Please help me improve cities

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

Hi simmers!

I am trying to tweak X-Plane 11 in order to get the best out of it. 

Premise: I have tried photoreal textures generated with Ortho4XP and I don't like them, I prefer to have seasonal textures and no seam lines between photos and default scenery, or between photos taken at a different time of the day/year.

I have installed the following add-ons + the necessary libraries and ordered the items in the custom scenery config file as reported in Simheaven FAQs:

- Airport Environment HD

- W2XP Europe mix

- VFR Landmarks World

- VFR Landmarks Italy

The terrain looks OK to me, what I would like to improve is the look of cities and the road / rivers network. I am disappointed with look of the cities because: 

1) The roads bend with sudden changes of direction instead of describing curves like in the real world

2) The rivers do the same

3) There are no landmarks in the default scenery (it's strange to fly over Rome and not be able to spot St. Peter's cathedral and the Colosseum...) while using VFR landmarks, a bunch of gothic style churches are spread randomly on the scenery. 

It's sad to admit that cities looked much better in FSX.

I am posting some screenshots to be more clear.

Could you advice how to improve these aspects?

Thanks a lot for any suggestions.

Cheers

[tonywob 4,768]

Not every city is the same, it all depends on how much data and the quality of it was used. Some look really bad, but others can look good.

1) The roads bend with sudden changes of direction instead of describing curves like in the real world

Try AlpilotX's HD Mesh v3 instead of the Europe Mix scenery, you'll likely find the roads smoothed out more with curves. If you're not using photoscenery then I recommend you get rid of W2XP and use the default autogen.

2) The rivers do the same

Again, try HD Mesh v3. It should make things a little better, but it depends on how good the data is.

3) There are no landmarks in the default scenery (it's strange to fly over Rome and not be able to spot St. Peter's cathedral and the Colosseum...) while using VFR landmarks, a bunch of gothic style churches are spread randomly on the scenery. 

There are some free landmark sceneries on x-plane.org, and LR are working on adding landmarks for some cities in a future update. 

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

Thank you Tony, I will try your suggestions tonight :)

In the meantime I have found a video of Rome with VFR landmarks and Italy landmarks, and it's not showing all those strange gothic churches! Maybe they are generated by W2XP Europe Mix?

Therefore I will also try the scenery packs suggested by the youtube user (except photoreal textures) and see what looks best to me.

Cheers

 

[MrFuzzy 2,118]

I tried both solutions and it looks much better now with HD mesh :)
Thanks a lot!
The only thing I could not do is use both VFR Italy and VFR World landmarks, as VFR World churches overlap on some Italy objects... there are waaaay too many churches in that add-on actually. 

[paume 0]

The gothic churches spread around randomly in many cities (not only Rome!) was for me the reason to ditch VFR World. I don't know what those developers where thinking.

Btw, the video of Rome on the link you provide looks gorgeous!