GEX Europe

[Benjamin J 751]

There we go again, 30 euros out of the window, but by god those screenshots look good!

[David Roch 1,982]

My best purchase this fall, after my first bottle of "Beaujolais nouveau"!!Thanks Anthony and Nick for your talent and devotion to the community.GEX Europe is a pure jewel. :(

[snave 0]

To be honest, I kinda thought the `wow!` factor is missing from the textures themselves (Note to developers: Try rationing your screenshots!) and no, I haven't tried all location and all seasons and times yet...BUT - and I need to say that again!BUT what has absolutely gobsmacked me is the new sense of depth perception these textures give. I made no changes at all to sim settings, haven't added any Mesh or Landclass, am not currently using UTX and have no useless tweaks in the FSX .cfg. So it can only be down to the artistry. Normally, using NON-widescreen settings I zoom out a couple of clicks to get the panoramic view and sense of `sky, everywhere` that FS on a desktop cannot replicate, but I now find that the non-zoom view gives a much greater sense of distance and three-dimensionalityIt's to do with the convergence lines in the actual texture artwork - brilliantly clever work aligning these without making it obvious and not something that was ever mentioned nor evident in static screenshots, but it is absolutely a reason to buy this product by itself, never mind your feelings about the textures. The sense of movement over a landscape is now visceral, tangible and, frankly, compulsive! It may even save having to add Mesh (contentious, but if you have a mesh product you can switch off try it and see if you agree, and also try the NON widescreen setting as frog-eye destroys convergence perception).Best money spent on scenery products in the last two years. `Nuff said. :(

[WebMaximus 372]

PLEASEDont forget to DEFRAG.. you just installed a very LARGE amount of files ! :(

Nick, what is the real truth for SSD drives when running under Windows7? I heard with a SSD drive you never need to worry about the disk becoming fragmented since that will not influence the read performance in the same way it does with a mechanical disk since the data is fetched electronicly instead.I'm very interested in this since I just in time for GEX Europe :( reinstalled FSX including all my addons like FS Genesis mesh, UTX, GEX, REX, ASA on a dedicated 160GB Intel X25-M SSD drive.Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this and congrats to your great release of the long-awaited GEX Europe!!

[Guest UlfB]

Nick and Anthony,Thanks for a magnificent add on :(

[Guest Nick_N]

Nick, what is the real truth for SSD drives when running under Windows7? I heard with a SSD drive you never need to worry about the disk becoming fragmented since that will not influence the read performance in the same way it does with a mechanical disk since the data is fetched electronicly instead.I'm very interested in this since I just in time for GEX Europe :( reinstalled FSX including all my addons like FS Genesis mesh, UTX, GEX, REX, ASA on a dedicated 160GB Intel X25-M SSD drive.Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this and congrats to your great release of the long-awaited GEX Europe!!

NO!SSD is not a mechancial hard drive and requires no defragmentation which can damage it

[Guest Nick_N]

To be honest, I kinda thought the `wow!` factor is missing from the textures themselves (Note to developers: Try rationing your screenshots!) and no, I haven't tried all location and all seasons and times yet...

The wow factor is usually missing in the dead of the winter season.. especially if you are not around mountain/tundra terrain where the GEX snow and glacier ice appear and are flying in flatter areas. UTX does add glaciers where they belong in the Alps along with lakes rivers and streams which are missing elements in default, and it better defines flatland areas.With no landclass installed Europe will be far less correct and very bland due to poor texture layout. The default landclass is very poorly defined which is why we suggest UTX and another 3rd party LC such as SceneryTech be installed. The combination of the LC's changes the texture layout and use however the seasonal changes will still not be correct. The sim does not play seasons correctly in Europe. It should still be Fall somewhat however past Nov 1 the sim will show the dead of Winter and will skip winter and go directly to hard winter in many places. That is a FSX issue with the season file which we do not change. In order to see fall the time must be reset to October 1st. We may look at edting the season file in FSX sometime next year however that is not part of our scope of work in texture replacement.

[WebMaximus 372]

NO!SSD is not a mechancial hard drive and requires no defragmentation which can damage it

Ok, good to have it confirmed from you! Now I can stop thinking about boring things like fragmentation and start enjoying my fresh installation of FSX with GEX Europe :(

[jjjallen 37]

Nick, what is the real truth for SSD drives when running under Windows7? I heard with a SSD drive you never need to worry about the disk becoming fragmented since that will not influence the read performance in the same way it does with a mechanical disk since the data is fetched electronicly instead.I'm very interested in this since I just in time for GEX Europe :( reinstalled FSX including all my addons like FS Genesis mesh, UTX, GEX, REX, ASA on a dedicated 160GB Intel X25-M SSD drive.Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this and congrats to your great release of the long-awaited GEX Europe!!

Just do the defrag. On my SSD it takes about 10 seconds. Just not 10x a day.GEX is a terrific product!jja

[Benjamin J 751]

Just do the defrag. On my SSD it takes about 10 seconds. Just not 10x a day.GEX is a terrific product!jja

Nick strongly advised not to just a few posts back... I'd say he shouldn't defrag his disk, then.

[Guest Nick_N]

The process of defragmenting was designed for mechanical hard drives since the hard drive is the slowest hardware component in the system and can hog the CPU if file fragmentations are present. The drive head must access/seek file parts and therefore defragmenting is a critical step in keeping storage performance high.With SSD it does not matter at all how fragmented the drive becomes because there is absolutely no mechanical activity taking place and therefore no file read latency issues. The operation of the defrag program can and will damage such drives. Do not use them for SSD only mechancial hard drivesIt will be a very expensive lesson to learn over time if you do

[snave 0]

To add to what Nick says, an SSD uses a completely different storage method to a `normal` hard drive with multiple platters and a physical read/write head. The lifespan limitation of an SSD is defined by the number of times the clusters may be re-written - note I say WRITTEN, not read - before failure ensues. Therefore to prolong life of your SSD you should never write to it until you need to. There is no decreased latency from defragmenting the drive as there is no seek time to speak of, regardless of the location of the primary data on the drive, because nothing physically moves to read the information.So while you CAN defragment an SSD, you should NOT, irrespective of the fact that only takes seconds.Most defrag utilities have the option to switch off the defragmentation process on an individual drive. Use it for your SSD.

[WebMaximus 372]

Nick strongly advised not to just a few posts back... I'd say he shouldn't defrag his disk, then.

I'm far from an expert when it comes to SSD drives thus my question but the way I understood it you don't gain anything by defragging a SSD drive since there's no moving parts inside it and after Nick's reply I'm even more convinced so I'll just leave my SSD drive as it is.One thing however that I'm looking forward to is for Intel to release their updated firmware to get a working TRIM support in Windows 7 x64, read they said they plan to release it before the end of the month.

[bkeske 0]

The wow factor is usually missing in the dead of the winter season..

Agreed, which is why I am still checking things out and slewing all over, and changing seasons at the same time. But I tell'ya Nick, one of biggest beefs with the default textures in Europe are the areas of southern Spain, Italy, Corsica, Sicily, etc. Man, those areas (textures) are really wonderful. Thanks again.

[Jean-Paul 167]

Agreed, which is why I am still checking things out and slewing all over, and changing seasons at the same time. But I tell'ya Nick, one of biggest beefs with the default textures in Europe are the areas of southern Spain, Italy, Corsica, Sicily, etc. Man, those areas (textures) are really wonderful. Thanks again.

South of France (that's where I live :( ) and Northern Spain look great as well. Nick and Anthony did a wonderful job :(