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Virtual-Chris

Let’s talk about scenery

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I’m curious how others deal with the conundrum of free add-on scenery, and the wide variety of quality and performance that comes with it. 

Ideally, I like to fly to a place and then “explore” it in more detail with the drone.  For example... London. I flew the A320 to Gatwick, then flew a 208B to London City, explored with the drone, and then departed for Oxford, to explore that by drone.

Default London is pretty uninspiring. Westminster Abby is just an imprint on the ground and the parliament buildings look almost fake in their hand crafted pristine representation.

There’s no shortage of add-on scenery for most places of course. London had several add-ons to choose from. Oxford had an add-on as well. The key problem is that the add-ons that really made both London and Oxford resemble their real architecture, turned my sim into a slide show at times. I think they both used Google data and were multi-GB files, so not surprising. There was a couple of other London add-ons that just fixed the Thames and added a few POIs. Those had no performance impact. The Gatwick and Oxford airports also didn’t cost anything in performance. 

So, it seems if I want to get a feel for the real architecture of a place, I’m looking at a slide show. If I just want an airport upgrade and a couple POI, there’s no performance hit. But is that good? Is it worth flying to Dheli or Bangkok or London to see generic buildings rendered everywhere?

I was going to do a world tour, but I have to say, I’m losing interest in that as using default scenery isn’t going to provide a realistic experience and let me see what a non-photogrammetry place really looks like. But if I take advantage of the free scenery (mostly imported from Google) the performance can literally be unplayable (9700K/3090/32GB). 

ps. If you want to see your 32GB of RAM put to use, try some of the more elaborate London scenery. I think I topped out at 26GB of RAM usage. 

Edited by Virtual-Chris

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I stoped looking for wrong things a long time ago well before FS2020 and trust me i dumped a pretty penny or ORBX scenery in the past , now with FS2020 i cant complain at all about scenery since im well aware that if i wanted the detailed stuff i would have to paid and arm and a leg in the past and now for the deluxe edition we get pretty good quality over all . I cant see myself pulling my hair out writing a letter to announce that I may go back to older sims or that im not feeling this FS2020 anymore just because there's a few details missing . 

I flight out of the us alot down to the islands PR JAMAICA CUBA places i know in real life and trust me i have no complains but again i may be focusing on flying too much instead or looking for something wrong . 

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It’s hard to divorce yourself from wanting to “get down into it” and take a tour. IMO the keyword is FLIGHT.  Except for ground ops locations this is an experience you can’t have from the ground. This is a world that is always distant, and seen from varying heights. Maybe it’s a tribute to the programmers that the whole thing seems so convincing from the air that you can’t help wanting to see it from the ground. Personally, I cannot justify spending a lot on small chunks of detail candy because it’s always going to disappoint if you get close enough. Might be fun to have a more detailed environment at a field you use regularly though. 


Intel i7-11700K@3.60 GHZ. 32 GB RTX 4070 Ti OC
 

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I download a lot of scenery.  If it slows down my framerates too much or causes the sim to take a long time to load I delete that scenery.  I had to delete some Italian scenery because of this and I miss it but maybe Microsoft will eventually add these areas.  It all depends on how the scenery is optimized and how many files it contains.

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Maybe dont focus so much on cities. Explore parts of the world with amazing landscape features, or even any random place actually, wich is why i dont think you should give up on your world tour, you'd be surprised at how amazing some unseemingly "boring" places look like. I remember some radom rolling hills in the Polands countryside. Or some crazy canyons righ in the middle of Spain. 

To put it simple, largen your scale, you'r gonna be less focused on the tiny wrong details of each buildings etc.

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Ah, stock scenery with 35 fps or addons airports and scenery with 5 fps.  I'm going to have to live without a few addons until I can get a Ryzen 5600x (my new RTX 3070 is coping well though).


Ryzen 5800X3D, Nvidia 3080 - 32 Gig DDR4 RAM, 1TB & 2 TB NVME drives - Windows 11 64 bit MSFS 2020 Premium Deluxe Edition Resolution 2560 x 1440 (32 inch curved monitor)

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Thanks.  So are most of you ignoring the massive amount of scenery on Flightsim.to?

The stuff I downloaded for London and Oxford while good is just an FPS killer to the point it's unflyable... on my rather good system.

14 hours ago, leprechaunlive said:

Maybe dont focus so much on cities. Explore parts of the world with amazing landscape features, or even any random place actually, wich is why i dont think you should give up on your world tour, you'd be surprised at how amazing some unseemingly "boring" places look like. I remember some radom rolling hills in the Polands countryside. Or some crazy canyons righ in the middle of Spain. 

To put it simple, largen your scale, you'r gonna be less focused on the tiny wrong details of each buildings etc.

I think this is probably what I'm going to have to do.  It would be great to see some of the major world cities in all their splendour from the air, buzzing through them, and maybe that will be possible for the photogrammetry cities with a CPU upgrade, but the non-photogrammetry cities are not worth looking at and the scenery updates are a too much of an FPS killer at the moment.

As you say, the country side is where some of the best scenery is anyway.

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2 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Thanks.  So are most of you ignoring the massive amount of scenery on Flightsim.to?

The stuff I downloaded for London and Oxford while good is just an FPS killer to the point it's unflyable... on my rather good system.

I think this is probably what I'm going to have to do.  It would be great to see some of the major world cities in all their splendour from the air, buzzing through them, and maybe that will be possible for the photogrammetry cities with a CPU upgrade, but the non-photogrammetry cities are not worth looking at and the scenery updates are a too much of an FPS killer at the moment.

As you say, the country side is where some of the best scenery is anyway.

exactly. I use plenty of airport freeware scenery, but the cities pulled of google, eyhmm, no thanks, it looks usually bad, and it murders my fps.

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9 minutes ago, leprechaunlive said:

the cities pulled of google, eyhmm, no thanks, it looks usually bad, and it murders my fps

There are a few decent creators who seem to specialize in particular areas.    Matt88 has done a bunch of Dutch cities that are both color-matched nicely and fairly well optimized.   Same for the French and Swiss stuff by Thalixte.

But you're right, there's a whole sea of quickly done, ugly hackjobs out there, you definitely need to spend time sorting the wheat from the chaff if you're going to use them.

Edited by kaosfere
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1 minute ago, kaosfere said:

There are a few decent creators who seem to specialize in particular areas.    Matt88 has done a bunch of Dutch cities that are both color-matched nicely and fairly well optimized.   Same for the French and Swiss stuff by Thalixte.

But you're right, there's a whole sea of quickly done, ugly hackjobs out there, you definitely need to spend time sorting the wheat form the chaff if you're going to use them.

Yes, ive had a few of the early Thalixte stuff, it was for my little PC, just way way too much to handle. Then he introduced a very agressive optimization process that cut the textures count by A LOT, but it was still a little too big for my CPU and RAM. But you'r right, he's one of the best out there.

 

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I download almost all freeware airports and cities, check it out...and if they are not the top of the top or of areas that I am  not interested in, I turn it off in the MSFS Addon Linker. I still have them, but I have turned off most of them. 


Manny

Beta tester for SIMStarter 

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On 12/2/2020 at 7:06 AM, rtodepart said:

I stoped looking for wrong things a long time ago well before FS2020 and trust me i dumped a pretty penny or ORBX scenery in the past

Same here, I'm happy that my days of buying hundreds of dollars worth of addons are pretty much over, as I find the default scenery to be perfectly serviceable, and I have to run everything on low/medium due to my old pc.

I'm not much into sightseeing, either, so the default stuff pretty much works for me.

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I bought KDEN because it is my home airport. I really doubt i will buy much more scenery. Or weather add-ons. All about airplanes, rounding out the hangar. 


AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D | RTX 4090 | 48GB DDR5 7200 RAM | 4TB M.2 NVMe SSD | Corsair H150i Liquid Cooled | 4K Dell G3223Q G-Sync | Win11 x64 Pro

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