic night time textures with no order.

MegaScenery has night time scenery that is generated using a proprietary technique that places lights wherever they are expected to be based on streets, roads and other geo information accurate to within feet. You can see an example of a night shot here. "Yes.... WOW!" MegaScenery adds a new meaning to the term - "sea of lights" which you experience in an aircraft at night. We all know how awe inspiring flying into a city at night can be, as a pilot or as a passenger. MegaScenery recreates that same sense of awe in a spine tingling kind of way. You can fly true "Night VFR" with MegaScenery.
 

What about bodies of water? Can I land my float plane?

This is another feature that sets MegaScenery apart from other photorealistic scenery. Again using a proprietary technique, all bodies of water in the satellite image, are carved out to precision and replaced with water that Flight Simulator recognizes as water. Therefore meaning that you can experience landing your float plane in all bodies of water and at the same time experience Flight Simulator's water effects.

** There is one limitation with FS2002 and that being misalignment with default object placement. When default Flight Simulator 3D objects are displayed over the geographically accurate MegaScenery tiles, it becomes clearly apparent that the location of these default objects are crudely located and not at thei exact geographical locations. While the development team have been able to go in and reposition default FS2004 objects, this procedure is not possible with FS2002. So in FS2002, while MegaScenery will display perfectly, some objects will appear to be misplaced. Again, this is a shortfall in FS2002 and not MegaScenery.