Scenery Questions

[swk1959 21]

Hi Folks,

I am a long time X-plane user, I am an avid flight simmer, although I have used X-plane since version 9, I had heard that Prepar3d had gone to 64bit and I was intrigued to check it out. I have seen several youtube video's and it looked pretty good so I decided that I would check it out. I purchased the licence and installed yesterday. It took a bit for me to configure my controls etc but I finally got that done. The first thing that I noticed as I did my first flight, which was a vfr flight from my home airport CPR5, is that everything looks the same as it does in fsx. The autogen draws the airport in the middle of  small city rather then a sparsely populated county road that it is actually on. The road structures in general don't seem right and make vfr difficult at best. I know that X-plane uses open street map to update roadways etc. Does Prepared have a way to incorporate this type of thing as well? PLEASE let me  make perfectly clear that I am not bashing the sim, I have purchased it and am eager to enjoy both. Any help to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

 

Best regards,

 

Scot

[Mace 1,902]

Typically a landclass product (scenery) could be installed to make the town appear closer to where it's supposed to be.  This is the option I prefer.

Obviously photoscenery of the area would show its location best, but then photoscenery has its own limitations regardless of the simulator you're using.

Using default scenery and shaders, you are missing out on one of the great strengths of P3Dv4.

[Buffy Foster 133]

I use Pilots' FS Global Ultimate NG mesh plus Orbx Base, Vector, and OpenLC North America (also South America and Europe) and it works real nice for my area.  For places that there's an FTX region, that adds another level of detail.

[swk1959 21]

On 1/3/2019 at 7:09 PM, Mace said:

Typically a landclass product (scenery) could be installed to make the town appear closer to where it's supposed to be.  This is the option I prefer.

Obviously photoscenery of the area would show its location best, but then photoscenery has its own limitations regardless of the simulator you're using.

Using default scenery and shaders, you are missing out on one of the great strengths of P3Dv4.

I understand what  you mean by default scenery not sure what you mean by default shaders, forgive me if it's a stupid question, I am not familiar with Prepar3d at all.

 

Thanks, 

Scot

[noahjpn 1]

HI Scot,

the default scenery on p3d is not that great to be fair. I was pretty disappointed at first when I just purchased the license. To improve the scenery, I bought some FTX products, just like Buffy. These products really are great, and I would definitely recommend these.  I would recommend the ORBX VECTOR product for you. It should add very accurate coastlines, railtracks, motorways and much more to your sim. The only problem is that you must first acquire the base pack. I thought it is a lot of money, but definitely worth it. 

 

Good luck, Noah

[swk1959 21]

2 hours ago, noahjpn said:

HI Scot,

the default scenery on p3d is not that great to be fair. I was pretty disappointed at first when I just purchased the license. To improve the scenery, I bought some FTX products, just like Buffy. These products really are great, and I would definitely recommend these.  I would recommend the ORBX VECTOR product for you. It should add very accurate coastlines, railtracks, motorways and much more to your sim. The only problem is that you must first acquire the base pack. I thought it is a lot of money, but definitely worth it. 

 

Good luck, Noah

Noah,

 

Thanks so much for the reply.  At first I thought the graphics and overall experience with no add ons was truly lacking. Especially compared to X-Plane. But I decided that I wanted to run both and am committed to doing so. I have seen so much video footage where prep3rd v4 looks awesome. These are obviously set ups with a great deal of aftermarket purchases. The Orbx global package runs about 91 US dollars which is basically $130 Canadian. Prepar3d cost me roughly 85-90 Canadian. What I'm getting at is that had I come from an FSX background where I had acquired a lot of add ons over time it would be a lot less painful. X-Plane because it lacked so much for such a long time from 3rd party developers has grown a secondary community of developers of mesh, airport scenery developers, and photo real sceneries, the vast majority are free. Having said that I am very new in my journey with Prepar3d, but as much as it is lacking right now, I do have to say there is "something" that I really do like about it. I am just starting the learning curve and I am sure that down the road I am gonna enjoy them both a great deal. One of the things I have noticed for example is the at night. Prepared seems to glow from the bottom rather then the objects being lighted from the top. Is this something that is native to the sim or is it something that would be addressed by Orbx or other 3rd party add ons.

 

At any rate thanks for taking the time to reply,

 

Best regards,

 

Scot 

[Mace 1,902]

On 1/5/2019 at 12:38 PM, swk1959 said:

I understand what  you mean by default scenery not sure what you mean by default shaders, forgive me if it's a stupid question, I am not familiar with Prepar3d at all.

 

Thanks, 

Scot

Programs like PTA, Tomatoshade, EnvShade can be used to make the sim look (much) better. 

As you found out, without mods, P3D is fairly bland.  But modded it is (in my opinion) the best out there.   You are right though, it isn't cheap adding all of that stuff, but what you get is really good.  As for night time, XPlane excels there.  There are however some P3D add-ons that address night.  I will say, P3D 4.4 night is a step in the right direction -- dark is DARK now at least.

[Langyboy63 22]

You will also need a good weather program, I use Active Sky from HIFI and Toga's Envshade for textures and shaders, Orbx scenery is a must, word of caution with Vector though, try adding the features one by one and see what hit they have on your performance, to higher settings will hit your performance hard.

Freemesh if you want to improve the mesh is good, but if you want to fork out a bit of dosh, Tomosims meshes are great.

I am sure you will be more than happy with the result your get.

 

[noahjpn 1]

14 hours ago, swk1959 said:

One of the things I have noticed for example is the at night. Prepared seems to glow from the bottom rather then the objects being lighted from the top. Is this something that is native to the sim or is it something that would be addressed by Orbx or other 3rd party add ons.

 

 

I can't compare it to X-plane, as I have never used it. I started with FSX, and i got so frustrated if the sim froze during the final approach (which happend pretty often). This was the reason for me to switch to P3D. The overal performance of P3D compared to FSX is so much better for, that it was worth switching, even though I had a lot of add-ons on FSX that I couldn't use for P3D. 

I can't comment on this question, because the first thing I did after installing P3D, was installing ORBX. The grate thing was, that I could use ORBX on both FSX and P3D! You do not need to purchase it seperately for both sims.