VERO (REAL in Italian) is for those Flight Simulation enthusiasts, real pilots and professionals trainers alike who have one thing in common:
They use FSX as a simulator, not as a game!
AS REAL AS IT GETS
This is what we aim to and we started from the ground textures as we believe it's the basement of the type of environment in FSX that we call VERO (REAL).
VERO pilots are those who fly as in a real plane, in real life. It's a product for those who fly as real as it would be in a real airplane, with all the flight patterns, respecting altitudes etc. If this is your way of using FSX, then you are in the right place.
VERO is for those who want to fly REAL VFR. Only real world ground textures will give you the real reference to plan and file your VFR flight in VATSIM or IVAO or by yourself. Instructors can now teach VFR flights on a simulator, something that can not be done on FSX default world OR in any other simulated ground environment available today on the market as add-on.
Some people complain about photoreal ground textures because the textures below 1000" look grainy. The answer to this is the following…
1) by the time you are able to look out of the window during take off you will be above 600" and at about that height, our textures look good.
2) while climbing, up to 600/800" you will see autogen more than the textures so… the problem doesn't exist.
3) during approach, below 600" you will be looking at the runway. You will not have time to look out of the window and see the grainy textures. Also, the ground textures will not be visible as buildings and trees will cover.
What about helicopter flying? Same story… if you care so much of details on the ground, isn't it better to simulate a landing on the REAL cities, REAL towns, REAL country areas then flying over a simulated world?
Some simmer out there don't like photo realistic ground textures as this is what they expect to have fun and enjoy FSX:
I won't be satisfied with FSX until I can see hedges around the gardens, opened windows on the first floor, kids playing in the backyard, and the dog eating out of the trash can…
http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?s=&showtopic=285669&view=findpost&p=1771498
OR
As usual the buildings looks very odd when you approach them from the wrong direction (which is the opposite direction of which the photo's were taken), as with all photorealistic addons
http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?s=&showtopic=285669&view=findpost&p=1771068
If you are like this guy above… then keep flying over simulated ground but that would be like choose to keep watching cartoons instead of real movies.
Many out there produce photoreal ground textures. So what's the big deal with VERO?
Our sceneries are made of OPTIMIZED and SEASONAL photorealistic ground textures with some autogen near airports, important to give the altitude sensation, at least around airports, during take off and approach. Our autogen will not be heavy as we don' t like how the default autogen looks and we believe it ruins the beauty of the photoreal ground. Those little houses look like cardboard buildings so, the least the better.
OPTIMIZATION
We want the ground to look perfectly colored balanced and lume/contrast corrected with no color dominance or the blend/washed out effect that all the aerial and satellite images have. This is something everyone can do on a single ortho-photo tile while is something very hard to do hard to do it on large areas (millions of tiles that make thousands of square km/miles). Basically… if you want to have the REAL colors and image quality of the ground you fly over, you will need either to optimize every tile one by one in Photoshop. This will require YEARS or HUNDREDS of Photoshop experts. By the time you are done optimizing 200.000 sqkm one by one and compiled in FSX format, you will have to restart from scratch as the world coordinates have changed due to the natural earth axis shift. So what is the alternative? ALSO, the final retail price for such product would be so high that nobody would ever buy it.
The alternative to this manual work is to create some kind of script that is able to process large quantity of orthophoto images (tiles) in a very limited amount of time with no or very little human work. This will keep the final price affordable to many and this is what can be considered a real progress in FSX.
There is another alternative: compiling raw ortho-photos without any kind of optimization work. This is what all the other photo-realistic ground textures developer out there.
Last but not least, VERO HI-FI technology goes even further, greatly improving the already top quality optimized tiles.
SEASONS and HARD WINTER
Who's writing here is a simmer, first of all, not only a digital imagery expert with years of experience in digital photography optimization: As a simmer, I wouldn't consider buying a single square mile of photo realistic ground textures if I had to give up on seasons, night and Hard Winter (winter wonderland in FSX) snowy ground. This is why I wanted to create the seasons variations and I think we reached a very good result. Can it be improved? We prefer to say it can be custom made, according to what people like the most. For instance, the fall and winter can have grass and trees in different color tone/hue and we aim to do that, soon. Simmers will be able to choose the version they like the most for each season variation. Stay tuned.
For some simmers out there, seasons, hard winter and night are a plus they can live without. If this is you, VERO is not for you. Keep making your own photoreal ground textures from Google Earth using some tools available for free like TileProxy or others.
VERO is Seasonal + night + hard winter perfectly luma/contrast/color optimized ground texture. (Sorry… it seems that no matter how many times we write this, some folks out there don't get it 
)
FILE SIZE AND STORAGE
40.000sq.km of our scenery requires HUGE amount of HD space. We're talking about 20+GB of data only for one seasons + night!
The state of California is 440.000 sq. miles. You do the math.
If these numbers scare you, then you have another reason not to become a VERO user. Keep buying cartoons type add-on sceneries that will fit in a single DVD.
If instead you are smart enough, you will understand that HD drives' prices lower so quickly that by the time we're done producing USA, Terabytes of data will fit your High-end FSX machines.
ANYWAY… this said… we will not stop improving the product and YES we will add higher resolution imagery as it comes available!
We will welcome your feedback as it is important to improve so, please use our forums (where you can login with the same username and password you use for this site)
I want to end this page with something we just received via email from Philip Wilson from AVSIM, which is something that I really think it says it all:
The video and screenshots of Mt. Shasta brought tears to my eyes.
You see…I went to High School in Alturas, CA and played football against every town mentioned in the video.
I spent all my teen years traveling around Northern California and have driven the very roads in your scenery.Thank you for the great memories!
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