FTX Global or Photoscenery for Commercial Flying?

[gandy 18]

Hi Mark,

 

As long as FSAltitude sits below your other photoreal scenery in the scenery library it will be fine. I used FSAltitude Western Europe for ages with other photoreal on top of it and had no issues.

[skully 1,045]

Photoscenery all the way! That's the way it looks in real life at altitude.

99% of the time I'm flying routes over the Southwest U.S.

At cruise I have the time to enjoy the sightseeing and I'm always spotting interesting geo formations and lakes or obscure airports in remote locations. Many times I'll note the nearest airport or coordinates and go back later and check it out low and slow. 

There is truly a staggering amount to see and explore out there that you'll never get to find and experience if you're not using photoscenery.

UTX lighting works great with all of my photoscenery and gives me the pitch black ground with only city lights glowing just like real life.

This is what works for me but preferences vary for others.

[coturnix 1]

Just like gandy says, you can use it with any tipe of terrain addon. FS Altitude only works at a certain distance from your aircraft. This means your plane is at the center of a circle of "x" radius. Inside this circle you won´t ever see FS Altitude textures, only the photoscenery/whatever terrain you have for the area (or default terrain if you have nothing). This circle always has the same radius and stays in the ground, so the higher you go, the smaller it becomes and the more you see of FS Altitude.

 

Once you are at FL30 and similar, you really need to contort your head out of the cockpit to see the circle down there without FS Altitude (or just go to external view and see directly down) so it works really well for those flights, the effect is very convincing (even more if you use weather).

 

Once you start to descend the "void zone" circle obviously gets bigger the lower you go, showing whatever terrain you use for the area you are in. With the old megascenery earth based on tiles you could get only those tiles near the airports and let FS Altitude take care of the cruise (and it was not coincidence that those airports usually rested in the conjunction of 4 tiles ).

 

For flying low and slow it´s better to disable FS Altitude altogether (one entry in the scenery library for each product). Mountains outside the "void zone" will show FS Altitude textures, noticeable even standing on the ground. But it´s just two clicks to enable/disable it.

 

For me it´s the perfect photoscenry for high altitude flying, one DVD for Europe, two for USA (plus caribbean) and another for Australia. Try covering an entire continent with normal photoscenery... :wacko:

[klamal 282]

Nathan, it's a tough choice for me. Wish we could have the best of both worlds.

 

As GSalden said in his post above, you kind of can have the best of both worlds now with openVFR and photoreal scenery.  There are still drawbacks to this though as well.

 

I have my own homemade photoreal scenery for Norway and bought the openVFR for that country.  It does what you want - autogen on top of photo real.  The only caveat to this is that it is only as good as the source data used to generate/place that autogen.  They use OSM data which isn't perfect either.  For example, west and north of ENGM there are large forests that have lakes in them.  Well, whoever made the OSM definitions for this area didn't bother to "carve" out the lakes.  So, you will see trees in the middle of the lakes since to FSX, it is just one big forest.

 

FSAltitude, from the last time I looked at it or read any reviews on it is ok.  However, they don't use very good resolution for their photoreal source imagery - I want to say it's only at 4m(correct me if I'm wrong).  So, that will look fine at FL350 but not so much the lower you get.  50cm resolution, like MSE v2 for the states, can almost(and, I emphasize the word almost here) look really good and convincing even as low as 500 feet.  Of course you still lose the immersion when you look towards the horizon and don't see anything 3d as you get lower and lower.

 

Your other alternative is to use the FSX SDK and annotate the photo real yourself.  Not hard, but very very time consuming.

 

 

As long as FSAltitude sits below your other photoreal scenery in the scenery library it will be fine. I used FSAltitude Western Europe for ages with other photoreal on top of it and had no issues.

 

Now that would be interesting and nice for the "fill in" areas where I don't already have photoreal scenery.

I used to absolutely hate photo real scenery too for the lack of autogen.  The feeling like "you're on the moon" when you're sitting at an airport really stinks.  I know.  But, now, I can't fly without photo real.  I've gotten used to the flatness part and it doesn't bother me.  Plus, if you have a lot of good airport sceneries, you usually don't notice it too much with the exception of the few seconds on final or departure.  But, that's maybe 2% of your flight time so I can live with that and would much rather have the more real(IMO) view of what's out there with photo real vs the land class system that can't come close to real.

FTX-G and GEX can't come close to matching the color palette of mother nature.  Photo real can come close.  However, it is of course only for that single moment in time that the photo was taken.  But, still, this still represents a more real view of what you'd really see if you can look past this.  Even if only at one particular season and time of day - it's really what is there.  FTX-G and GEX colors are just artists impressions of what's there or what the colors should be and there just isn't a wide enough variety of them like you can get in the real world.  It's probably impossible for these products to even come close on today's computers/storage space.

 

I think some of why FTX-G has this "wow factor" right now is that it's different.  Different can be perceived as better just based on the simple fact that it is different.  It would be interesting to see in two years of someone using FTX-G only we could then have them go back to GEX without any update.  I bet a lot of people would then again be saying "wow, I can't believe how my sim looks like what FS11 would have been." even though they went back to using something that they think now is worse than FTX-G.

Anyway, having said all this, it still is a matter of personal opinion.  It's all a matter of what looks the most real to you.  No one else can tell you otherwise.  There is no definitive better or worse answer here.  In this case, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder and whether or not you can look past the negatives of whatever product you decide to choose.  They both have their negatives and both have their positives as has been said many times.

[e51f8e0401548d7940caf01724 16]

I thought you'd already purchased FTX Global and the patch deleted it like it does with pirated copies, then you rebooted and Global was back?  :huh:

 

Most confusing indeed...

[ComSimPilot 623]

I had the same thoughts.First, I discovered Tileproxy, but system resourcses was precious to be spent for tile converting, so I spent a lot of money buying photoscenery for Europe. When I discovered photoscenery I could't live with the old default textures any more. I could stare at the real terrain!

However, the fact that during final approach or after takeoff, I was seeing a flat surface, was not realistic either. 

When I first heard about FTX Global and saw some videos I thought ''its like a video game's fake scenery, it is not real''.But, after some thoughts I decided to buy it and see how it feels. I also installed UTX Europe.I was amazed! I started doing comparisons between photoscenery and FTXG. First, FTXG has beautiful colors. You see vivid colors witch mach your favorites payware airplanes. Thats 'eye candy' you may think, but yes eye candy is important when something should be realistic. It satisfies your mind that this is realistic. Secondary, you see 3D buildings and vegetation, cars etc, in realistic positions and densities. 

The cons...you don't see the real buildings and trees. You don't see the real roads in many cases. You don't see the real image as a photo of course. But, my conclusion after some thought and after having spent a lot of money for photoscenery that right now stay uninstalled in my hard drives, is that what matters most is not if you see the real picture, but if what you see satisfies your brain for being realistic. Of course there are exceptions. For example the Greek islands can't look realistic at all if you are not using photoscenery. Other places also. But it seems we can't have it all. At least for now. 

I used OpenVFR autogen, but the result wasn't realistic to my mind either. It seems this is the best approach, but OpenVFR didn't gave me the autogen density I wanted. FTXG along with UTX and maybe the LC product they are about to release sson, for the moment is the most realistic expirience to me in the market. When you fly high altitude however, nothing can beet photoscenery. That's a fact. But after all, we are using flight simulators, we are use computer simulated aircrafts, not photo-aircrafts, we use computer simulated airports, not photopictured airports etc. So, to my mind it is a fair thing to have a computer simulated terrain, with 3D autogen not in the real life positions.

 

To sum up, what matters most for me is the 'flying simulation feeling' than the real position of a house, a field or a road. Something also very important is that FPS is better for me than using photoscenery, I don't have OOM errors (I least there are greatly minimised) and the setup is cleaner with less HD space, and less scenery library priority frustrations. All these, especially FPS, add to a more realistic expirience.

 

I don't know, I may change my mind again in the future, but this is how I see it now.

 

PS. The best solution for the future, would be photoscenery, color corrected everywhere, with the real 3D buildings as GoogleMaps shows in many cities now. Something like the new 'New York X' product. Maybe in 10-15 years from now we will be flying in a 3D simulator that uses all that real data without having memory issues! 

[Manny 1,293]

For me normal photoscenery is overkill for commercial flying in the high flight levels. I use FS Altitude and find it just the right thing for that. When i´m flying lower and slower i switch to regular photoscenery.

 

And agree that you should try both. People usually is entrenched in one of the two alternatives and stick to that for their FS world (photoscenery junkies like me or "give me terrain with autogen" people).

 

 

I am with you. I only wish FS Altitude puts out a slightly higher resolution than what they currently have... not to the level of MS v2 but tad  bit higher resolution than they have. Photoscenery is so much better for altitude flying.  When you come down on approach to land then you need something like FTX or Megascenrery with autogens

[Flyboy 4]

After following (and participating) around thousand duscussions about photoreal versus landclass I think I can honestly say your question is utterly useless... Give both options a try and use what you like most. Simple as that. ^_^

You know... It is guys like you and some others on here that are really the useless ones....

Many of the simmers look up to the experienced simmers and are learning just as we did... with questions that yes, may have been asked but by being a jerk you give new simmers a simmers complex...

Knock it of...

If you don't have anything nice to say or cant give advice in a respectful manner...

Keep your nose out of the forums...

FB53

Will Charles

[NWATech 95]

Combo of both. Repeating textures at altitude without photo.

 

DOH!!! 2 year old thread raised from dead.

 

In before the lock!  :smile:

[skully 1,045]

Combo of both. Repeating textures at altitude without photo.

 

DOH!!! 2 year old thread raised from dead.

 

In before the lock!  :smile: