I just purchased and downloaded the RealScene landclass data for $20. That's $20 I could have done something useful with instead....I first tried it out around Seattle. Downtown Seattle has too much crop/grass/forest/whatever...way too undeveloped...welcome to Seattle 1903 :-lol Tacoma looks the same. Crops and fiels and grass in the middle of the city.I then moved to Ranger Creek airport...there's some commercial highrise kind of buildings near the runway...#####?! In fact, there are many instances where there are big buildings in the middle of the forest, where one would expect a small village at most.Moved to Livermoore (SFO area) and it's awful. I could barely recognize the area. I thought I had gone to the wrong Livermoore (I just typed Livermoore in the Go To Airport box, I didn't use the identifier).Green "grass" texture all over the place. That awful, horrendous grass texture is over-used with this landclass. I also got some weird-looking, hideous city texture that doesn't blend at all with the background, scattered in random "blobs" and weird geometric shapes. I was not able to identify Livermoore. The whole Northern-Central CA coastline looks weird with lots of grass and ugly city textures. After slewing around for a while I was able to confirm that this was indeed the San Francisco Bay area, but it took a while before I could be sure. Basically, the SFO area is barely recognizable after installing this "improvement". Previous landclass products I have used (freeware even) actually makees the area look more built-up. This "revolutionary" upgrade does the oposite. Now the scenery is even more sparse and undeveloped than with default landclass.Napa Co. with DEFAULT landclasshttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/65895.jpgNapa Co. after the "revolutionary" improvementhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/65896.jpgWith default landclass, you get proper textures. Forest textures and small towns/villages in WA, sandy/dry hills and forests in CA etc. Sure, some smaller towns are missing and such but at least you can recognize the area.Anyway, is the FSGenesis landclass also worse than the default landclass? Or is it actually an improvement? Can someone who's using FSGenesis post a screenshot from KHAF, looking south twoard the coast so I can easily compare?I just spent $20 to make the scenery worse, but I'm willing to try again with another product.

FSGenesis has a beta6 you can try for free. I downloaded it a couple days ago. I like some things; didn't like others. My hometown got a whole lot smaller. It appeared that I'd lost about half my autogen buildings around some of the cities I frequent. But you can give it a try. Won't cost you anything.

Will check it out. I'm starting thinking the default Landclass data might be the best available. MS probably has a whole team assigned to North America landclass data alone. They spend a lot of resources to make sure the textures placement is good and region-specific. If you fly from the north to the south, you can see how the terrain smoothly changes from forests etc. to desert. With RealScene it's just a crazy mess of different textures from different regions.How would one single person, who doesn't even have acess to all the FS scenery paremeters and feature do it better than a whole team at MS?I'll check out the FSGenesis landclass though, since it's free.

I use Michael Ouellette's landclass data for New England, much of NY and NJ. It is a nice improvement over the default for areas I'm familiar with. It's also free and available at:http://www.fscorner.com/database2002-2/02-11-2002.htm (ne_lc_10.zip)Stevewww.fs-traveler.com

OK I tried out the FSGenesis free beta Landclass.It doesn't utterly mess up the terrain like RealScene did. It actually seems to improve things somewhat. It added a few towns that were missing with default landclass. I also found a few instances where I liked the default landclass better however. Will have to do a few flights before I decide.How does the free beta version compare to the payware version found here?http://www.fsgenesis.com/Merchant2/merchan...ategory_Code=LC

I've not tried Justin's free landclass... I do have the payware version you linked to above. I like it alot. Bear in mind two things: This is my opinion, and making the perfect landclass cannot be easy. Clearly some areas will be better done than others. For the area I fly (Western US) the FSGenesis payware landclass has made a nice improvement to my simming experience.Good luck,

Is the payware version a newer version than the beta? What's different about them exactly? Don't want to pay for something if I can get the same thing for free :)

HI JimmyGHere's a complete changelog of the changes that have taken place since the free beta 6. http://portal.fsgenesis.net/index.php?name...light=changelogI'm am preparing a major update for next weekend, too.If you have problems connecting, keep trying. I am having some higher than usual traffic this morning and the server has been periodically overloaded.-------Justinhttp://www.fsgenesis.netHigh Quality Scenery for FS200x

So is the FSGenesis landclass better than the MS default? I know addon landclass is "supposed" to be better but I'm a bit more careful now :)Also do I have to pay another $15 every time an update is released?

HI Jimmy,Well, I think it's better, of course, as do most of my customers, from what they tell me, but I'm not sure you can accept my opinion as "unbiased." :-)No, the $14.95 includes free updates for the life of the product. I had originally planned on updating it more often, but then the SRTM terrain data started coming out, giving me plenty to do, so the updates haven't been as frequent as I had originally intended.As it is, there have been five or six updates over the past year or so, and there is still much to do, as there always will be. I doubt it will ever be "finished," but as long as MS doesn't change the terrain engine too much, the product should have good "legs."-------Justinhttp://www.fsgenesis.netHigh Quality Scenery for FS200x

I use the land class that was created for FS2002 in Fs2004, it functions well. And it represents Washington and Oregon well.

"MS probably has a whole team assigned to North America landclass data alone. They spend a lot of resources to make sure the textures placement is good and region-specific." With landclass, you win some, you lose some. For instance, in three versions of MSFS, Microsoft has shown rural textures in the area of Carson City/Minden/Gardnerville--an area that supports a population in the neighborhood of 100,000. That was one of the things which inspired me to write Landclass Assistant, so I could touch up areas important to me. I enjoyed your Napa Valley example, btw... You caught that one very well.... I also lived there, and immediately north and east of the airport is an area of industrial parks, etc... The population of the city of Napa has risen to approx. 75,000.... Many of my friends who still live there wish it'd look like your second shot :) But even Microsoft's default scenery doesn't catch the smaller towns of St. Helena, Calistoga, and Yountville... Somewhere on my HD I have a landclass file of Napa Valley, the way it should look, which I prepared... I'll see if I can dig it up and upload it...-John

I recently purchased the West Coast and North East 38m mesh from FSGenesis and am delighted. It is far superior to the free stuff that is available. However, the landclass I can take or leave. Having tried the Beta version I can say it is different but looking at my home area of Philadelphia I can't say it is more accurate. There seems to be less autogen buildings and more greenery than reality in the downtown area.

Hi Jimmi."MS probably has a whole team assigned to North America landclass data alone. They spend a lot of resources to make sure the textures placement is good and region-specific." :-lol The worldlc.bgl, and the landclass values that are represented are simply a modified Olson world land classification... they even "borrowed" the exact wording of most of the descriptions.You can go to the United nations Geo Portal website and find it in BIL format ( ready for resample ):http://geodata.grid.unep.chSsearch for 'olson world', and you'll find it.I believe it's also located here:http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/glcc/tabgeo_globe.aspIt would be called "Global Ecosystem"... look at the legend link:ftp://edcftp.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/glcc/gl...tlon/oge2_0.legLook familiar?MS has made some improvements to this dataset by adding extra data for urban areas and forests. But, it's still basically the same set, and probably one guy was assigned to it for a few weeks.You can actually make a replacement worldlc from this set ( I have ), but MS has added the right stuff, for the most part. So, a straight resample is actually inferior to MS' work.Justin has chosen a different dataset for his US landclass. I never did buy his set, but I very much like his freeware set, and use it. I'm sure the payware version is worth the money, and he does update it ever so often ( for free ).Dick

The raw data has to come from somewhere, they can't exactly send out a team of their own to analyze land coverage.Just importing it straight in won't look very pretty. Don't forget all the manual editing they have to do. Also, AFAIK, the data isn't region-specific so that has to be taken into account as well.I upgraded to the payware FSGenesis landclass. The FSGenesis landclass makes cities look less built up. Where the MS landclass just puts one big blob of the urban texture, FSGenesis mixes it with forest or grass or something similar. Sometimes this results in a more correct shape of the city, sometimes it just makes it look less built-up.When flying in rural areas, I prefer FSGenesis. When flying over framlands you don't just the same crop texture tiled forever, it actually mixes it with some forest or desert or dry grass or whatever is accurate for the region you're flying in. Accurate or not, it's better than the checkerboard effect of seeing the same texture tiled for hundreds of miles.Importing a big databse of scenery isn't really a good way to create realistic scenery. The best method is to use actual aerial/satellite images of high resolution. Storage space is a bit of a problem but it's still possible to cover quite big regions. I've got hundreds of thousands sq. km's of photographic scenery and that uses about 15GB of harddrive space. Was unthinkable a few years ago but now 15GB is nothing.If landclass is to be used, manual editing is probably the best way to go. Find a decent satellite image of the area, and use it to make sure landclass is as accurate as possible. Of course, this will only work for smaller regions because of the amount of work involved.