Mayor Island Scenery

[JonARNZ]

I downloaded Tim's first package in his Bay of Plenty Islands series and got it all installed. This is, IMO, an important release for FSX for a couple of reasons.

1 - Its 100% kiwi
2 - Its FSX specific, and the more of this we see the better.

Mayor Island is a small island, surprisingly small actually given the file size (23MB). Dial-up downloader's beware. I can understand why some of the 'X' photoreal sceneries are on DVD's, as has been discussed on other threads, but this scenery is important none the less because it starts to show what FSX can do when it comes to blended textures and higher-rez textures beyond what we saw in FS9. There are a few funny clashes where water and land meet on angles, this would be more an issue with the mesh than the textures I would suggest.

Mayor Island is the visible portion of a 700m high, 15km-wide shield volcano located 40km north of Tauranga city in the Bay of Plenty region, New Zealand. The Island was discovered by Captain Cook on the date of the Lord Mayor's Birthday in London, England - November 3rd, 1769 so was named in honour of this. The Maori name for Mayor Island, Tuhua, is the word for Obsidian, a black volcanic glass found on the Island.

I'm personally quite excited by this release, and wait with baited breath for when Tim finally gets to White Island (Whakaari), which I have seen from a distance, and feel FSX does a very poor showing at replicating, as you would expect. SO what does this place look like?









I'm not sure what resolution the textures have been produced in, hence me waiting for White Island where it really has an opportunity to shine, hopefully they are high enough to take these island out of the realm of 'wow' into the realm of 'WOW, I gotta have those'. Robin set the scene with Taranaki, the question is who's going to up the ante next.

The good thing is you and I the users will be the ones who benefit. Good job Tim!

[Timmo]

Hi Jon
Interesting point/shots about the water clashes.....im only using the default mesh which doesnt cause any problems. I should be getting a copy of the topo/mesh so hopefully any future releases should be sorted (may have to resort to scaling the islands slightly larger)

As for White Island.....we only have hard copy aerial photos of that so the final resolution may be lower.....White would certainly benefit from a high resolution mesh as well.

The file sizes are quite big (especially considering that FS2004 Rotorua scenery was around 50MB?) but of course there is a squared relationship with image resolution.

Look forward to White Is coming soon

[Timmo]

Oh, and since this is my first scenery release, any comments would be appreciated...

Doing NZ scenery covering areas of native bush certainly does highlight the need for an NZ specfic Autogen class.....as you can see in the screen shots, the trees are an OK approximation but it would be really nice to see some Pohutukawa, ferns etc on there..

[Ian Warren]

Have it install Timmo , Just lookin for my sleeping bag , prob spend bitta lookin around

[JonARNZ]

All good Timmo, you should try it with the free 75m mesh and see if you get the same result. What was the final rez of the textures?