Yes

12 hours ago, himmelhorse said:

Required or not, AUv2 is incredibly better than the original. As such, i highly recommend it.

AUv2 is landclass, of course, and looks pretty dated now.

If you're flying jets - which is where P3D excels - I'd suggest considering orthoscenery. Easy to make, or you can buy megascenery if needed, which covers a fair chunk of eastern Australia.

As none of this is likely to include an overlay, it's going to look bad for the first 2000 feet or so, which is about a minute of flight time.

The downside of AUv2 is that it looks dreadful and repetitive when flying over the outback, nothing like the real thing.

A couple of recent shots from over central Australia and Western Australia - whilst there is a lot of open space, the landscape is actually interesting to watch as you cruise across it at FL350 (unlike landclass, which can never show the larger-scale patterns).

I use the Orbx AU airports over ortho without any problems, and even use the somewhat improved Auv2 airports over the ortho for second-tier locations.

 

Edited April 2, 20215 yr by OzWhitey

Oh, and AUv2 also doesn't allow you to discover geoglyphs/other evidence of alien activity:

Seeing this fellow out the cockpit window while flying over some ortho I'd made of a remote part of South Australia was one of my more surprising flightsim experiences. 🙂

 

Could you explain what "ortho" scenery is and how you make it?

3 hours ago, OzWhitey said:

The downside of AUv2 is that it looks dreadful and repetitive when flying over the outback, nothing like the real thing.

I noticed this as well. Looks really old and dated.

For anyone keen on ortho / photoscenery of Australia, but less keen on making it themselves, I would suggest taking a look at Gibson Sceneries "en-route" Northern Territory and South East Australia.

Resolution is good for cruising altitude (15m per pixel, ~LOD 11 or ZL13). Means disk space isn't swamped and you have realistic ground textures for large swathes of the continent.

AUD20 for each product from his own store, also available on Simmarket.

 

7 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Could you explain what "ortho" scenery is and how you make it?

Orthophotography or photoreal scenery, is ground textures that look like you are viewing Google Earth or Bing Maps in P3D rather than the traditional landclass ground textures most people are used to seeing.

One 'easy' way to make your own scenery is to download the freeware tool Ortho4XP_FSX_P3D. It requires a lot of patience and a lot of disk space. There are a couple of YouTube videos on how to set it up.