Question: Which scenery works best overall?

[mark22 2]

This is my story of my scenery issues, so if you are sitting comfortably I will begin....I am in a bit of a dilemma regarding installing different scenery; to cut a long story short, many moons ago I used to have VFR Photographic scenery and VFR Terrain for England & Wales. I was quite happy with it apart from the sometimes long loading times.Not so long ago, unfortunatly I had to do a complete fresh install of FS9, not pleasant at the time but in some ways it gave me a good opportunity to clear out some clutter and start again.Anyway, I decided to go for a change and move away from VFR scenery and try something else, like Ground Environment Pro, except that for some strange reason and I have mentioned in past topics here, I cannot get the darn thing to work which was and still is a real shame as I was really looking forward to seeing how this looked, I won't go into the problems with it as I don't want to stray from my question, but the problem I was getting was something to with ODBC manager and a series of errors popping up.So, not to be to disheartened I managed to get hold of a CD boxed version of the the original Ground Environment which I installed. It wasn't bad but I did kind of miss the realistic feel of flying over places over the UK and actually identifying landmarks etc. Anyway, I stuck with it for a little while and added FSGlobal 2010 plus a couple of Zinertek's products to try and spruce things up a bit. I was still missing flying over landmarks, in particular a port close by to me, but I did find a file that I downloaded and installed which adds ports around the UK, however, this was only compatible with VFR scenery so when I had it installed the ports were way off where they should be, ie some ships were on on land etc.After some thought I decided to revert back to my boxed editions of VFR Photographic scenery and uninstalled Ground Environment. I then added lots of VFR objects from the AVSIM library including many trees (thousands of .agn files!) plus various other scenery including the ports!So, what's my question you may ask. Well, I am wondering now about getting Ultimate Terrain Europe, bearing in mind how much time I have spent tweaking my scenery, I certainly don't want to undo any of my hard work by installing another product which may cause damage.I am quite intrigued by what Ultimate Terrain Europe might look like, can this be used as a stand alone programme or is it in an ideal world better to use it alongside Ground Environment? I know I mentioned about not having the realistic scenery while flying over the UK but I may sacrifice that and go for a change, on the other hand, I am not too sure!I assume that if I was to install Ultimate Terrain Europe and/or Ground Environment and I decided I didn't want it, I could unistall it and have it back to what I originally had, ie the VFR Photographic scenery with all my extra add-ons. Please tell me that would be the case as I don't want to go through the whole process again of reinstalling all my scenery again!Another thing I thought of which I could do if possible, could I have Ultimate Terrain and/or Ground Environment in every country EXCEPT the UK? In other words I just have the VFR Photographic scenery in the UK only and everywhere else UT and GE? I think this would be possible if the VFR scenery is higher in the scenery library list, but I just need some clarification on that one.I think, in an ideal world I would like 2 systems set up, one with VFR scenery installed and the other with Ultiamate Terrain and Ground Environment so I could chop and change when I desired!I would be interested to know what the rest of my fellow simmers out there use regarding scenery, do most people use Ground Environment or VFR Photographic scenery? Looks like I am about to start a poll but it would be interesting to see what most people have installed.Anyway, any comments on this topic would be very welcoming, not to just me but I think other simmers too. Thanks.

[mark22 2]

Anyone....?

[MarkW 1,491]

It sounds like you are flying VFR most of the time over a small land area. In this case I think the photographic scenery will be the best. If you are flying jets over Europe then the advantage you get with FS Global, GE and UT is that the larger areas of land look a lot more realistic, particularly shore lines, lakes & roads. I think you can actually run both but not sure about that, hope this helps.Mark.

[mark22 2]

Thanks Mark (good name by the way!). I do a mixture of flying over around Europe, within the UK and sometimes worldwide (depending how much time I have!). Anyway, thanks for your feedback, I will have a play around and see what works. Cheers

[Jim Robinson 122]

You should be able to install GEPro, Ultimate Terrain, and any photo scenery desired all at the same time. The photoscenery will take priority over all others, meaning it will show overtop of everything else. When you fly out of the photoreal coverage area you'll see GEPro textures and UT roads, rivers, and lakes.Jim

[speedbird2001 0]

Mark,You have been given some excellent suggestions. In fact I cannot add anything more...except that I went down a similar route with VFR scenery, gave up because of the crazy loading times. I think the best combination (well this is what I use) is GE Pro with UT Europe, Global 2010. In the AVSIM library there are various landmark downloads that will add power stations, windfarms etc etc. To me VFR scenery is one of the most frustrating packages out because, you can for example depart say from London Luton on westerley SID, freeze frame the programe and there beneath me see local landmarks including my own back garden. You cannot ever get this with GE Pro in conjection with UT Europe. And yet it was unaccpetable for me to fly over UK with VFR photographic installed seeing England in its full glory I got those terrible default textures of..well nothing. As someone said above, low and slow VFR should be fine. Anything else be wary.Tristan