Top tier Airport Scenery Developers

[Anxu00 176]

All,

Over the years I have bought too many airport sceneries.  Reinstalling them all is always a major pain, as well as keeping up to avoid OOM etc.  So I would like to just narrow down to a few reliable developers and throw out the rest.  Here is my list of good ones:  FSDT, FB, Fly Tampa, PacSim, 29 Palms, "ORBX" (in quote because many ORBX airports are resource hogs, but their regions are good).

Questionable: Taxi2Gate, LatinVFR, Drzewiecki Design, Aerosoft, SimAddons, my experience with these developers are so so performance, and most are resource hogs. Any of these will be thrown out and not reinstalled

What are your thoughts?

[Gregg_Seipp 568]

UK2000, FlightBeam.  Turbulent Design, perhaps.  Sometimes airports perform poorly due to the surrounding area...FlyTampa Toronto.  LatinVFR and Taxi2Gate have improved quite a lot.  Honestly, there are some smaller names who make smaller no-frills airports that look really nice and don't impact performance much at all. 

[Anxu00 176]

Since returning to flight simming back in 2010, I went into a long spending spree and ended up with just too many sceneries.  It's gluttonous.  The yearly upgrade from P3D 1.4 to 3.4 and the accompanied re-installation was also brutal.  All new scenery purchase came to a stop last year as I reassess what I do as I spent more time choosing the optimal install versus flying.  It's painful to decide not to install that package you paid good money for, but I was really tired of keeping track of updates.  I am in the middle of a reinstall with P3Dv3.4 due to a HD change, which is the reason why I am now reevaluating to choose only the very best and good ones that I use often.  I also have the REX Airport HD too, so the defaults look pretty decent.  

[Mikelab6 89]

To avoid OOM, install P3Dv4 instead of reinstalling v3 ...

Mike

[ShawnG 1,823]

my philosophy shifted as soon as I installed v4.  the reinstall is a pain, definitely, made somewhat better by the orbx direct, and the new addon method should keep reinstalls to a minimum once the original work is done.  the main thing is OOM.  I didn't like to have too many addons in an area, and I was constanly switching addons on and off for flights.  Not. Anymore.  So I've gone on a bit of a spree...

first the heavyweights:  FSDT, flightbeam, ORBX, FlyTampa, and 29Palms.  while I wince just a little bit and I'm thinking that fsdt's exalted position might be (just a bit) oversold, due to performance, quality, and couatl,  they DO have a lot of really major hubs covered that wouldn't be available in good quality elsewhere, so... ok  (and I like Vancouver and Houston a whole lot)  otherwise, hard to go wrong with anything these guys put out.

Aerosoft... depends on the scenery, they're a publisher, not a developer.  DD I love, especially since I can use their cities in v4 with no OOM,  taxi2gate and latin VFR,  nothing really wrong there in my book.  PacSim has really upped their game since their first sceneries as well.

however, if you only use the big names, you are missing out on a lot of really really good stuff.  JustSim, Jetline, rfscenerybuilders... all really really solid stuff,  and since I bought Digital design's Salzburg and Leipzig-Halle recently, I might even elevate them into the first group...