GMax..

[Guest]

Right now I am using the SimFlyers World Airports as scenery and while it looks more accurate in terms of building layout, it does not look as realistic as what is included in the some of the default sceneries. The ATL airport, for example, looks like old FS98/2000 scenery and does not shimmer like the default ATL scenery. Again, however, more building and aircraft are included and it seems to be laid out accurately. In addition, much of the scenery does not show until you are right at it. When approaching airports in SimFlyers Airports scenery, it looks like you arelanding in a field until you are well on final and only then do buildings pop up one by one. And, the buildings continue to pop up when you are on the ground approaching them and thendisappear again once they are behind you. If you move your hat switch a tiny bit to the left or right when looking at outside scenery, the entire jet dock disappears. Worst of all, the darnframerates drop off quite a bit and it looks as if you were in the middle of a slide show presentation. Is Gmax the answer for airport scenery? How are the airport sceneries in Gmax when compared to others such as the SimFlyers and the Wilco

[Guest flightpro08]

First of all, saying Simflyer's Atlanta scenery looks like FS2k is not saying much because the scenery was made for FS2k and upgraded for FS2k2.>In addition, much of the scenery does not show until you are right at it.This is done on purpose. The limited visibility on many objects dramatically help out with fram rates, and the scenery would be virtually unusable without these unqiue settings. If you move your hat switch a tiny bit to the left or right when looking at outside scenery, the entire jet dock disappears.This is because you're not "close" enought to your aircraft. You must go into your View Options and alter the Distance and altidue settings to 300 and 100 repectively. Some aircraft models (i.e. Mel's 777) require an even closer distance and altitude.Is Gmax the answer for airport scenery?Not necessarily. If it's done right, GMAX made scenery can be fantastic looking and very easy on fram rates. LAGO's Honolulu scenery is a great example of this. On the other hand, airport's like Shez's DCA scenery, which was also made in GMAX, is terrible on frame rates, though, it is still a great scenery that I use all of the time. Another example of poorly made GMAX scenery is Wilco's Airport 2002 v1. While I don't own the scenery, I don't think I've heard one good thing about its performance. In short, GMAX can be great, but if it's not done right, it's no better than any other 3D modeler.Overall, I love Simflyer's sceneries. I have all of their US sceneries, as well as Frankfurt and Rome. Sure some of the buildings arn't "photo real" or "picture perfect", but they look pretty darn good to me. Simflyers offers a perfect balance of performance vs. eye candy IMHO, and they've set the standard for other scenery groups.Just my 2 cents worth. :-)Ryan-Flightpro08 :-cool VATSIM Pilot/ControllerZLA ARTCC Senior Controller (C-3)ASRC (Advanced Simulated Radar Client) Beta Tester-----------------------------My "Home Made" System Specs:Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz ProcessorTurbo Gamer ATX Mid-Tower with 420W Power SupplyEPoX 4G4A Motherboard with Intel 845G ChipsetVisiontek XTASY GeForce4 128MB Ti4600 (Det 42.01 Drivers)512MB PC2100 DDR RAM40GB Matrox 7200RPM Hard DriveWindows XP Home Edition SP1*No CPU or GPU Overclocking*3dMark2001SE Score: 11298-----------------------------Click Here to Download my American Eagle POSKY CRJ-200!

[Guest]

I also wonder since when buildings are reflective?I've been to KATL and it was quite non-reflective so having an alpha channel wouldn't matter one bit (except maybe for a few fences and lightpoles).The same is true for most other buildings, except some metal ones.If anything, I find that the reflectivity in GMax created items (aircraft too) is usually overdone in the extreme (probably just the novelty, with authors doing it to proove they're doing it or something).

[Guest]

Thanks for the insight. I guess the best we can hope for is power, power, power from upcoming CPUs...The AMD Barton will be released February 7th, which will be a move in the right direction. I am planning on getting the Athlon 3G+ processor when it is released. Not only will it include a faster bus (166DDR vs 133DDR for what I am using now), it will include a larger level two cache (which may or may not help in FS2002). At that time, I will also look into upgrading my videocard NV30 perhaps, but I will probably have to wait until the summer for that one.Robb