I have P3d V4.1 and Orbx Global Base, Land class and Vector installed. Plus various Orbx scenery FTX Globals. Can they coexist with MSE?

 

Thank You.

 

Bill McCracken

I would check out the Photoreal forum here at AVSIM.  Lot's of good threads and screenshots to help your decision as whether to try out photoreal scenery.

Thanks Clutch. Didn't know that forum existed. I reposted it in that forum.

Bill McCracken

Orbx is not designed to coexist with third-party orthoscenery ("photoreal"). Though Orbx include orthoscenery in all of their airports, and you can make some Orbx airports work with orthoscenery if you have the time.

To answer your question, you would consider Megascenery Earth - now up to v3, btw - if you want to fly over real terrain. Your default sim, and the Orbx products you describe, play a reasonably clever trick to produce terrain - they use repeating, fictional tiles that roughly approximate what is on the ground below (forest, city, etc). But be aware, they absolutely do not reproduce the textures of the real terrain.

The advantage of this method is that objects such as trees or houses can be placed on the tiles without too much difficulty, as there is only a handful of tiles to populate. With orthoscenery, every tree and house would need to be placed in its real-world position, a difficult prospect when dealing with a whole country, for example.

Without trees and houses, orthoscenery makes the world look very flat from the ground. You really need to use airports with objects to avoid this odd appearance. You also need high-quality orthoscenery, so that the ground does not look pixelated in low-level flight.

I own most of Orbx's products, and most of Megascenery's as well (all of the USA, plus the available european countries). In practice, I tend to fly over orthoscenery 95% of the time, because I feel that reality - "as real as it gets" - is the goal. I like finding out about the world, and seeing things that I would see from a real plane. I can't learn anything from repeating tiles ('landclass' scenery).

Because I like my sim to look as good as possible, my approach to orthoscenery is to:

- Build my own, because with a product like FS Earth Tiles you can exceed the quality of Megascenery (e.g. cover your landscape with 25cm per pixel, post-processed orthoscenery).

- Build airports with structures and trees surrounding them, so that the world looks OK from the gorund.

- Add night lighting, with Night Environment.

- (usually) Choose places to fly that are not flat - because ortho looks better when there are mountains.

Commercially-available tree and building products are currently pretty dreadful, and whilst I own them, I wouldn't use them. Once you are in the air, the world looks more realistic with orthoscenery-only, as long as the image quality is high enough. 

Right now, I'm holding short of the runway at LFMN (Nice Cote d'Azur) in the Maddog. I built the scenery today, optimising the downloaded bitmaps and watermasking the coastline before compiling. With the night environment lights covering the hills, and the current Sky Force cloud cover, it looks beautiful. And I can fly all the way to Austria over the real landscape if that's where I choose to go. :)

 

 

 

 

 

Robert,

Thank you for your detailed post. Some is a bit over my head. But I understand your concept. I just left from EGLL to LSGG. Orbx all the way in the PMDG 777. To switch sounds like a big commitment and expense.

I do appreciate you taking the time to reply.

Bill McCracken