I've recently bought a few V3 Megascenery Earth photoscenery add-ons. Although I am frankly disappointed by the lack of resolution compared to what I was hoping for, (I thought it might be as good as Google Maps but it seems not to be - at least in Australia), they are nevertheless a mildly entertaining way to keep my attention till I move to the new MS platform. Of course the obvious problem with this sort of scenery is you lose so much - all autogen, all stock buildings, pretty much all objects except a tiny few like windsocks. I realise I could probably buy airports to layer on top but it is pointless (and very expensive) with my 10 year old old system, especially when it really only runs stock FSX OK with payware aircraft add-ons - and I am holding out for the new sim where I will build a brand new state of the art rig.

Anyway, that had me wondering if there was some sort of slick utility running around (happy for payware) that, for example, when a pre-determined parameter or set of parameters is met, it changes the FSX configuration "on the fly" - quite literally. An example might be within 4 nm of your flight plan departure and destination airports (just for arguments sake) it runs the stock scenery and outside of those areas runs the photoscenery.

Yes, of course I could manually do all of that. But to really do it right I would have to save the flight, change the scenery config within FSX, exit FSX altogether, "swap in" a different fsx.cfg file (since my config settings are different with the photoscenery versus the stock scenery) and fire the sim up again then go flying from where I left off. Do-able, yes, but obviously not what I am asking for.

I realise the answer is probably no and I would just have to save the flight, exit the sim, reconfigure everything and start flying again. It is obviously a difficult compromise when this photoscenery by nature kills everything else off. I knew that going in and will obviously live with the compromises (otherwise I wouldn't have bought it), but I was just hoping someone might have found a slick way to do all of this.

5 hours ago, JonP01 said:

Of course the obvious problem with this sort of scenery is you lose so much - all autogen, all stock buildings, pretty much all objects except a tiny few like windsocks. 

Jon,

Using photoscenery only results in losing autogen but not all stock buildings that are “hard coded” for lack of a better term into the  sim. For example city centers, landmarks and things like that that are placed into the sim using bgls will still remain. If you go into riot scenery directory you’ll find the folders with city scenery folders for Dallas, Miami, etc. Each of those city bgls contains all the buildings/landmarks, stadiums etc that are going to display when using photoscenery.

I use a lot of MSE titles and all my objects display just not autogen trees and buildings.

As far as a utility that does what you want, I’m not aware of one. However, what you can do when your 10 miles out or whatever from landing, just pause the sim, open the scenery library from the pull down menu, uncheck the entry you’re flying in, hit ok to save it, and the sim will do a quick reload without the MSE showing and you can resume the flight and land with autogen. Not the quickest but saving the flight, exiting the sim and all that other stuff is not necessary.

So are you saying your default airport buildings also remain? I still have all the city objects - it is just the buildings and objects on the airports themselves that are missing (except windsocks).

10 hours ago, JonP01 said:

So are you saying your default airport buildings also remain? I still have all the city objects - it is just the buildings and objects on the airports themselves that are missing (except windsocks).

Yes default airport buildings will remain and are not in anyway affected to using photoscenery. 

The only way this could happen is if the photoscenery itself comes with custom AFCADs that install to align the airport with the photoreal background. Sometimes these AFCADs have the objects set to only show if you have the Scenery Complexity slider turned way up. That being said, I’m not aware of any of the newer MSE titles including AFCADs but you might want to check the directory that the bgls are installed to just to double check.

Another way to check would be to start a flight at one of the airports thats affected and turn the Scenery Complexity slider all the way up and see if the building that are missing show up. If they show up then it’s a sign that another AFCAD could be in use. 

One other thing to try would be to go into the Scenery library, uncheck a photoreal area that is causing this and load a flight. If the building load then it’s another sign that MSE might have come with an AFCAD that requires higher Scenery Complexity to be turn up.

Try those suggestions and report back your findings.

Thanks very much for the suggestions. Good news is your suggestion fixed the buildings issue with Delaware (I have bought South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Washington and the whole of eastern Australia but have only installed Australia and Delaware - a freebie - so far. I am waiting to buy a bigger hard drive). But the same person who did the alignment BGLs for Delaware has done them for the other US states I have bought. So I am assuming they did them consistently - viz, scenery has to be at Dense or higher for them to display as you mentioned (I just had it at normal - that was my problem).

Australia is sadly a different kettle of fish. The alignments in this case are "baked in" to the product and no amount of fiddling gets the stock buildings to show. Not sure why they did it this way - why not just allow them to display, not everyone has replaced every airport in Australia!

Anyway, I will see what Megascenery Earth say about it. If worst comes to worst, I guess in Australia there won't be buildings unless I have third party airports for the whole lot - obviously not a good solution. I know there are packages around but I think with such an old machine (ten years old now) and the new sim coming, i will just leave it as is - flat ground.