Sorry, me again!

I’m having great fun getting to grips with FS9 now and it totally fits the job for me atm.

I’ve updated my airports and some textures etc already from suggestions here and I have my first VFR disk of Scotland and the Orkneys etc arriving tomorrow courtesy of eBay. V. Excited!!

So, my question:

I’m deliberating spending money on ultimate terrain, which I think I would still be able to use if I upgraded my sim and pc later. But is there a better option? FS Earth Tiles looks interesting from what I’ve seen on YouTube etc. but I’m worried about the security issues and legalities of using such a thing. The .ini file setup scares the pants off me! Although it seems it would suit my needs as I progress further afield than Europe. Assuming it still works nowadays of course!!

Any advice dear new friends?

If I remember correctly, FS Earth Tiles is photo scenery, while Ultimate Terrain is vector scenery. Remember that FS9 is limited to 4.8m/pixel.

The bad thing with UT is that it only covers 2 continents (Europe and US/Canada). If you want Central America, Africa, Asia or Oceania, you're out of luck. But if you want South America, you're still lucky: there's still the freeware OSM South America scenery...

Depends what floats your boat really.

Photorealistic terrain is kind of cool in that it is a high altitude photo mosaic map of the real terrain which you are flying over, so you could literally fly over your own house's location and you would see it below you, but the effect is only really convincing from perhaps around 1,500 ft altitude and upwards, since it is a frozen snapshot of the terrain, get low down and it becomes apparent, - particularly when looking at oblique angles - that you are looking a flat 2D image draped over a 3D mesh. Flying around in an airliner at 30,000 feet it looks just like the real thing though, so if that's what you mainly plan to do, it would be a good choice, if on the other hand you want to be hedge-hopping over the countryside in a Piper Cub at fifty feet off the deck, it won't look too good.

Vector/Landclass add-ons such as Ultimate Terrain on the other hand, place 3D roads, railways, rivers, lakes, trees, bridges, buildings etc in their geographically correct locations based on a library of objects and it will also make coastlines more accurate depictions, so, if for example there is a dual carriageway which passes your house and there's a church opposite where you live, Ultimate Terrain will place that Dual Carriageway road accurately, put some reasonably realistic houses where there should be some, and will put the church where it should be. It won't be photorealistic, so the houses and church etc will be fairly generic, but they'll definitely be in the correct places. Flying at night you'll see accurate street lighting and traffic lighting etc over those accurately-placed streets and roads.

Lots of the stuff UT does is customisable, so you can play about with it a bit to get it looking how you prefer. Considering Ultimate Terrain costs 30 quid, and covers either all of Europe, or all of the US depending on which one you buy, it's quite a lot of bang for your bucks and will certainly make the places you fly to look more like they do in real life than the default FS2004 scenery does.

There is nothing stopping you from using either one, or both of these scenery solutions, it depends on what you prefer visually, and only you can decide that.

5 hours ago, Chock said:

Depends what floats your boat really.

Photorealistic terrain is kind of cool in that it is a high altitude photo mosaic map of the real terrain which you are flying over, so you could literally fly over your own house's location and you would see it below you, but the effect is only really convincing from perhaps around 1,500 ft altitude and upwards, since it is a frozen snapshot of the terrain, get low down and it becomes apparent, - particularly when looking at oblique angles - that you are looking a flat 2D image draped over a 3D mesh. Flying around in an airliner at 30,000 feet it looks just like the real thing though, so if that's what you mainly plan to do, it would be a good choice, if on the other hand you want to be hedge-hopping over the countryside in a Piper Cub at fifty feet off the deck, it won't look too good.

Vector/Landclass add-ons such as Ultimate Terrain on the other hand, place 3D roads, railways, rivers, lakes, trees, bridges, buildings etc in their geographically correct locations based on a library of objects and it will also make coastlines more accurate depictions, so, if for example there is a dual carriageway which passes your house and there's a church opposite where you live, Ultimate Terrain will place that Dual Carriageway road accurately, put some reasonably realistic houses where there should be some, and will put the church where it should be. It won't be photorealistic, so the houses and church etc will be fairly generic, but they'll definitely be in the correct places. Flying at night you'll see accurate street lighting and traffic lighting etc over those accurately-placed streets and roads.

Lots of the stuff UT does is customisable, so you can play about with it a bit to get it looking how you prefer. Considering Ultimate Terrain costs 30 quid, and covers either all of Europe, or all of the US depending on which one you buy, it's quite a lot of bang for your bucks and will certainly make the places you fly to look more like they do in real life than the default FS2004 scenery does.

There is nothing stopping you from using either one, or both of these scenery solutions, it depends on what you prefer visually, and only you can decide that.

That was really helpful. Thanks👍

I’m definitely flying at lower altitudes atm so that is something to bear in mind, although I’m erring more towards the photo realistic because I want to be able to fly vfr locally and the Earth Tiles solution should let me do that myself once I get my head around it.

Budget, obviously is also a factor. As I’m retired I have to meme my hobby pennies count so I don’t want to spend somewhere wher it could be used better elsewhere!

All that said, the basic enjoyment I get from fs9 each day as I learn more is great!

Nice to see newcomers to FS9.

Fsearthtiles is great I use it for small areas but you could use it for larger. the uk vfr scenery on CD like you have is fantastic, I have it for the whole country so if you can find the rest on Ebay I suggest buying it. I have used FSearthtiles to update some of the areas as its a little old now and for example in my home area some new housing estates where missing.

 

There was a great project on this site, www.shepsshed.com , however looking today it's no longer active. It was a collection of autogen trees so you had quite a few areas where you had proper tree coverage over your photoscenery. I have a lot downloaded so maybe I will see if I can somehow contact the author and he might allow it to be loaded into the avsim scenery library. It's a great shame we are often losing some of the great websites and there addons.

 

I also recommend taking a look at this website for scenery it has a big list of free scenery. It covers the whole world and is updated regularly. Here's the link to the UK section.

http://www.freewarescenery.com/fs2004/uk.html

 

Enjoy your journey into fs9. May I recommend one additional item. Weather. You can get a couple of weather addons for your sim which inject the current real weather into your sim making it much better. If you scroll down the forum a bit you'll find a couple of topics. I recommend FSGRW but it's a bit pricey. (sorry for the topic divergence there)

 

 

 

 

Edited September 26, 20187 yr by domvc10

4 hours ago, domvc10 said:

Nice to see newcomers to FS9.

Fsearthtiles is great I use it for small areas but you could use it for larger. the uk vfr scenery on CD like you have is fantastic, I have it for the whole country so if you can find the rest on Ebay I suggest buying it. I have used FSearthtiles to update some of the areas as its a little old now and for example in my home area some new housing estates where missing.

 

There was a great project on this site, www.shepsshed.com , however looking today it's no longer active. It was a collection of autogen trees so you had quite a few areas where you had proper tree coverage over your photoscenery. I have a lot downloaded so maybe I will see if I can somehow contact the author and he might allow it to be loaded into the avsim scenery library. It's a great shame we are often losing some of the great websites and there addons.

 

I also recommend taking a look at this website for scenery it has a big list of free scenery. It covers the whole world and is updated regularly. Here's the link to the UK section.

http://www.freewarescenery.com/fs2004/uk.html

 

Enjoy your journey into fs9. May I recommend one additional item. Weather. You can get a couple of weather addons for your sim which inject the current real weather into your sim making it much better. If you scroll down the forum a bit you'll find a couple of topics. I recommend FSGRW but it's a bit pricey. (sorry for the topic divergence there)

 

 

 

 

Hey, don’t apologise! I’ll take all the advice and tips going. I have ordered a couple of vfr disks from eBay so it’ll be good to see what they look like. I’ve also started to use some FSET tiles to cover South Yorkshire, which is great for high altitude but I now am looking how I can ‘model’ that a bit better with some trees, buildings etc. I’m sure these libraries still exist somewhere I just gotta find em!

I downloaded FSRealWX - but I haven’t really used it in anger yet... 🙂

Autotrees is quite good at placing autogen trees for you in your scenery that you make from fsearthtiles. It's a bit buggy and I have never managed to get it to cover a very large area without crashing but for smaller areas it works pretty well.

https://library.avsim.net/search.php?SearchTerm=autotrees&CatID=fs2004sd&Go=Search

Edited September 26, 20187 yr by domvc10

Welcome to the FS9 party, FS9 still delivers much enjoymant! I also recommend getting a good weather add-on like Active Sky Evolution or one of the many freeware ones (although for me ASE is the best hands down - but still expensive).

12 hours ago, sascha said:

Welcome to the FS9 party, FS9 still delivers much enjoymant! I also recommend getting a good weather add-on like Active Sky Evolution or one of the many freeware ones (although for me ASE is the best hands down - but still expensive).

Thanks, I’m still experimenting with weather so all suggestions welcome. I’ve also seen people rave about your Evo textures so I may have to consider those at some point too... for an old platform this can still work out costly! 😂