Guys, I was surfing and found there are some new scenery packs for XP10.http://secure.simmarket.com/taburet-geneva-photorealistic-for-x-plane-10.phtmlI took a look at the screenshots which don't look too bad with the exception of the ground resolution, which looks pretty rough.Is this because the author's texture resolution is turned right down?I'm sure in the demo the ground base textures look better than that...?

Edited February 21, 201214 yr by rabid

I'm sure in the demo the ground base textures look better than that...?

Yes, the normal ground textures of X-Plane 10 look much better than the ground textures of this scenery.I don't think it is worth the money. I would dare to say: download the OSM maps for switzerland and you have a better result.

After watching endless vids on youtube XPX has got a new customer.Does anyone know about the scenery in the XPX DVD are they realistic ?

Edited February 22, 201214 yr by ironmaiden

After watching endless vids on youtube XPX has got a new customer.Does anyone know about the scenery in the XPX DVD are they realistic ?

why use the videos to decide .. acquire the demo and try it out. The countryside scenery is fine .. but the airport and cityscapes are absent (airports) and unbelievable (cities)

why use the videos to decide .. acquire the demo and try it out. The countryside scenery is fine .. but the airport and cityscapes are absent (airports) and unbelievable (cities)

I am anyway ordering XPX is a few days.

Hello !

As a former game developer, it seems evident to me that Laminar is very capable in the aeronautical simulation space, but greatly lacking in graphics fundamentals. They really need to recruit someone who understands the rendering pipeline of modern GPU's and can author a lean graphics engine.

Are you really talking about X-Plane 10 ?http://forum.avsim.net/topic/363513-near-evreux-with-the-bonanza/http://forum.avsim.net/topic/363359-in-france-with-the-saratoga/OK, graphics may not be the "state of the art", but what would you improve first, as a former game developer ?

Those screenshots use an aftermarket photo-scenery. That is precisely the problem with default X-Plane 10 scenery. With no "fake" 2D city textures, cities look sparse and very green. In the distance, where no 3D objects are drawn, you can't even tell that there's a city. It looks like a giant golf course or cemetary.I even tried turning all scenery detail settings to their maximum. It was literally a slide-show on my fairly low-end system, but it still didn't look very realistic or "plausible" because of the sparse, clustered nature of buildings surrounded by huge areas of green nothingness.Laminar tried to do something similar with the scenery in X-Plane 8, but they eventually had to give up on the idea and re-introduce fake 2D textures to at least give the illusion of a densely populated city.

Those screenshots use an aftermarket photo-scenery. That is precisely the problem with default X-Plane 10 scenery. With no "fake" 2D city textures, cities look sparse and very green. In the distance, where no 3D objects are drawn, you can't even tell that there's a city. It looks like a giant golf course or cemetary.I even tried turning all scenery detail settings to their maximum. It was literally a slide-show on my fairly low-end system, but it still didn't look very realistic or "plausible" because of the sparse, clustered nature of buildings surrounded by huge areas of green nothingness.Laminar tried to do something similar with the scenery in X-Plane 8, but they eventually had to give up on the idea and re-introduce fake 2D textures to at least give the illusion of a densely populated city.

So the videos on youtube don't use the default XPX scenery ?

If you like fake 2D city textures for the ground, then you should try Urban Maxxx:http://maxx-xp.hiking-pa.com/http://maxx-xp.hiking-pa.com/?page_id=58I prefer OSM2XP, with or without photo-sceneries:http://forum.avsim.net/topic/363657-vernon-bonnieres-sur-seine/http://forum.avsim.net/topic/363688-alsace-and-clouds/http://forum.avsim.net/topic/363752-vfr-test-flight/Happy flying !

AI traffic is very much a work in progress, and clouds whilst pretty, will demand a lot of horsepower to render.

That sums it up for me, yes. AI traffic is weird (although it keeps amusing me to see AI "land" a 747 on Palo Alto and Dublin Weston Airport), ATC is IFR-only, sometimes lets me wait endlessly for no clear reason (at which point I of course just turn off radio and fly away), or sometimes gets stuck saying the same thing to one of the AI flyers in an infinite loop (fixable by going to the map and moving that flyer around a little bit, heh).And I really wonder what kind of machine I need to get decent (>30) fps with the indeed very pretty clouds. I have an i3-2100 which I know is low-end, but the heavier CPUs these days mostly seem to just add cores. X-Plane is already not really utilizing my current 2/4 cores/threads too well, maxing out one of them and using the other one for I guess AI. :-(

That sums it up for me, yes. AI traffic is weird (although it keeps amusing me to see AI "land" a 747 on Palo Alto and Dublin Weston Airport), ATC is IFR-only, sometimes lets me wait endlessly for no clear reason (at which point I of course just turn off radio and fly away), or sometimes gets stuck saying the same thing to one of the AI flyers in an infinite loop (fixable by going to the map and moving that flyer around a little bit, heh).And I really wonder what kind of machine I need to get decent (>30) fps with the indeed very pretty clouds. I have an i3-2100 which I know is low-end, but the heavier CPUs these days mostly seem to just add cores. X-Plane is already not really utilizing my current 2/4 cores/threads too well, maxing out one of them and using the other one for I guess AI. :-(

I just upgraded my system from a Core i7 860 to a Sandy Bridge 2600k and X-plane ran great on both. I can now turn things up a little more on the 2600kand stilll maintain 30-35 fps, but I found X-plane a little easier on frames than FSX. The trick is to start off on low settings and work up until youv reached a good balance between looks and performance. Clouds are a big performance hit, but if you turn it down to 20-25% they still look good and dont impact frames much. Also turn off HDR.Rob

Yup, I've tried to turn off things that require CPU power and turn on things that require GPU power. As long as the fps indicator in the top left corner of my screen shows CPU utilisation near 1.0, I assume the CPU is the bottleneck in my system.But the clouds seem really expensive. At 50% or so it sometimes means 30 instead of 60 fps.. :-(

I'd rather chew off my own leg than turn off HDR! I love the lighting in XP10. :)Might as well stay with FSX or XP9 if yer gonna do that! ;)

HDR doesn't look so good on mine. I have quite a lowly graphics card tho.

I don't use HDR either, and I have a higher end system. It's not so much the performance hit, it's the way it's rendered in XPX that I don't like. I think it's more of a problem with the way the Metar is reported at a lot of smaller airports. My local airport never has visibility reported greater than 9sm, it can't report anything higher, even if it's a cloudless day with high pressure all around. So, in XPX, it's doing what it's told, and setting the visibility to 9sm, and it looks like your flying in "close" fog, when in fact the visibility should be upwards of 30sm, with a nice clear view to the horizon. With HDR off the problem isn't as exaggerated. XPX is not alone in this problem either, HiFi's products could never get it right either. If the Metar cloud and pressure readings are not indicating foul weather, these software programs should be able to compensate, and give a better representation of the actual weather visibility. If there's not a cloud in the sky and the pressure is high, chances are the "real" visibility is not 9sm, and it could be "fudged" to show 20-30sm??. There are a lot of airports that have this visibility limitation, and it takes away from the realism when flying with real weather, because of the poor (not accurate) Metar reporting and the lack of "creative" programming in the weather programs.Glenedit: Yesterday morning I did a flight from my local airport, the real world conditions we cold, -20 Celsius, no cloud, and high pressure. Fired up XPX, had HDR off, it looked good, but I could tell straight away that the visibility was wrong, way to limited. Turned on HDR to see how it looked, and it was like sitting in a bowl of soup, fogged in within 9sm. It's too bad, because it does look great, the way it's implemented though is a huge drawback.

Edited March 6, 201214 yr by Muskoka