FSXCENERY

[Zimmerbz 153]

What are peoples thoughts on FSXCENERY airports?  I saw them online and the say compatible with P3Dv4 but from the screenshots I've seen they don't look much better than default.  Does anyone have any reviews on their work?

[Cargostorm 151]

Never heard of them... because they look default...

[JYW 2,977]

A little bit above default.  They do some interesting (if minor) upgrades to some US airfields that haven't otherwise been covered as payware.  Pretty cheap.  Nothing to blow your socks off but quite tidy little uprades.

[Chock 17,769]

If you go to Simmarket (this page: http://secure.simmarket.com/fsxcenery.mhtml ) and scroll down the list (note there are two pages of products). Look for any product which has some blue rating stars on it, since this means there will be a customer review of it. If you check out several of those, it will give you a good idea of what to expect.

You don't have to buy from Simmarket of course, although there are worse places to shop, but this incidentally, is something you should pretty much always do if buying something because those verified Simmarket reviews are from people who actually bought the things as opposed to the big posh reviews on websites, where they've been given a free copy of the thing and are sometimes inclined to not want to annoy a developer lest they stop getting freebies. Yes, I'm talking about you PC Pilot lol. This isn't true of Avsim reviews by the way, I asked Avsim's founder Tom Allensworth about that when I joined as a reviewer years ago, and he said: 'if something is no good, it's up to you to say so in an Avsim review.'.

Anyway, from those user reviews of FSXCENERY, you can see many of their products work in FSX and P3D (as you'd expect, since most scenery does), and whilst they are nothing to blow your socks off visually, most people seem to think they are okay with the odd minor glitch here and there. Two plus points for them are: they cover small airports which no major developer is ever likely to look at, and part of the purchase price goes to help an animal shelter. Point number two is not an excuse for making poor scenery of course, but if you are satisfied with the visuals etc, then it is nice to know your money went to help an animal rather than to fund a few beers or whatever.

[signmanbob 592]

I have a few of their airports and they do look much better than the default to me.

What is nice about FSXCENERY is that they make airports that no one else wants to make, like they did KHSV, which is close to where I live and also KBHM.

They are making their airports using Google Earth and not actually going to the location and taking pictures, so you are getting something that is a decent representation of a local airport (which KHSV is), which normally would not get made, and at a very low price.

I think they are filling a need.  I like them.  Of course I also buy all of the beautiful airports from FSDT, Flightbeam, Orbx, etc.

 

Bob

[scottb613 1,187]

Hi Folks,

To their credit - I had a few emails with the developer suggesting they include seasonal variants to their products - and they've subsequently started doing just that (+1 for responsiveness)...

Yeah - they do seem to be hitting airports that hold a very high interest level for me... If they could up their game a bit (ORBX Freeware Level) - they might be a real contender...

Regards,
Scott