I'm looking for a scenery package that will enhance ground scenery and work well with my PMDG products. I'd like more realistic geography, such as land details including mountains, lakes, etc. and general contour.I'm also interested in more realistic scenery near major airports and their respective cities. The problem is there are soooo many products out there! I tried Abacus extreme landscapes,but there has to something better than that. I'm satisfied with the weather that comes with FSX, so I'm not looking for upgrades in that area. My computer has Windows 7 64 bit and pretty powerful hardware. I'd like something that is compatible with my OS, and that doesn't require lots of other addons to make it work. Also, what is FSUIP and how does it enhance FSX. I dowloaded it from a website mentioned in this forum, but have not tried to install it yet. Thanks!Pete Locascio

I'm looking for a scenery package that will enhance ground scenery and work well with my PMDG products. I'd like more realistic geography, such as land details including mountains, lakes, etc. and general contour.I'm also interested in more realistic scenery near major airports and their respective cities. The problem is there are soooo many products out there!

Yes, there are a LOT of products. It helps if you narrow down the regions/areas you are interested in and also consider the type of flights you like to do. First off, there is no one provider/solution that will give you both broad coverage and high detail, so you need to consider the trade-off between breadth of coverage and level of detail. For example, to get noticeable (but not enormous) improvements over broad regions like all of US or Europe, you can buy products that improve your scenery "tile" textures, landclassing, and/or scenery mesh. These are generally sold on a per-continent or sub-continent basis.I'll run you quickly through the best of these products. Ground Environment X improves your landclass texture image "tiles" over US or Europe (each is a separate purchase). This package generally makes all the defaul scenery look a little better, but not any more accurate. This is because GEX doesn't make any changes in shapes or positioning of the landclasses, only their textures. To make the landclasses more accurate, you can get Ultimate Terrain X. UTX is also sold by region (US, Canada, Europe) and most noticeably improves the accuracy of urban areas. SceneryTech products improve rural landclasses in the same way: they cover most of the world, and you buy by the continent. And finally to make the topography "mesh" more detailed, FSGenesis will sells very nice mesh that provides more detail and accuracy to your topographic features. FSG mesh is also sold by continent/sub-continent.Purchasing these three/four products for one continent (say North America) will set you back a lot of money. It will give also you noticeable -- but not startlingly great -- improvements across hundreds-of-thousands to millions of square miles.Another approach is to sacrifice broad coverage for much greater detail. Orbx products are great because they include improvements across the board (textures, landclass, and mesh) plus lots more (airport upgrades and some photo scenery areas too). However, you get much more limited coverage (regional) for each product you buy. In terms of amazing accuracy and detail improvements though, you can't beat their scenery ... it's truly impressive.Zooming in even closer on details of specific regions, you can get photo-realistic scenery tiles from a variety of vendors. Each vendor tends to focus on a specific region. MegaScenery is very good if you're interested in the Continental US, Aerosoft has products that cover Germany, and so on. Photo scenery looks great, but can get very expensive to cover larger areas, and takes up a lot of disk space. Also photo scenery usually doesn't change with the seasons, sometimes lacks autogen buildings and foliage, and can look very "flat" from lower altitudes.And finally at the closest zoom level, there are scenery packages that only cover specific airports and/or major cities. Orbx, FSDreamTeam, Cloud 9 and Aerosoft MegaAirports are among the best ones, but there are many other vendors, each commonly with a specific regional focus. These types of packages enhance very small areas with astounding detail, right down to light poles, baggage carts and various other ramp equipment at large airports. By the way, of all the improvements I've mentioned, city/airport scenery and Orbx regional scenery are the only ones that will have any negative impact at all on your frame rates. However, adding a MegaAirport on top of a PMDG aircraft will definitely tax your system (can be a 50% or worse drop in FPS) so think about your overall system's performance before you dive too fast into this detailed scenery. In my experience, FSDreamTeam airports have less impact on the frame rate than the others, while still providing great detail.So with all these options, you really need to ask yourself in depth what "better looking scenery" means to you. Do you fly short VFR flights, or medium or long haul jet routes? If the former, then photo scenery or something like Orbx regional scenery is your best bet. If you do long jet routes, you would do better to focus on the cities and/or airports you want to fly to/from, and forget about everything in between. Because at FL360 improvements in your enroute scenery will barely be visible, especially if there's cloud cover. In this case, focus on improving the first and last 10-15 minutes of your flight instead. Or you could pick and choose from all these different scenery "zoom levels", which is what I've ended up doing with my purchases over 2-3 years. (The total dollar amount is easier to digest over time.) For the broad upgrades, start with Real Environment Extreme if you don't have it yet: this product's weather and airport/water texture improvements are hands down the most visible improvement you can make in FS at a reasonable cost. Next, get Ground Environment X and/or FSGenesis mesh (the net impact of each is similar). And finally upgrade your landclass with Ultimate Terrain and SceneryTech. In between all of these, you can buy individual airports, cities, and/or regions that you are interested in seeing in the best detail.Nobody said this hobby was cheap!Anyway, I hope this information helps you more than it confuses.Peter

My recommendations:-FS Genesis 10m mesh - this improves the detail of the underlying terrain polygons, makes mountains look more like real life etc.-FS Genesis USA Landclass - this is the file that determines what textures get placed where on the mesh, it's not textures itself, but it essentially says "This area is forest, this area is a small town" etc. Makes a huge difference in the overall look of the landscape.-Ground Environment X - this replaces all the actual textures that get placed onto the mesh. Makes things look much better than the defaults.-Ultimate Terrain X - this adds realistic roads, lakes and rivers, accurate coastlines, as well as stuff like city landclass and night lighting.-REX 2 - incredible sky, clouds, water, airport textures etc as well as a real time weather download engine.-ORBX FTX Pacific Northwest - if you're interested in the region, this is absolutely amazing - transforms basically everything.As far as airport scenery, I really like what ORBX does - their stuff is amazing. FSDT does some great work as well.

Do you mean what is FSUIPC?Go to this link and download the version 4.60 documentation if you do not have it because you did not install it. It has descriptions in there:http://forum.simflight.com/topic/66137-documentation-24th-september-2010/

There's a 24 hour special right now on MegaScenery X Southern California scenery. If you are interested in this region, this is one of the best photo scenery packages you can get, and it's a really good deal at US$19.97. In the future to get the same coverage, you will have to buy individual "tiles" from MegaScenery Earth at higher prices.Title: MegasSceneryX: Southern CaliforniaPublisher: PC Aviator IncNormally: $39.95Special Price: $19.97Savings: 50% (Save $19.98)Special Runs: 24 Hours Only – Ends 9 am Friday 5 November USA Eastern TimeDelivery: Boxed product on 4 DVDs with printed charts.Compatibility: FSXLink: http://www.pcaviator...productid=17881 Peter Vanags

Can you guys tell me, what's performance hit with this kind of addons? I mean with addons like Ground Environment X, etc. Not airports.

GEX is no hit - that's just texture replacement.REX can cause a hit if you run the super high res 4096 textures and don't have enough texture memory.UTX can cause a hit with certain parts of it enabled - mostly the night lighting and high levels of road traffic.Mesh is essentially no hit on a modern system.Stuff like PNW can cause something of a hit because it so drastically increases the amount of autogen and stuff like that.

Can you guys tell me, what's performance hit with this kind of addons? I mean with addons like Ground Environment X, etc. Not airports.

I've had a some noticable hits with some of the older FS Dreamteam products. (JFK, for instance), But, with overclocking, that has largely gone away. The newer ones (DFW, e.g.) have no real noticable hit to me. What I love about their products is the detail on the surfaces and lighting. I was landing at KLAS at dusk with the lights on and it was one of those times when I felt compelled to pause on short final just to look at the drawings.