This was my home turf for over twenty years, and I took my first General Aviation flight over the Napa Valley. The aircraft is Carenado's 172 and the scenery was generated by Tileproxy. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That scenery looks pretty spot on. How do you like that Tileproxy?

Exactly what the real world should look like!

 

HLJAMES

Very nice shots. Tile Proxy looks great. I might give it a try soon. Thanks for posting.

Those look very good, John.

 

John

Fantastic shots of Wine Country!

That scenery looks pretty spot on. How do you like that Tileproxy?

 

I fly almost exclusivly with Tileproxy. It took me a while to set it up where it looked real--the default settings caused the textures to lose detail as they became distant from the aircraft. I modified those settings so I have the highest res textures visible to about thirty miles out. I then fly with vis lowered to thirty miles, so the textures just kind of blend naturally into the distance. I posted my .ini file in one of my previous screenshot posts, so my settings are there to look at.

 

Two things with Tileproxy to note:

 

One, it takes several minutes for FSX to initialize and load the textures when you either start it with Tileproxy running or change to a new scenery area. You just have to be patient, get something to drink, or lie down and take a short nap.... All kidding aside, it's just part of the price of using the program.

 

The other issue, you might notice some micro-stutters as you fly over an area for the first time, caused by tileproxy fetching the scenery off the web. If you choose to fly over the area again, such stutters don't happen since the scenery is cached on the hard drive. The caching is one other item to warn about--if you fly long flights over many different areas, you will start to see hard drive space used up in a big way. Literally tens of thousands of textures get saved to the hard drive. I freed up over 100 gigs of space once by clearing out the cache.

 

Some might miss the lack of autogen, or the lack of seasons, but IMHO it is worth it for the VFR realism it offers. You really feel like you're flying a VFR GA flight.

 

Some say Tileproxy has challenges loading in the textures as your speed goes above 100 kts. I don't see that problem--I've flown the Epic LT at nearly 300 kts, and with my settings the textures stay fresh for me.

 

So if you're patient (with the long initial load times for the textures) and if you have a PC and graphics card that's no more than a few years old, it's fun and it's worth it.

 

Regards,

 

John

 

Edit--some might wonder what fps is seen using Tileproxy, I don't know the upper end, since I keep my fps locked at 30, but with a three year old PC and low end Nvidia 1 GB graphics card, every flight is a consistent 30 fps unless I am in the vicinity of a highly detailed airport--then my fps might fall off to 25.

Very nicely done John, enjoyed them!!

 

Adam