Having been out of the Loop with flight simming and only doing some beta testing with a fairly basic installation I wondered how extreme some have their MSFS.Here I am talking about addons both payware and freeware to improve scenery, clouds, atc etc you name it.There must be some guy or gal out there who has the ultimate FS, the showpiece FS in both detail and fluidity which has possibly cost a fortune in time and money.That brings me to another point which would help me from delving into downloading loads of promising sounding stuff only to bin it because it doesnt come up to expectations.What would be your list of must haves for MSFS and Im not talking about aircraft now.And as a little teaser whats the airport in my pictures?Thanks Peterhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/77780.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/77781.jpg

Greetings. I am a stickler for visuals.I use the following:Chris Arrington's Airport environment upgrade. The latest, I think is aeu6.zip. Love those dirty runways, cracked taxiways, and pretty night lighting.Marcel Aerni's replacement wood and desert textures. 2004_wood_desert.zip I really wish this guy had done an entire set for all ground textures because I think they're incredible.Chris Willis' generic night lights. fs2k4gnight.zip and the fix: gnfixv2.zip.Blueshpere reduced visibility layers fs9envis.zip only. This is mainly to fix the bug of low altitude/low visibility layers looking way to white - like ground fog. The major bluesphere replacement ground textures, in my opinion, lighten things up too much. This effect looks great when you're flying in perfect visibility conditions, but add just a little haze and things just look to washed out to me.Nils Danielsson's sky textures: fs9envtext.zip. Without these the sky often looks too blue. Also enhances dusk/dawn shading.OceanFx 2.0 - ofx20sa.zip. Lots of replacement water textures to choose from but most of the newer ones make the water look like something out of a 1st person shooter. OceanFX is the only one I've seen that keeps the waves small enough to be in proper scale to the rest of the Fs2004 world. I turn on water and ground texures and turn off all water effects.FsGenesis replacement 38m terrain mesh for the U.S. Some of it is now freeware. I also bought some of the higher resolution 9.6m mesh for Yellowstone, Monument Valley, and the Grand Canyon. rlstars.zip. This adds all stars visible to the naked eye and works fine in FS2004. REALLY makes the night sky spectacular.Last, but not least, I use hdmoon.zip as a replacement moon. Good stuff!These should keep you busy for a bit....- Matt Duren

I'm a huge fan of photographic sceneries.http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=139131&page=On this flight, framerate never dropped below 40 FPS.The best ones are the VFR Photographic Scenery for England and Wales (especially if used with VFR Terrain), and Switzerland Professional. Megascenery is available for some parts of the US, but the quality of the textures is not that good.Despite the severe limitations FS2004 places on scenery textures, I believe photographic sceneries provide the most "natural" appearance to the scenery, at least from 1500 feet and above. Autogen and vector roads tend to look artificial and airports, roads, rivers etc. stick out too much.If flying over normal scenery, make sure you get a good landclass (I use FS Genesis) and some good mesh scenery (much is available as freeware). I also use the FScene replacement textures which provide a nice improvement over default textures.

Matt and JimiThanks for these guides I will give them a try who does the Swiss photo scenery?bestPeter

The problem with a lot of that VFR scenery is the lack of night and seasonal textures IIRC.MegaScenery has both and the textures look fantastic on my computer...not sure what Jimmie above means. ???

Hi, Peter.There are many things that can help the original installation. Here are a few of the things that I added / modified.1-Mesh, I use the one by Orlando Sotomayor, for US / So Cal.2-If you fly at Dusk, which is about 90% of my siming time, I would Dload

Hello, I am not recommended this files: Replacement moon.hdmoon.zip are not accurate phase and are not built for fs2004, even worse, you got performance decrease, the files is way larger. Keep your fs2004 heatly with no 3rd party ressource hit.BestEric

Hi, Eric.Your statement

>What would be your list of must haves for MSFS and Im not>talking about aircraft now.All of the above plus Ultimate Traffic. Simply awesome!>And as a little teaser whats the airport in my pictures?Looks a bit Dublin-ish to me.Regards,AdrianLGTS

"not sure what Jimmie above means. ???"The Megascenery textures are based off satellite images rather than aerial images like Switzerland Pro etc. The aerial images have more vivid colours and retain some of the "3D" look, at least from certain angles. In addition, the Megascenery images show some artifacts at low altitude, such as random black pixels and strange things that look almost like Jpeg-compression artifacts. From higher altitudes, Megascenery looks just fine.Megascenery does however feature night lighting and in the case of the NY scenery, winter texture. For "night VFR", Megascenery is probably the best scenery out there.

TVMany thanks 2 you and the others for spending the time to helpPeter

AdrianClose :-) its Belfast City