megascenery SE Texas 4x

Hi folks.....For the last two days I've loaded and installed and uninstalled ad nauseum in an effort to get the Megascenery SE Texas 4x to work on my system.... I'm hopelessly lost. So tonight, I completely uninstalled the Megascenery files and removed all mention of them in FSX scenery library and then started again....with the same result. Although I'm not sure, I think the program is correctly unzipping and creating the BGL files and putting them in the correct directory, but I don't think FSX ever "sees" them.

 

So....can anyone else suggest the correct sequence of events to try to fix this? I have FSX loaded on a 240G SSD and it runs beautifully with all the standard settings and default scenery. The Megascenery is installed on a separate spinner drive. I have an I7 system with plenty of memory and a midrange video card if thats important.

 

Any and all help/suggestions welcome.

 

Jim

Have you correctly referenced your mechanical drive to the SSD? If not Windows may not see the mechanical drive. Does the scenery installation direct you to identify the drive you use, so that FSX will know where to look? If not here is a way of doing it

 

http://lifehacker.com/5986883/how-to-combine-multiple-hard-drives-into-one-volume-for-cheap-high-capacity-storage

Make sure Megascenery is near the top of the Scenery Library.

 

 

Nothing would install if Windows didn't see the drive.

 

You manually add the scenery to FSX just like every other scenery so it doesn't matter where it is located.

 

That link you gave does absolutely nothing to solve this issue.

Thanks.....Does other Megascenery have to also be installed to make this SE Texas 4X scenery work? Once I install the 4X scenery and then go into FSX, it has a checkmark in the 4X scenery and is up at the top of the scenery priority. But what I'm seeing at the Houston airports is the same as if I used the default scenery but without the autogen stuff. So is it possible that the scenery header is in place in the library but no actual scenery is being loaded ?

No.

 

Airports look the same. Actually take a flight and leave the city. Now what do you see? A screenshot or two will help us!

Is Houston and the surrounding areas included in the package? I've never bought sections of MSE; I always buy the complete states.

Well...I started again last night and I believe I have uncovered the guilty culprit... --> it's me...

 

I thought that the scenery would mimic what the screenshots on the website show. And the views I got were nowhere near the clarity and sharpness until I pressed the F12 key for the straight down view and -bang- there they were.

 

So...now the next question. how do I get these superfine views when looking out the windshield above the 2D panel when flying? Or is that just the limitation of the sim... I was really looking forward to these excellent views especially when slowing on approach and then setting up for landing. If you guys think this is a setting or fsx.cfg tweak, please advise and I'll take some screenies tonight in the before and after mode for comparison.'

 

Many thanks, Jim

There are a number of issues involved here. If you are expecting "superfine views" when setting up for landing, you might be expecting too much. Even with high-res. photoscenery, it isn't very sharp below 500-1000'. I like to use Orbx airports (with photoreal surrounding sceneries) so that I have autogen objects and sharpness at very low altitudes around airports.

 

When switching to a higher resolution photoscenery, the LOD (level of detail) radius will decrease due to the higher texture loads. To offset this, it might be necessary to increase the LOD_Radius setting in the FSX.CFG file. But if the load becomes too high for the computer system, then blurries can result from slow loading times.

 

Another thing that can affect clarity is the visibility setting. Things can look sharper when visibility is set to unlimited.

 

I'm certainly no expert on this stuff, but this is my understanding. Take my comments with a grain of salt. When I was installing some Megascenery high-res. Ultra 4x scenery (from disks) it asked if I wanted to have my settings optimized for the scenery. I clicked yes, and I think that one of the things that MSE reset was the LOD Radius setting.

Well...I started again last night and I believe I have uncovered the guilty culprit... --> it's me...

 

I thought that the scenery would mimic what the screenshots on the website show. And the views I got were nowhere near the clarity and sharpness until I pressed the F12 key for the straight down view and -bang- there they were.

 

So...now the next question. how do I get these superfine views when looking out the windshield above the 2D panel when flying? Or is that just the limitation of the sim... I was really looking forward to these excellent views especially when slowing on approach and then setting up for landing. If you guys think this is a setting or fsx.cfg tweak, please advise and I'll take some screenies tonight in the before and after mode for comparison.'

 

Many thanks, Jim

Hmm this is a hard one. I get the views from anywhere, not just top down. No idea what's going on with yours?

Hello Kingnorris

 

My computer specs are very similar to yours. I7-4960? Haswell, 8 G memory, GTX 650 video, FSX Gold with Accel.

 

I don't think anything about FSX is "tweaked" or overclocked. Seems like I just installed it, and began to run the sim with few changes. But I'm pretty sure that even before the 4X installation, the top down view (F12) was always much sharper than the cockpit windscreen view.

 

Up until now, I just assumed that was the way it worked.....

 

Now I'm wondering if this is a video card or monitor issue?

 

Jim

So you're getting the photoreal scenery now, but it's not sharp, correct?

 

Word of warning: photoreal scenery looks better the higher you go. If you plan on flying only about 3,000 feet, it may not look good. Go up to at least 9,000 feet and you should see a difference.

 

This is why a lot of people don't like photoreal. That, and the flatness of it while on the ground.

Make sure Megascenery is near the top of the Scenery Library.

 

 

Nothing would install if Windows didn't see the drive.

 

You manually add the scenery to FSX just like every other scenery so it doesn't matter where it is located.

 

That link you gave does absolutely nothing to solve this issue.

 

 

Not trying to hijack, but I thought he first said the scenery did not appear in FSX after installing on a different drive from FSX. Please correct me if I am wrong, but some sceneries - like Orbx - must be installed in the FSX folder, there is no option to install it on another drive unless the two drives are linked.

 

 

 

CPU I7-960 OC @ 3.8 Ghz, Asetek Water Cooler

Asus P6T X58 MB, 6Gb RAM Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600Mhz

EVGA nVidia GTX 570, 1.28Gb DDR5 RAM

1 Tb SATA II HD, Kingston 128Gb SSD (FSX only)

Apevia 800W PS, Win 7 64-bit Acceleration

OrbxFTX Global BASE, OrbxFTX Global Vector, OrbxFTX open LCEurope & open LC NA, FS Genesis World Mesh, DX10 Fixer

It's basic photoscenery and as basic photoscenery, it can be installed anywhere just as Blue Sky can be installed anywhere. The key point is having the correct entry in the Scenery Library. That is why we don't manually edit the scenery.cfg file to add things.

Good morning, everyone

 

So....I think I've stumbled onto the "cure". It appears now in hindsight that there were two issues. The first seems to be that because the huge database (55 Gb) was on a spinner and not on the SSD where FSX was, that I just wasn't allowing enough time for the installation file to fully complete the data transfer and so the megascenery installer wasnt able to configure the scenery......until mr dumb thumbs here stopped mouse clicking and jumping in and out of FSX. So once I went into the installer and could actually configure the scenery, then I could at least see it in the top down (F12) view. But the second issue was the zoom factor. Someone had suggested that what I could see from topdown should be similar to what was seen through the windshield....and that if not, to check the zoom levels. And therein was problem 2....the topdown zoom was 0.3, but the cockpit windshield view was set at 1.5 !! So setting that back down to 0.65, brought the scenery into better scale and sharpness. So....I'm so glad everything is working well again I'm thinking about hooking up two monitors !!

 

Thanks for all the great suggestions and assistance.

 

Jim