Is there anything available which makes the standard FSX-SE scenery colour more naturalistic?  I have some scenery 'add-ons', but mostly for airports.  I just 'flew' from East Midlands and Bristol (both HD add-ons) but the winter scenery between the two was like flying over a desert - not remotely like England (even in summer).

Andrew

Photoreal scenery perhaps? I use VFR Real 3D from Just Flight which I believe comes with it's own decent terrain mesh. A good terrain mesh is a no-brainer imho. One can recognise where you are more easily when that gentle bump is actually Parlick for example 😉 Other photoreal sceneries are available, or maybe look for a different landclass?

Hi Andrew,

Another option to reasonably consider to improve basic FSX scenery is the use of Orbx FTX regional scenery. I use the FTX-EU regional scenery addons for each of the countries of the British Isles and the overall improvement in landclass and textures which they achieve is very impressive indeed and certainly provides a much more realistic impression of flying over the sort of countryside you would see in these islands. There are plenty of screenshots from the various areas over on the Orbx website and they will give you an idea of what you could expect to see if you decided to go down this pathway.

Bill

Thank you HighBypass and scianoir.  I already have JustFlight VFR scenery packages for England, Scotland and Wales, and before 'flying' in whichever area I make sure my scenery library is pre-selected.  The 'flight' I gave as an example, between East Mids and Bristol, was in the VFR area for England and Wales, which was selected.  I also have Active SkyNext, but on this occasion it was switched off to save demand on computing 'power'.  My PC has 20GB of RAM, my broadband (because of Steam) is typically running at 55-60MB, but my quad core processor is only 3.6 GHz.  I'll have a look at Orbx FTX.

I'm not sure why it would look like a desert though. I mean the photoreal doesn't have seasons as such.

Or do you mean that there is no autogen, thus having featureless terrain like a desert? Do you have the original JF VFR Real which does not have any autogen? 

VFR Real 3D does have autogen which tries to be somewhat realistic in its placement and also has numerous landmarks throughout the country.

16 hours ago, threebears said:

I also have Active SkyNext, but on this occasion it was switched off to save demand on computing 'power'.  My PC has 20GB of RAM, my broadband (because of Steam) is typically running at 55-60MB, but my quad core processor is only 3.6 GHz.

My PC is also a quad core with a 3.6GHz processor but with 16GB of RAM but I am able to run Active Sky (2016) together with AS Cloud Art in FSX without problems. Just in case you were not aware, FSX being a 32-bit platform, has a 4GB VAS limit and this is independent of RAM or indeed the power of the processor.  VAS (Virtual Address Space) can be thought of as a part of your hard drive which FSX uses to run a session and once you get close to using up that 4GB you get an Out of Memory error message. Using resource heavy addon aircraft or scenery can put you close to that 4GB limit. 

Photoreal scenery (such as JF VFR scenery) can tend to steadily increase VAS usage during a flight because FSX has to load an increasing number of different texture files representing images of the changing areas you are flying over and cumulatively that can mount up. Non-photoreal scenery such as default scenery on the other hand uses a lot of the same texture files over and over again so it doesn’t have the same impact on VAS usage. Orbx regional scenery, which also isn’t photoreal, generally uses less VAS than photoreal scenery although more than default because, although it reuses its texture files, many of these are larger files than default textures.

If you are having resource issues, I would suggest using a scenery configurator to easily deactivate addon scenery which you are not going to use for a flight and also try moving your display settings sliders to the left. In particular it’s worth drastically reducing the amount of active AI traffic as this is a big culprit in terms of resource usage. 

Bill

On 12/5/2020 at 4:36 PM, threebears said:

Is there anything available which makes the standard FSX-SE scenery colour more naturalistic?  I have some scenery 'add-ons', but mostly for airports.  I just 'flew' from East Midlands and Bristol (both HD add-ons) but the winter scenery between the two was like flying over a desert - not remotely like England (even in summer).

Andrew

Try here:
https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/fslib.php?searchid=81927902

or search for "FSX European Ground Textures"

John

Thanks all.  I appreciate the input.

Re: HighBypass - "I'm not sure why it would look like a desert though. I mean the photoreal doesn't have seasons as such."   My description wasn't clear: what I should have said was that the colour was largely brown - like flying over parts of Spain in summer.  There were features.

Anyway, I took a suggestion and registered with Orbx, installing "England" as an experiment - and the jury is out.  I loaded my least 'hungry' aircraft (standard Microsoft Beechcraft Baron twin) for a trial 'hop' from Yeovilton to Exeter (which I have as a UK2000 'Extreme' add-on).  The in-flight scenery was certainly more realistic but switching views within the Virtual cockpit after 'looking' outside resulted in 'greyed-out' cockpit views.  The airport detail at Exeter was also compromised.  I then tried a simple push-back and take-off from East Mids (EGNX), which I also have as a UK2000 'Extreme' add-on, in a PMDG 737NGX.  Again parts of the airport were compromised - a mix of the standard Microsoft autogen buildings and either UK2000 or Orbx (can't be sure which).  I note the Scenery library for the Orbx England is loaded as separate files for different scenery elements, so I will try switching them off one at a time to see if I can keep the landscape benefits of Orbx but leave the detailed buildings and ancillaries to my UK 2000 'Extreme' packages.

Fun init!

Andrew

 

With regard to the compromised airport scenery, this sounds like a case of duplicate AFCAD files. You could try deactivating the Orbx scenery files related to the UKXtreme airports in question. You can do this by going to the scenery folder within the FTX_EU_ENG_05_SCENERY folder and searching for the relevant airport using the airport code. In the case of Exeter you should find three files containing EGTE and if you change the BGL suffix to something like OFF that should hopefully do the trick and restore your UKXtreme EGTE scenery.

I’m not sure why you had the issues with the default Baron between Yeovilton and Exeter as that should not be a resource ‘hungry’ flight. I occasionally find that the cockpit textures can be greyed-out for a second or two when returning to the cockpit from an external spot view in any aircraft but they go back to normal very quickly. How powerful is your graphics card?

Bill

My graphics card is a 1050ti 4GB

I used the Baron becuase I knew that would be the least resource hungry.  Partly it was my stupidity in not moving my airports above the Orbx files in the scenery library list.  That has helped but not enitirely.  I've just done a test flight from Leeds to East Mids and it was a bit 'juddery'.  I'll have a look at the Orbx scenery files to see what I can 'disable' as you suggest.

Andrew

I have a somewhat more powerful 1650 graphics card which probably helps to improve the performance of my system which is otherwise very similar to yours. I would however have thought that you should still be able to comfortably use an aircraft like the default Baron without resource related issues.

Just a thought, if you have never done so, I would suggest going through the Avsim FSX Configuration guide step by step and setting up your system in accordance with the recommendations given there. I think the performance of my own FSX set up has improved ever since I did this quite a few years ago and, in the main, FSX seems to function smoothly provided VAS usage can be kept below the dreaded 4GB!

Bill

Thank you Bill scianoir.  Yes I did do the AVSIM setup (for FSX-SE) a long time ago, but I'll review it. Orbx recommended I disable the files related to airports for which I have other software add-ons, and I have done that - which has helped.  As always, balancing incremental improvement in hardware (like upgrading my graphics card) provokes internal debate about a completely new 'rig' - the silk pure / sows ear question!  I have noticed that start up of FSX-SE, in fact of my computer, has slowed down.  I'm sure many people on here will recognise my feeling that enjoying my simulator increasingly feels like being an IT consultant.

2 hours ago, threebears said:

As always, balancing incremental improvement in hardware (like upgrading my graphics card) provokes internal debate about a completely new 'rig' - the silk pure / sows ear question!  I have noticed that start up of FSX-SE, in fact of my computer, has slowed down. 

That just about sums up the dilemma Andrew! The only reason that I now have the 1650 is that my old graphics card packed in a few years ago so it came down to a new card or a new rig. The fact that a new card was less than a tenth of the cost of a new rig made the choice easier plus there was the fact that I wanted to avoid the hassle of having to reinstall the ridiculous amount of add-on scenery and aircraft that I have accumulated over the years. So I really have ended up with a silk purse made out of a sow’s ear!!

Because I have a large amount of scenery addons, FSX was also very slow to load for me but I found that this was improved by using a scenery configurator so that only the scenery I needed for a particular session was loaded. This also decreases the amount of resources used which helps a little with the VAS limit.  I use the payware utility SimStarter NG but there are also some freeware scenery configurators available I think.

Bill

9 hours ago, scianoir said:

but there are also some freeware scenery configurators available I think.

Indeed there are, Bill

Scenery Config Editor 🍻

http://fs-sceditor.sourceforge.net/

This has less features than SimStarter NG as it is purely a scenery library manager, but it does work well at that. If I'm flying in Australia then I just untick all other parts of the world (add-ons, not the baseline FSX) so the sim isn't loading up my UK in photoreal and all it's add-on airports 

That link seems to offline at the moment Mark but, from what you say, it sounds like it works well and does the business which is what counts. Anything that reduces resource usage is a help in FSX and, like you, I have a rake of add-ons for these islands which are worth deactivating if flying elsewhere.

I originally bought SIMStarter after installing the Earthsim scenery for the Isle of Man where we used to holiday every year when I was a kid. Unfortunately Earthsim are now defunct but their scenery is amazing and I ended up also adding their Channel Islands and Scilly Isles scenery. But they are big resource hogs (the Isle of Man alone is almost 12GB in size) and the only option to use these successfully in FSX without an early OOM was to use a scenery configurator to create separate scenery cfgs to minimise loading of scenery that wasn’t being used. SIMstarter also comes with a very useful simulator configurator to create FSX cfg sets and I have set up a number of these for various  scenarios. Every little helps with FSX!

Bill