Scenery

Hey everyone,

 

Might be a stupid question, but i am a littlebit confused. I want the world (nature, cities, sea) to look as realistic as possible. Can anyone give me some advice on which addons to buy? Money is not an issue. Also was wondering the differences between addons, like mesh. lc and scenery. I already bought a few like orbx and UT but am scared to install them both because i think they might mess eachother up :S. Is it best to just install one mesh, one lc and one scenery? And which ones are best in these clases?

 

Hope someone can help me out!

 

Thanks to everyone!

I have nothing at all against payware scenery, but there's so much good freeware scenery out there that you should look around carefully before you spend your money.

 

I would recommend getting UTX and GEX. There are some things to beware of when you have ORBX and GEX, but GEX tells you what to do (there's a switch in ORBX you need to set) during installation. You may want to look through the support forums at Flight1 to check for other issues.

 

A piece of freeware scenery that I really cannot recommend too highly is the Bluesky scenery, available here: http://www.blueskyscenery.com/index.html

 

This covers much of the western US and is being expanded all the time. But be prepared to spend a lot of time downloading, it's HUGE.

 

Hope this helps somewhat -

 

Jorgen

I've tried several free and buy ware scenery packs. I much prefer ORBX stuff. I have all the freeware I'm aware of & several bought pieces as well.

 

Be aware everything you load onto a flight makes the computer work harder. I fly almost exclusively with stock airplanes because my priority is what it looks like out the window. Plus I hand flew with just the very basic form of autopilot all of my RW career.

 

However many really like all the stuff that most commercial pilots now use to fly in today's world. If you want to get into aluminum tubeliners with PMDG and all the other bells and whistles, your scenery detail will have to be scaled back on your flight options page.

 

Also, I don't know if you noticed but Jorgen and I are both fist class members. When Jorgen talks about downloads taking quite a lot of time, he's referring to the higher speed first class members enjoy. You can download without becoming a first class member but your download time will hugely longer. Spend the few bucks, support the site, & enjoy faster downloads.:cool:

..I want the world (nature, cities, sea) to look as realistic as possible. Can anyone give me some advice on which addons to buy?..

 

OrbX is pretty and a lot better than the default FSX scenery, but its placement of roads and buildings etc is not strictly 100% accurate.

If you want to see your own house, Photoreal scenery is the ONLY way to go..:)

For example here's a shot of Plymouth UK in Horizon VFR Photographic Scenery Generation X, I can make out my house, the chip shop, the pub, the funfair on the Hoe and every road, street and back alley etc.

(But in photoreal most buildings are pancake-flat 2D (except for landmarks like Tower Bridge and some big cathedrals etc), so you have to stay high like this to maintain the illusion of 3D)-

 

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/sub2/FSX-GenX-Plymouth_zpsqljhnoiy.jpg~original

I completely agree with Rupert, do yourself a favor and become a First Class Member. Especially in my own situation I will need the extra bandwidth for this site, since I have to install every little thing again from scratch. (Thanks to f.... Windows 10 updates that caused me to be locked out.... but that's a whole different story).

 

But really what I meant in the posting above was that the Bluesky scenery is HUGE, for instance only California is 97 (!) scenery downloads, plus almost as many AFX (airport) files. The scenery files can be anywhere between 400 MB to 1 GB - fast internet connection necessary!

 

I might have to go with Horizon for the UK, the screenshot looks good!

 

Does anyone have any experience with UTX/GEX and the Horizon photoscenery?

 

Jorgen

OrbX is pretty and a lot better than the default FSX scenery, but its placement of roads and buildings etc is not strictly 100% accurate.

If you want to see your own house, Photoreal scenery is the ONLY way to go..:)

For example here's a shot of Plymouth UK in Horizon VFR Photographic Scenery Generation X, I can make out my house, the chip shop, the pub, the funfair on the Hoe and every road, street and back alley etc.

(But in photoreal most buildings are pancake-flat 2D (except for landmarks like Tower Bridge and some big cathedrals etc), so you have to stay high like this to maintain the illusion of 3D)-

 

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/sub2/FSX-GenX-Plymouth_zpsqljhnoiy.jpg~original

 

ScatterbrainKid and I have this disagreement on a regular basis. I took a couple of shots of Plymouth at 1,200' ASL to show what it looks like with ORBX. I fly mostly low vfr so I like to see something nice to look at. If the pub isn't exactly where I remembered it being that's ok with me.

 

 

The last shot is taken at Moffett Field in California while flying through a blimp hanger. I thought that would show you how 3d ORBX and similar scenery can look.

Finally a shot I stumbled across out the 2D windshield and taxiing to park at RONA on a rainy day. And yes, that's ORBX too.

 

Rex4 for environment and airport textures. Orbx for global land and airport scenery. It WILL make a dramatic improvement. Visit the Orbx site and try some of their freeware first. You won't be disappointed.

I'm a satisfied customer and not a fanboy of either.

ScatterbrainKid and I have this disagreement on a regular basis. .....If the pub isn't exactly where I remembered it being that's ok with me....

 

And THAT'S the crux of the matter mate, because I DO want the pub to be exactly where it should be, and only Photoreal scenery does that..:)

I wouldn't say we're having a disagreement, we're both simply stating facts, and the facts are that Photoreal is simply a photograph of the ground, so EVERYTHING is going to be in it, just like on google earth, and it's therefore ideal for flying cross country following roads, lanes, rivers, rails, hills and mountains etc.

But for anybody who doesn't want to do cross-country navigation by eyeball, OrbX is fine because they won't care that some things are missing.

Below is a shot of Photoreal Plymouth (with Revolution X which adds trees and semi-fictional buildings) from about the same location over Hooe Lake as your OrbX shot, you can see the field patterns and shapes of woods are different for one thing in both our shots, the patterns and shapes are accurate in Photoreal, but not so accurate in OrbX-

 

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/sub2/FSX-Hooe_zpsb0bjwmit.jpg~original

Thank u all so much! I have installed ORBX Global and Vector. Also some LC's from ORBX and many airports aswel (ORBX, Aerosoft etc). Installed fsgenesis mesh and freemeshX for NA. And just bought myself REX texture direct with soft clouds and REX essentials + overdrive. And it is not running smoothly at all, not even very nice realistic graphics like i see on youtube videos. My specs are nvidea z170a m5 gaming 8 pins, MSI Geforce GTX970 4gb gaming, I7 6700k 4ghz processor, and 16gb memory at 3200mhz. Does anybody know what is wrong?

ScatterbrainKid,

 

I use a HAMLYN Super Scale Ordinance Survey Street Atlas for visual flying and RW driving in the UK. I've found no problem knowing where I was in either case. But yes, especially if trekking on Public Paths, I probably would need photoreal or a higher scale than 2.16 miles per inch. But I take your point as well. And we're both doing what we enjoy doing! Next time I'm in Plymouth I'll buy you a pint.

Youtube video's are made smooth with video-editing software. Is not what they are really seeing.

 

Just wanted to add, your mainboard is not nvidea z170a, but is MSI. Small detail.

 

To get higher fps, set settings lower in fsx, and close background processes. It usually gets better also as you get to know what you pc likes over time.