Preparing for the release of the first MegaSceneryEarth 4X

We know that you have been waiting for further new on the new MegaSceneryEarth 4X series we first announced back in June this year.

The MegaScenery 4X series is going to be the first ever venture of such magnitude where we will bring you the entire USA, for FSX, FSX:SE and P3D as seamlessly as possible in between states, in an incredible ultra high resolution of 60 cm per pixel. This is a gargantuan project that takes a heck of a lot of time and resources and a heck of a lot of image processing. The first title, just one state, involved 50 terabytes of data being processed to output the final product.

So we haven't forgotten about you. We have been steadily working away in the background producing our first title and we expect to release this first title in the first week of October.

The first state that will be available is a stunning recreation of the state of New Mexico. It is 121,500 square miles of the most gorgeous flight sim photoscenery that you will ever fly. The coloring is perfect using our PerfectColor image processing and the clarity and resolution is simply outstanding. 60 centimeter resolution lets you fly down to as low as a few hundred feet and still have great clarity in terms of resolution.

We are sure that you have questions and we will try to answer what we expect to be the most common questions.

Pricing

You are going to love this! Pricing will not go up a single penny. We will be maintaining the same pricing structure as the V3 series. So if a state was $39.95 in V3, it will be $39.95 in V4X. All V3 titles will actually go down in price by around 25%. So if a V3 title was $39.95, it will go down to $29.95.

Data Size

Here's the thing... the resolution of the V4X UltraRes scenery is 4 times the resolution as the V3 scenery. This unfortunately means a huge data set for each state. 4 times the amount of data actually. We get that it is big and that amount of data isn't for everyone. We know it will limit our market, but that is the size of the scenery and the nature of photoscenery. Each 60 cm of land is a unique pixel. So 121,500 square miles at a unique pixel for each 60 cm turns out to be 210 Gb. We cannot change that. We have however considered that not all users will want 60 cm and will simply want the latest imagery at 1.2 meters so for each title, we will also be providing a 1.2 meter version at a lower price. The 60 cm scenery is going to be called UltraRes and the 1.2 meter version is going to be called HighRes. The 1.2 meter version will be at the lower $29.95.

We expect the entire USA when complete will occupy around 7 Tb of data. It's a lot we know but you can easily install and run this scenery from a portable USB drive. These are cheap these days with a 4 Tb drive running around $100. As your data purchases accumulate towards the entire USA you will only ever need two of these drives to store and run your entire USA from. Of course if you have larger 8Tb or larger internal hard drives already in your system you won't have any issues.

Ordering Options

As per the above paragraph you will be able to order the UltraRes option or the High Res option. UltraRes will give you 60 cm highest resolution data for just a little more than the HighRes 1.2 meter data.

We will no longer provide a DVD Media option since a title such as New Mexico will be 50 DVD's. We don't think anyone wants to deal with 50 DVDs to install a title and we don't want to have to deal with trying to master 50 DVDs. It just isn't going to work. We will however offer the Flash drive option. New Mexico for example will be optionally delivered on a 256 Gb flash drive for the cost of the drive and mastering time. We expect these to run around $40.

We ultimately expect most customers to stick with the download only option. Our new installation system handles all of the downloading for you in the background along with resume and pause and bandwdith management options. You can even fly while your scenery is downloading in the background.

When is it coming again?

Expect MegaSceneryEarth 4X - New Mexico to be released on or before 7 October. We will let you know when it is released. It's almost all ready to go now. We are just putting some final touches.

So what does it look like?

Ok, here is a couple of screenshots from New Mexico. These are taking with about a 7.5 LOD Radius. You can display the highest resolution tiles much further into the distance with higher LOD Radius settings.