Hi guys,

 

I was looking to further improve my realism for fsx. This time, I am talking about sceneries. I have seen many of these "As real as it gets" fsx videos online. They mentioned the sceneries add on they use but it's hard to choose from. My friend suggested me to go for GEX + UTX and REX. I am not sure about his idea. I also heard this thing called FSGenesis, I don't get the description, can you guys tell me what it does and what scenery add-on should I use to make my fsx more realistic. I really want terrain and displays like the ones in the videos.

 

P.S: I mainly fly in europe

 

 

 

Thanks guys

 

Good afternoon,

 

I for one use GEX+UTX Europe for flying in the majority of Europe and have found it to be a pretty comprehensive package for improving my flying experience in Europe. Of course there are also hundreds of other European location/airport specific addons that are also fantastic, however I mainly fly in the UK, Australia and N.America.

 

If you are looking for the best scenery out there then I would encourage you to take a look into ORBX and FlyTampa amongst others. I have a large majority of ORBX's packages that cover the entirety of Australia, North America, England and Wales. It's been said (I've seen it on here and numerous other forums) that ORBX are leading the way in FSX scenery design. They're the PMDG of scenery if you like; certainly for their respective regions at least. Here's a link to make your like easier http://www.fullterrain.com/

 

Unfortunately you'll have to wait for someone else to give you a heads up on FSGenesis as I haven't got it, however if my understanding is correct, it's a number of terrain mesh updates that cover the entire world. (Someone will have to confirm this).

 

As for making your flights more realistic I would also recommend looking into a weather engine such as REX or OPUS (especially REX as it has ground textures etc.). Most, if not all, of those on YouTube etc use a weather engine as it creates a more true-to-life flight experience and makes the sim look damn nice!

 

I hope that's helped to some degree and that you get some more answers. Take a look around the forum (esp. screenshots etc) for a better idea of what people are recommending.

 

Out of interest, what do you already have?

 

All the best,

Mesh determines your ground elevations such as mountains and valleys. FSGenesis and FSGlobal are both mesh products. Upgraded mesh works well if you also have upgraded terrain such as UTX. The problems with upgrading mesh is that certain features such as airports and water polygons are set at fixed altitudes and by default are designed to blend with the default mesh, so if you upgrade the mesh you can have water or airports on plateaus or in pits. For USA and Europe this is less likely as the default mesh is not too bad but if you upgrade mesh in mountainous parts of South America you can see these problems because the default mesh is way off.

 

UTX provides terrain data: Part of this is land classes which are tiled regions of different ground types (eg. urban areas, farmland, forest, desert etc). In addition UTX defines rivers, shorelines, roads, railroads, lakes, hydro lines and other features using vectors and polygons. UTX roads can result in increase road traffic, and they also provide upgraded lighting for roads. It is a big improvement over default but mainly improves urban areas. You can supplement UTX with another landclass product such as Cloud9 Xclass or SceneryTech, as long as you follow the UTX instructions for sandwiching the added landclass into the UTX layers.

 

GEX provides textures used to display whichever landclass is called for by the terrain data. An upcoming alternative to GEX is FTX Global, and I'd suggest waiting until this product is available before making a decision, as I think this might be available soon.

 

Orbx (FTX) regions give you all of the above (mesh, terrain, textures) in a single integrated package and also add upgraded 3D modeling and improved airports. They include altitude corrections for stock airports so they blend properly with the upgraded mesh.

 

REX is a very nice texture pack for water, runways/taxiways, cloud and sky textures and they also upgrade runway lighting and weather sounds. It includes a weather engine which is continually improving or you can use an alternative weather engine such as OpusFSX or ActiveSky. REX textures work very nicely with either Orbx regions or any mesh/terrain/ground texture combination you use.

 

Personally I find Orbx regions are the best but for areas they don't cover I use FSGenesis, UTX and GEX together. I also use REX with OpusFSX for weather and camera features.

Just to add orbx provides free mesh data for Australia on their website.

Orbx will soon release FTX Global, which will be a texture replacement pack that will most likely do away with GEX, so I would hold off on that for the moment.

 

edit: as Barry said...

Orbx will soon release FTX Global, which will be a texture replacement pack that will most likely do away with GEX, so I would hold off on that for the moment.

 

edit: as Barry said...

 

They will have to pry GEX from my cold dead hands first!