Best scenery for Swiss/Austrian Alps for v3?

[Heathrow to Dublin 1]

Ho guys,

 

I have the full Orbx stack (global, vector, openlc) for Europe, but as I do a lot of flying into Austria (LOWI) and Switzerland airports, I am wondering what is the best scenery for there?  I especially want the alps to look amazing and some of the towns.

 

Nothing recent seems available for P3D, so I am looking at older products:

 

Approaching Innsbruck, Swiss Pro, and Austria Pro. 

 

1) Do they work with P3D v3 easily?

 

2) Are they still good enough or are they dated looking by now?  I would only be buying if they were a decent step up from the ORBX stuff right now.

 

Thank you all,

 

Heathrow.

[Heathrow to Dublin 1]

So, will Switzerland Pro X work with P3D and FTX products?  I have FTX Global/OpenLC, and I want better Swiss scenery. 

 

Thanks

[GSalden 4,655]

Hi,

 

I have swiss Pro working in P3D.

Had it installed outside FSX and just added it in the P3D scenery.cfg file.

 

Quote :

Inside the CHPROX\CHPROX_scen\scenery folder try removing all the BGL files with "PointLights" and "RestPointLights". Put them somewhere else just to have them as backup.

As far as I know these are all the files that make 3D night lighting for the scenery, but it doesn't seem to work in P3D... so I tried removing them and it fixed the issue

 

I use Night Environment Alps for nightlighting.

[Heathrow to Dublin 1]

Thanks for the advice!  Good to know that it can work reasonably well in p3d.  I may now pick it up.

[Jim Young 2,356]

For Austria I suggest the recently released Taburet 10M mesh - http://secure.simmarket.com/taburet_austria-10m-mesh-fsx-p3d.phtml

 

Good price too!

 

Best regards,

[gpf3m 41]

I too am looking for scenery for the alpine region. Would like photoscenery. My understanding is Taburet is only mesh, no scenery.

[OzWhitey 3,353]

Heathrow, products such as Switzerland Pro are quite different from Orbx. FTX Global looks prettier for low level flying, but like any landclass product it's not an accurate representation of reality.

 

Swiss Pro is photoscenery based, and good photoscenery will give the alps their real appearance. The problem seems to be that quality European photoscenery is very expensive for developers to acquire. I don't own the Switzerland Professional product, but from th screenshots/reviews I've seen the quality of the photoscenery is quite low.

 

I spend a great deal of time flying P3D v3 in the Alps (Austria/Switzerland/Germany/Italy). Here's my solution:

 

I've made my own Alps photoscenery using FS Earth Tiles, with interesting areas (such as around Sion) at 25cm per pixel. This takes up a lot of disk space! I have the whole Alps in 50cm per pixel, with watermasking done via Google Earth - makes for some great glacial lakes to land the Beaver in.

 

Photoscenery ideally has autogen-like objects - trees and buildings - placed in their real positions, available as an option. If flying low-and-slow, this is really important. Tubeliner flying is often better without this, as long as you've got airoports with surrounding objects to stop the 'flat' appearance. My solution to this is to use the "autogen" by Open VFR - I own this product for all four of the countries listed above and it works well, though it's not as high quality as the ES Treescapes that I use for the UK.

 

To make the 'autogen' trees look better, I use the Orbx HD Trees product, which I feel adds a lot.

 

For Germany, I sometimes use the autogen from the Aerosoft germany photoscenery on top of my photoscenery, but it's a little bit sparse.

 

The next step is to find a decent terrain mesh. There's lot's available, and you should consider downloading the Freemesh X product, which I've just done myself. Having said that, I currently use the FS Genesis mesh products that are based on the Nextmap data for this region. Check out a mountain like the Matterhorn if you're wanting to copare meshes.

 

For nightlighting, I use the Aerosoft Night Enviroment products (as mentioned above) - for this region, I've installed Germany, 'Alps' (swiss/Austria) and Italy.

 

FInally, you'll want some airports. FSDT make decent versions of Geneva and Zurich, which I have. I've collected a bunch of other freeware - including from the Avsim file library - which helps in the other areas. Airports with trees and buildings help a lot to decrease the flat sensation that photoscenery sometimes gives you. Mountainous terrain - such as around LOWI, for example - also helps a lot in this regard.

 

The combination of this - with a good weather program such as ASN - makes for a truly great experience. I have all the FTX global stuff and it looks very artifical by comparison (because it is). DIfferent product for a different purpose - it does, after all, give a decent impression of the whole world!

 

FInally, if you want to use off-the-shelf photoscenery, you could consider the Megasceney earth range. I have their photoscenery for Switzerland and Italy and it's OK, but not great. I don't usually choose to fly over it.

 

That may sound a little bit complicated, but if you're willing to to a bit (or maybe a lot) of effort, this area of the world is one of the best simulated aviation experiences available.

[Fi5kuS 57]

I always thought the Swiss Pro Scenery was the best on the market, until I MegaSceneryEarth released their version.

 

http://www.megasceneryearth.com/store/cart.php?target=product&product_id=815&category_id=175

 

It looks pretty good, if you ask me, and they offer a better price in contrast to the Swiss Pro edition. I haven't tried this but Flugwerk has some very nice scenery for Austria, which is right next to Switzerland.

 

http://www.flugwerk.at/?product=austria-professional-hd-east

[OzWhitey 3,353]

Megascenery earth Switzerland is pretty low quality photoscenery (I do not enjoy flying over it very much.) If it's better than Switzerland Pro - which is plausible - then Switzerland Pro must be awful!

 

I think of buying Switzerland pro every once in a while for the autogen (I wouldn't plan on using the photoscenery component) - but its not exactly cheap and i dont know how much better the autogen would be than the far cheaper Open VFR product.

 

I came back here to post about the Austria East HD product (which you've linked to above) - as I've just checked the aerosoft site and it's stated to be P3D v3 compatible.

 

The older Austria product from this developer can't be made to work in P3D (the autogen shows up as black objects). Note that there is not yet a new product covering the west - and more mountainous and interesting - half of the country, and no one seems to know when it will arrive.

 

One last suggestion for perfect alpine scenery - the water bodies in the alps are incomplete in P3D v3/any other version of FSX. I notice this as some of the lakes I've watermasked show up as solid ground. The solution is to use Ultimate Terrain Europe for the water.

 

I will aspire to upload a P3D v2/3 picture or two of the alps when I get home.

[OzWhitey 3,353]

Here's a photo from over the Swiss Alps taken in P3D v2. 50cm per pixel homebrew photoscenery, shot during an NGX flight. Compare this to screenshots of the commercial products such as MSE and/or Swiss Pro - or a landclass product such as FTX global. There's really no comparison, IMHO. 

 

http://imgur.com/ucLqF3m

[wizzards 99]

I was looking at Swiss pro until i looked at the price,then I some how lost interest,i just wish Orbx would produce a version of Switzerland  and also Austria would be very good if you are listening Mr Orbx ,I do have Aerosofts Approaching Innsbruck running in P3dv3 and Absolutely love it

peter

[Fi5kuS 57]

Here's a photo from over the Swiss Alps taken in P3D v2. 50cm per pixel homebrew photoscenery, shot during an NGX flight. Compare this to screenshots of the commercial products such as MSE and/or Swiss Pro - or a landclass product such as FTX global. There's really no comparison, IMHO. 

 

http://imgur.com/ucLqF3m

 

 

WOW, amazing! Do you share your scenery, or?

[fscottee 10]

As OzWhitey mentioned, its fairly easy to make your own, with trees and every building in Switz accurately placed.  All data is OSM based.  I'll post some screens when I get a chance of my 60cm creation with buildings and trees to boot.   It's only a matter of time for some company to create a Switzerland Pro X 2.0

[Heathrow to Dublin 1]

Wow... What is required to make this, any guides?  I'm a total newbie in that area.

[GSalden 4,655]

Making photoscenery takes a lot of time.

I made the freeware Belgium 2012 and it took me 4 months.

 

It was not only dl the tiles but some area were summer, others were autumn...

Manually I modified lots of tiles to match the others.

Then applying watermask to the entire coastline and also cut out all harbours.

At the end with another flightsimmer we made custom ag for the whole country.

 

I have Swiss Pro and when flying at 2500 ft + it looks good enough for me.

MSE Switzerland is 50cm based and resampled to 1m .

It has lots of color differences...

Some people who had Swiss Pro too tried MSE Switzerland with Swiss Pro ag.

 

@Ozwhitey

Why do you not upload what you have made like I did ?