Let’s talk about scenery

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

basically I have:

Payware

FSDT Key West KEYW
AUscene Southport YSPT

Freeware

Aerosoft Paderborn/Lippstadt EDLP
NZA Rotorua NZRO
NZA Napier NZNR
NZA Westport NZWS
NZA Kalgoorie YPKG
NZA Oamaru NZOU

 

 

Edited December 7, 2020 by Glenn Fitzpatrick

[andy1252 3,846]

On 12/2/2020 at 5:47 AM, Virtual-Chris said:

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.

Hi Chris, I'm a scenery junkie, no doubt about it, and a big fan of exploring with the drone camera too. Both freeware and payware addons vary enormously in terms of quality and performance hit, for sure. For me the bottom line on the freeware is "suck it and see", although you will tend to notice that some creators may not do things that suit your taste. I've found that quite a few of the photogrammetry type addons, grabbed from Google I assume, don't work for me in that like all photogrammetry it works better above about 2000 feet, but at that height if it's not well colour matched it sticks out like a land tile in the old P3D environment.

In terms of performance, I don't know what your spec is, but I'm quite high end (R3950 and Titan) and some of these addons hurt me a bit. Load times are probably the major issue for me.

If you're going to play with lots of scenery you must get hold of the MSFS Addons Linker. I simply could not run my system without it (well I could, but I'd be forever creating and running batch files to turn stuff on and off). You can get it here - https://flightsim.to/file/1572/msfs-addons-linker  - and it is brilliant. I have a folder setup where I've divided the world into about 25 areas (with some subdivisions as well) and my scenery is allocated according to these regions. I can then switch either whole regions or individual locations on/off and it brings the load times down to managable levels. I don't honestly know the effect on performance of having masses of scenery active at the same time - I couldn't wait long enough for it all to load to find out. What triggered my use of the addons linker was one of the bits of Spanish scenery freeware - I had installed that with a bunch of other things and my load time was approaching 25 minutes. When I started investigating I could see that one bit of scenery had something approaching 40,000 files - that seems to be the thing about the freeware Google grabs. I'm not knocking the folk that produce this stuff - I wouldn't know where to begin doing it myself - but I suspect there might be steps or techniques that are not always being done efficiently (compared to commercial products). So now if I want to see some of these places, I make sure I turn all my other scenery off first.

Also, there is some very nice 3d modelled stuff out there as well, and the performance hit is pretty minor by comparison, plus you can get real close to that sort of thing without it getting ugly. The Montevideo scenery on Flightsim.to is a great example of that.

I always wanted a world simulator far more than a flight simulator, if someone gets around to modelling a flying Lay-Z-Boy that'll work fine for me, and finally I feel I have one. Early days still with MSFS but this is the one to be in if you're into your scenery, for sure.

PM me if you want more info on how I've got my environment set up, but definitely go get the addons linker!

[EGLD 436]

On 12/2/2020 at 5:47 AM, Virtual-Chris said:

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. 

UK is getting some love in the next update isn't it - hopefully London starts to take shape at that point

[EGLD 436]

duplicate post!

Edited December 7, 2020 by EGLD
duplicate post!

[andy1252 3,846]

On 12/2/2020 at 5:47 AM, Virtual-Chris said:

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.

Forgot to add - you know you can turn photogrammetry off? Possibly a better option if you're getting down really low to explore.

[eslader 1,782]

On 12/2/2020 at 12:24 AM, Bosco19 said:

IMO the keyword is FLIGHT.

This is my stance too. I find it a little odd that so many people seem to expect a flight simulator to simultaneously be a fully detailed and accurate Earth walking sim. If I want to explore the architecture of a place from my desk chair, that's what Google Streetview is for. I don't expect Flight Simulator to offer me a full fidelity ground view experience away from airports any more than I expect Assassin's Creed to be a racing sim.

 

[cobalt 798]

I have downloaded and installed over 250 scenery add-ons, nearly all of them freeware from flightsim.to. I manage them with an addon manager (the addons linker mentioned by others above) that allows me to load only those scenery files I need for a particular flying session -- greatly reducing load time, and, I think, also enhancing performance. So far, I have had absolutely no problems with any of these add-ons, and they have added tremendously to my flying experience. The notion that addons from reputable sources are dangerous or "mess up the community folder", etc. is nonsense as far as I am concerned.

[kaosfere 3,115]

16 minutes ago, cobalt said:

I manage them with an addon manager (the addons linker mentioned by others above) that allows me to load only those scenery files I need for a particular flying session -- greatly reducing load time, and, I think, also enhancing performance.

If nothing else, enhancing startup time.     I noticed the other day that I have over 200GB in my community folder, but I also use Addons Linker to only toggle on the ones that I'm using at any particular point.   Just for the heck of it, I decided to enable everything and see how long it would take the game to start.    A normal startup for me, using fast launch, is about 80 seconds from click to main menu with a naked sim, or closer to 2 minutes with a fair number of mods active.   With everything loaded, well...   I gave up after 15 minutes because it was still at the black loading screen and disk activity had slowed.   I wasn't sure if it had locked up and didn't feel like waiting any longer for it.  😄