Introduction
Comparison Screenshots
Performance Items

The original MegaScenery series for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 was a remarkable advance in photoscenery realism and size for Flight Sim pilots. Using a combination of satellite imagery, which was sourced at 30 meters per pixel and sampled up to 4.75 meters per pixel and aerial photography, which was sourced at 1 foot per pixel and sampled down to 4.75 meters per pixel we were able to deliver some pretty realistic looking scenery for Flight Simulator 2004. The limitation however was 4.75meters per pixel - fine for higher altitude flying but when you got low it got pretty blurry. On top of that were the limitations of the scenery file format which consisted of (up to) hundreds of thousands of 43Kb bitmaps. This resulted in many performance issues - especially when hard drives were far from optimized. It was, however, as good as the technology would allow.

The New Microsoft Flight Simulator X now supports a much higher level of resolution - as little as 7 inches per pixel. This allows for some amazing scenery realism! What is not practical in this circumstance is the amount of hard drive space that 7 inches per pixel scenery would take up.

So a happy medium that has been adopted is 1.19 meter per pixel. And that's the level of resolution that the new MegaSceneryX scenery will adopt. It is created from created from source aerial photo imagery of 1 foot per pixel sampled down to 1.19 meter per pixel.

What that means for you is scenery that's 16 times the resolution of the original MegaScenery and due to new compression techniques for only 5 times the additional hard drive space.

16 times the resolution gives you new generation scenery with a profound additional level of clarity and realism. The result is eye candy beyond your wildest dreams and from a practical point of view enabling you to enjoy a higher level of scenery realism - at both high altitude and low altitude - and especially landings where land features remain remarkably clear almost all the way down to touchdown.

The first MegaSceneryX title to be released is MegaSceneryX - Hawaii which covers Honolulu and the island of Oahu. We've got a lot of titles planned with the next 3 titles (in no particular order) being New York, Phoenix, and Southern California. Many other areas are on the planning table.

These comparison screenshots of MegaSceneryX Hawaii reveal you the clear differences between Default FSX Scenery, MegaScenery for FS2004 and the new MegaSceneryX for FSX.

Simply click on each thumbnail for an expanded view of each screenshot. Left Column is MegaSceneryX, center is MegaScenery for FS2004 and right column is FSX default scenery.

MegaSceneryX Created From 1 foot per pixel aerial photos resampled to 1 meter per pixel	MegaScenery For FS2004 Created From 1 foot per pixel aerial photos resampled to 5 meters per pixel	Default FSX Scenery Still only offers generic "landclass" textures albeit clearer than previous
Golf Courses You can now clearly see level down to shrubs and sandtraps clearly discernable. Note the actual traffic that was on the road at the time the image was captured.
Suburbia (Top Down View)
Suburbia (Out The Cockpit) Virtually everything is clearly identifiable at 3500 feet. Streets, houses, cars...
Highways and Interchanges These simply look spectacular and provide great landmark references for visual navigation. Note the parking lot at the ballpark. There's a game on today.
Mountain Flying There's nothing more spectacular in MegaScenery than mountain flying. The difference now is that trees are uniquely identifiable.
Going Rural The detail in rural areas is amazing. How real is this?
Landing Even down at 1500 feet detail is very clear giving you those ground references that help you with your landings.
Landing 500 feet!
Another Landing
NightScene We've further improved NightScene for the most realistic looking night scenery you'll ever fly.
One More... To whet the appetite and illustrate the clear differences between MegaSceneryX, MegaScenery for FS2004 and FSX Default Scenery. Finally scenery graphics are at the level of realism you've only dreamed about!

Performance Items
The new Flight Simulator X does have some pretty demanding system requirements in order to enjoy good performance. If your system comfortably handles FSX then it will comfortably handle MegaSceneryX.

Frame Rates and Loading Times.

In FS2004, MegaScenery, while it took longer to load than default scenery when commencing a flight, frame rates were faster than default FS2004 scenery.

In MegaSceneryX - frame rates remain the same but what is very welcome is the fact that load times are the same as for default scenery.

Drive Space

In MegaScenery For FS2004, a lot of files were installed into your hard drive. In some of the bigger titles such as Pacific Northwest - over 300,000 bitmap files that make up the scenery were installed onto your hard drive.

In MegaSceneryX the change in scenery file format which incorporates larger texture bitmaps into each BGL file means far far less files installed onto your drive. The lesser number of files contributes to the faster loading time of the scenery.

Due to the 16X factor in resolution, more hard drive space is required. However due to better compression techniques, hard drive space required for an equivalent area only increases by a factor of 5.