Megascenery Earth - Colorado

This product is developed by Megascenery. Sales information and acquisition of the product may be attained here.

TEST FLIGHT CONDITIONS

KAPA - VFR North along I-25 to I-70, then West to KEGE for a low pass, then to KASE to land at Aspen.

ActiveSky X was used for real world live weather during this review.

INSTALLATION

In the case of MSE Colorado, you download the tile you purchased (in this case I purchased all 15 tiles) and install them one at a time. No online activation is necessary and thus you simply run the installer, choose your location, and then wait for the files to install. At the end of the install, a new dialog will give you the option to adjust the settings of your FSX.CFG for performance. It is interesting to note that no matter if you check or uncheck that box; it still adjusts your settings, according to the progress screen which follows. For the sake of performance, I chose to let it adjust my settings and it seems to perform nicely in FSX, but on the following installers I chose NOT to adjust the settings and it still stated it did the adjustment. It would be nice if the installer instead did an "x" instead of a check mark to reassure the customer that their choice not to adjust the settings has been honored.

SCENERY

Well, where should I start? I suppose it will be simple enough to take you on my short test flight from KAPA to KEGE then on to KASE. Right after takeoff was my first disappointment. After seeing the misaligned taxiway I went to other airports to check for alignment. Most of the GA airports had no effort by the developer to be aligned in this product. KAPA, fortunately, at least got lucky in that the runways were in the right spot, although the taxiways were not. Smaller airports in the mountains weren't even touched for alignment purposes. I did visit KDEN and it appeared some effort was made there, only because of it being such a major airport that the developer knew people would fuss if it was not aligned.

Another disappointment here was that the developer made no effort to place any form of flatten into any of the airports. Even at KDEN I would be taxiing or taking off and the runway would disappear under portions of the terrain. This completely ruins the visual experience when close to an airport and doing operations around that airport.

The next major disappointment, which was the worst for me in this product, was the water class. If the MSE team wanted to include water class with this product, it would have made more sense to either do it completely or not at all. If they wanted to do it only halfway, they should have at least made the files separate - or include a configuration utility - so that the customer has an option to have the poor water included. As you can see from the next screenshot, default FSX terrain seems to "phase" in and out of the photo scenery, giving a very cruddy look to it. Just take a look at the shot below. It is like this in the entire coverage of this product.

I can also verify this was NOT a result of a scenery conflict, because MSE is the ONLY third party scenery installed into FSX at the time of this review. However, before I had to reinstall FSX, I had tried MSE Colorado with Ultimate Terrain USA installed, and had the exact same result. I posted saw in the MSE forums that others encountered this, and some answers stated that this was due to "poor water mapping by Microsoft" and "poor water mapping by UT USA" - I simply do not buy that. The water masking is a direct result of the mapping done as part of the coverage area. I have done my own photo scenery, although on a much smaller scale.

What FSX does is read water mapping and thus place water surfaces where these maps are. It's as simple as that. Whenever I placed a water mask into my own scenery, even if it was a fictional water body, FSX would always place water there. Therefore I can conclude that these are NOT water masks. Instead they are "excludes" that somehow made it into the photo scenery. I am not sure if this is accidental or not, nut since the developer gives no support for the product (more on that later), I could not confirm this from their perspective.

If a developer is going to take on a project like this and decide to try to add FSX water to it, the least they could do is not leave major water bodies such as lakes and reservoirs only half finished, as seen in the following screenshot. Only half of the lakes covered in the scenery area were done at all, and the half that the developer saw fit to try to mask was only half done at that. In the Denver area, there is multiple lakes right next to each other and seeing only half of them textured one way and the other half as photo really makes it look awful. Personally I like the photo versions because as a real world pilot I like seeing what I see when I fly in real life, which is a huge reason a lot of people buy photo scenery - VFR navigation. I do not do water operations, and in Colorado that makes sense because there are no water operations allowed here unless by forest firefighter teams. So a simple option to choose water or photo would have been perfect here.

The next hit to the realism of the scenery was the poor autogen. When active, the product's autogen places buildings and objects on the highways, misaligned with the roads, and some of the smaller airports end up with autogen on taxiways and runways.

After turning the autogen off, I was very pleased with the result. The following screenshot is more like what you'd see from the air as a real world pilot anyway.

Fortunately, even with the autogen off, major landmarks and special buildings, such as downtown Denver, the Coors Stadium and Invesco Field are still present -- and aligned! At least the developer saw fit to make an effort here.

In the mountains with autogen off is where the scenery really shines. Scenes such as the screenshot below are what really make photo scenery worth it in FSX. The terrain elevation appears to be very well done.

DOCUMENTATION AND CUSTOMER SUPPORT

No charts are included with this product at all, unlike the earlier Megascenery lines where you could order a boxed version of the product and it'd come with VFR charts to navigate. If you want to navigate VFR in the MSE series, you'll have to get your charts elsewhere. There is also no documentation of any sort included, no flights to take you on tours of interesting parts of the scenery and no support.

Customer support is nonexistent. At first they give the impression of being present by there being contact methods available on their web site. Be warned that if you ever need to contact this company, you will never receive a reply. I have written to them numerous times about the various issues mentioned in this review, and no attempt was ever made to reply back to me. I even made an effort to use separate email accounts and check my junk mail folders awaiting a reply. They simply did not try.

A quick visit to their forums also indicates a lack of support. A few customers who also use the product seem to be willing to lend a helping hand, but nowhere in the forums will you see any posting or reply from the developer at all.

CONCLUSION

Overall I will most likely keep this product installed to practice my real world VFR skills. I have to be honest though that I only do so because I have already paid for and acquired the product. If given the chance, I would not do so again, and I will not be buying any of their other coverage areas in the future. I dumped over $100.00 USD into this product, and I have to say that it was NOT worth it in my eyes.

Read any of my other reviews and you will know that I am not harsh. I try to be positive and forgiving in all of my reviews. It actually saddens me to have to do this review in such honesty. However honesty and straightforwardness is what I strive for in all of my reviews. I just needed to divert and clarify here that this is not a review meant for bashing -- it is meant for informing others of my experience so that you, the reader, can make a fair and informed buying decision if you are considering MSE Colorado.

Therefore I conclude that I would NOT recommend this product to anyone unless you are a student pilot in the Colorado area desperate for VFR scenery to practice in FSX.

I would also like it to be said that I own all of the Megascenery titles they released for FS2004, and I was always VERY satisfied and impressed with those titles. I am not sure why they did so many things different in their MSE series that lowered the quality, but I am in high hopes that they fix this in the future. I understand that doing larger geographic areas can take its toll, but this team has already proven with their past titles that they have the ability to shine through greatly. I'd rather wait a longer period of time for a title to release that is done right than to have a larger, messed up area in a shorter amount of time.

I have to admit, having these tiles installed is still a drastic improvement over default scenery, and I now love being able to fly VFR using my real world charts for practice in VFR operations. When you kill off the autogen and try to ignore the water masking, this product does have the ability to allow the student pilot or virtual GA pilot to operate VFR in the covered area with ease. My main issue is price for quality, and the main killer here is the lack of customer response and support. The MSE team punched out a number of titles in a short amount of time then seems to have disappeared from sight. As a paying customer, it makes me wonder if this is another SimFlyers or Phoenix Simulation in the making. Those who are familiar with how both companies disappeared from sight will know what I am talking about here.

I hope that I am wrong in that regard.

LIKES

Accurate terrain elevation
Accurate custom VFR objects such as the stadiums and downtown Denver buildings

DISLIKES

Airports not aligned with photoscenery
Poor autogen alignment - sticking through roads, runways and taxiways
No customer support
Poor water masking
No options to choose inclusion of the water masking
Water masking embedded in main files, so no way to even manually edit this out.
Terrain "bleeding through" onto runways and taxiways. No flatten switches at all for airports.

SCORE: 40% = "F"

Out of an expected 35 items expected for this add-on, 15 passed. This gave the product a base score of 50% for an "F" grade. However, i found that the treatment of customers by customer support completely ignoring all contact was unacceptable, and I am docking an additional 10% from their score. This gives them a 40%. Sorry MSE, but that's the worst score I have given any FS product in the history of my doing reviews at the time of this writing.

To be fair, if the MSE team DOES decide they wish to answer my queries as a paying customer, and assist me in fixing some of the issues listed, I will happily re-do this review to reflect this, which would most likely raise the score dramatically.

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