Recommendations for scenery upgrades

[Birminghamchris]

Hello all.

I use the FSX Steam flight simulator.

I am looking to upgrade the scenery aspects of the sim, but wondering which software to go for. In this respect, I am looking for users own personal recommendations.

Being a relative newcomer to the flight sim experience, I am looking for something that's easy to download, and doesn't involve any complex installation....I am based in the UK.

Thank you.

[fsc_ba]

Hello all.

I use the FSX Steam flight simulator.

I am looking to upgrade the scenery aspects of the sim, but wondering which software to go for. In this respect, I am looking for users own personal recommendations.

Being a relative newcomer to the flight sim experience, I am looking for something that's easy to download, and doesn't involve any complex installation....I am based in the UK.

Thank you.

 

A company called uk2000 has an excellent selection of add on airports and orbx do a very good selection of scenery for fsx both are excellent to start with

[n697dt]

Orbx is almost a must have (https://orbxdirect.com/). I would also recommend Active Sky for your weather. Both are very user-friendly.

[kingnorris]

You can start simple and get Ultimate Terrain X along with GEX. They work well together and while not as sharp as Orbx, they’re cheap and easy to install.

[scianoir]

Hi

 

It depends on what type of flying you are planning to do and where you are planning to do it. As you are UK based I guess you might be doing lot of your flying either within the UK or to or from the UK. In summary you basically have 3 options in terms of general scenery enhancement - Ultimate Terrain X + GEX combination, Orbx scenery or photoreal scenery. Ultimate Terrain X combined with GEX is a very good and reasonably priced combination which will give you great looking scenery to fly over throughout all of Europe though it will be generic so perhaps not the most accurate in some areas. The Orbx scenery areas for the UK are a bit more realistic in terms of looking like the sort of landscape you would expect to see when flying over the UK but when you add up the cost of the various Orbx addons you will need it is a more expensive option. The third option is to use photoreal scenery which, as it is based on real world photography, will be the most accurate in terms of what you are looking at. Photoreal however used to have the disadvantage of looking very flat and featureless below about 1500ft when I last used it in FS9 but it looks like the photoreal scenery available for FSX may well have been improved by the addition of autogen etc, but as I haven't any personal experience of using it in FSX, I can't really advise you on this.

 

If you are planning to do a lot of high level IFR flying I would suggest UTX/GEX might be the best option and that will also give you a very good improvement in scenery for low level flying at a relatively low cost and it really is a great all around option. If you are planning to do a lot of low level VFR flying mainly within the UK and cost isn't an object then you could consider using Orbx scenery. UK photoreal scenery might of course also be an option for VFR flight but as I have said I am not sure how good the latest UK Photoreal scenery is and the other disadvantage of photoreal is that it can end up using a lot of VAS which could lead to the dreaded OOM errors in FSX.

 

If you want to improve your airports, there is a vast amount of software available for the UK and I can highly recommend the very detailed UKXtreme series, produced by UK2000, which now cover most of the airports in the UK. UK2000 also produce 3 volumes of VFR Airfields each of which contain about 80 UK airports (including the major ones) and airfields which is quite a good way to populate the UK with lots of improved airport scenery at a reasonable cost. The airports in these packages however are not as detailed as the UKXtreme airports but are still pretty good. If you want Scottish airfields there is also a package available from Scotflight Scenery containing about 50 airfields. In addition there are quite a number of individual UK airports produced by other developers including some very detailed ones by Orbx and the bottom line is that the UK is very well covered for addon airports and airfields.

 

I hope this is helpful to you but remember before you buy any addons for your sim, always research them as much as possible and look at the reviews and feedback particularly on the various forums.

 

Bill

[il88pp]

Flightsim.com has a file library with loads of nice freeware airports to choose from. Install is simple. A file "readme.txt" with install instructions is included in each download.

 

For mesh (terrain height everywhere. Mountains, valleys, everything in between) there is FreeMeshX. (download is not on this site, find download on their own site through google.). (Free.).

 

A payware that makes everything in between airports look great, and is a lot less expensive then the payware mentioned by the others is scenerytech. 6 reasonably priced areas that if all bought will together cover the whole world.

This is the europe area:

https://secure.simmarket.com/scenery-tech-europe-landclass.phtml

[MaxLegroom990]

Since you are more likely to be flying in the United Kingdom, I thought I'd add the idea that maybe you're not keen on spending a lot of money on scenery. This website in general points to the available freeware, and also a link leading you to the payware, if that's your choice. This will get you started, and the Soarfly Concepts Biggin Hill scenery looks quite good. Their links will point you to wherever you need to go to get it. http://www.freewarescenery.com/fsx/uk.html