Something that has been bothering me lately is that when flying in FSX Alaska during winter, the trees are all very dark colored on top of lighter ground textures. The result is that the autogen draw distance is very obvious and a bit of an immersion killer. It's annoying to be headed to a clear white patch of ground (to land my Maule w/ski's on) just to have it become populated with a thick, green forest as I get closer. The screenshot below is with Ultimate Alaska installed, which helps a bit, and the shot doesn't really show the horizon where the problem is more noticeable, but it conveys the issue I'm talking about.

 

 

You can see past the nose of the aircraft where the trees seem to stop, but if I keep flying, it's really just as dense as the area I'm over.

 

I have ORBX PNW, and it's a little less noticable (more due to ground textures, maybe), but it's still there.

 

I was looking at GEX NA, and saw these screenshots on their product page:

 

http://gex.flight1.n.../GEXUSCAN25.htm

 

http://gex.flight1.n...s/GEXUSCAN8.htm

 

Now that's what I'm looking for! Will GEX do that for me, or is there some autogen addon somewhere that does that?

 

Thanks!

you may want to try this:

 

Samoshin - Natural World Trees V2

Thanks! I'll look into those. Also TreeX.

 

Just so I know, should I be seeing snow covered trees in stock FSX or do I need an addon to see that? It would be good to know before I spend too much effort barking up the wrong tree...

 

... no pun intended...

For the record, these two stock FSX shots (ie no scenery addons) are near Cordova-Smith (PACV) airport, Alaska with Time/Season set to Winter, January.

There's a decent amount of snow on the trees, and the draw distance seems fine, I can see trees miles away, they don't suddenly pop up when i get close unless i've misunderstood the original question?

(plane is a freeware Fokker F7a)

 

 

Here's another shot for good measure taken from a few miles southwest of PACV (you can see the airport lights at top left).

As you see, here again the trees are visible for quite a long way and there's no hard 'draw-distance' line, the rendering thins out the further they get from the plane and it looks okay, as I don't suppose any computer is tough enough to render a zillion dense trees out to 20 miles or more.

As before, it's the stock FSX scenery, and Autogen is set to 'Dense'.

Zoom level is 0.50 which I use most of the time.

Hey Malibu, maybe you could fly your plane to this exact spot with the same settings to see how things look on your screen compared to mine-

 

Thanks. Those shots were very helpful. I did a comparison, and it looks like I'm pretty close to you in terms of coverage and color. I seem to have some darker trees mixed in, though.

 

 

 

I took these shots with FTX switched off, but it's possible that I porked something at one point and maybe I've lost my default trees...

 

Also, that area doesn't seem to be as affected by the issue I was talking about, since the trees are all on a darker ground texture. Even when the game stops drawing trees (in the distance) my brain is still tricked into thinking there are trees there because of the dark ground texture used in that spot.

 

Here is another shot near Unalakleet. Note that the area circled in red doesn't not appear to have any/many trees:

 

 

But as I get closer:

 

 

That is the specific issue I was refering to. However, after playing around with a lot of stuff, I have come to the conclusion that there isn't much i can do about it. It is just something that happens in some areas, and it's especially noticable during Jan-Feb. During December, the game uses the whiter trees (with more "snow coverage") that look similar to the GEX shots I linked above.

 

Also, just to close the loop, I did ask at the GEX forums, and the response I got was that the GEX shots weren't taken with any tree addons. I did try a some winter flights in areas other than Alaska, and I saw trees more similar to the GEX screenshots in places like Maine.

 

Also, I haven't been able to try Samoshin trees yet, since the installer has issues running on Win7...

Follow up - Looks like TreeX gave me me pretty good results, with some better snow coverage.

 

Also, one of the tree downloads I tried included backups of the original FSX textures. I de-activated FTX and then installed those backup textures. The result was my stock trees looking like the shots that Scatterbrain Kid posted. So it looks like I had porked something in FTX at some point so that my back-up stock trees were over written with the FTX ones.

 

Thanks for the help guys.