I've never been one for much stick and rudder flying. Before FSX I would engage the autopilot soon after take off, and never take it off again until I was lined up on final approach to my destination airport.But FSX has changed all that. With the density of autogen forests now, and with the traffic populating the roads I am now flying just a few hundred feet above ground, admiring the subtlty of the terrain, and following the roads to my destination. I print a Google map of the route I want to take, and simply follow the traffic. I wouldn't have thought of doing this prior to FSX, but now I seem to have a more intimate relationship with the landscape, and I can feel sure that the terrain is pretty close to lifelike.Of course, this sort of flying is better suited to VFR, so there's not so much interaction with ATC, although you can request Flight Following, in which case being handed off from controller to controller is somewhat amusing. "Maule November 221 Charlie Papa, with you at... 300!"There's so much more to look at low and slow now, and it makes me wonder, heck what is FS11 going to look like?Mike.

Mike, if you like that, you'll love it with some photo scenery, especially if you can get some to cover wherever home is. I'm using Horizon's VFR England scenery, and it is simply mind-blowing. Autogen can be dispensed with, because the scenery's so good, and I get 50+ fps or so regularly (with an admittedly pretty modern system).I now like to head off from my local airport in my new SF260 (even more frame-rate-friendly, btw!), fly over my house (I can see the neighbour's car in the street) and then head into my local city, and from there I choose a motorway out of town and navigate by sight. It is a revelatory experience, not least because I never knew how many places were close to each or how they related, geographically to one another, till I saw them from 1000'!I can't recommend the scenery highly enough (and I've no connection to Horizon - there's another thread on here extolling their praises).Just had to mention it, triggered by your "intimate relationship" remark - too true.Paul

I don't like photo scenery for flying down low, I much prefer the default stuff.For one thing photoscenery seems to cut way back on autogen, and it also does not have correct placement of trees like the default does along the edges of fields and such. When I'm above the tree tops I like the clean, crisp look of the default textures. http://sio.midco.net/111lll/fsx%202007-01-...05-56-25-68.jpghttp://sio.midco.net/111lll/imagequad.jpghttp://sio.midco.net/111lll/lownslow.jpg

I've got to agree with SolarEagle on this one. For me it's the trees and cars which give FSX that sense of being a living world. It's so much more lively low and slow now compared to previous editions which always seemed barren to me. As you can see from Solar's screens the 8800 GTX really does some nice work, so the future looks bright for us as improvements in the hardware provide for a continuous development of the software.Mike.

Fabulous scenery! Please..........where is it? I'd like to try flying in the same area.Cliff

>Fabulous scenery! >>Please..........where is it? I'd like to try flying in the>same area.Take off from Dundee, UK (EGPN), and fly west. You'll come to another small town, and the area shown is just on the other side.Here's a couple more pics and coordinates to this first location. Its a very framerate friendly area. I get 20-27 with the settings shown. N56 27.97, W3 30.24http://sio.midco.net/FTP5/eurotrip.jpghttp://sio.midco.net/FTP5/Eurotrip2.jpg

>For one thing photoscenery seems to cut way back on autogen,>and it also does not have correct placement of trees like the>default does along the edges of fields and such.... Not so. Horizon will release a complete autogen package for their England & Wales photoreal scenery. It will have accurate placement of trees and buildings. Quite an achievement, as there must be millions of treees in the UK.Some screenshots: http://forum.horizonsimulation.com/viewtopic.php?t=196They have an autogen demo for a large area (Wales/Snowdonia). The effect of accurately placed trees and buildings is amazing. A *very* good reason to fly at only a few hundred feet!When I first used the autogen demo I thought it was neat that each treee had a shadow, assuming Horizon had painstakingly painted the shadows. Then I realised that the 'shadows' were in fact images of real trees! They had literally planted a tree in the position of each real-world tree. The same applies to buildings. We can be sure they are using software to automate this task.Unfortunately Horizon have stopped giving progress reports to their customers so I have absolutely no idea when the autogen package - or any other essential updates - will be released. This lack of communication is disappointing and hard to understand, but I can assure you that this scenery, particularly the autogen demo, is breathtaking.Best regards, Chris

Thanks Chris. Sounds quite impressive. Looks like I'll have to register to view the images though.

Thanks for the info pal.What an interesting area to discover.Cliff

>Mike, if you like that, you'll love it with some photo>scenery, especially if you can get some to cover wherever home>is. I'm using Horizon's VFR England scenery, and it is simply>mind-blowing. Autogen can be dispensed with, because the>scenery's so good...Totally wrong statement to my experience with VFR England (and some others). Just because it doesn't look or feel good flying low above barren painted ground without habitual autogen. I don't care much how good it does look from the recommended 4K to 5K feet (or higher). Yeh, it looks good there, but am I really interested in colors only?1000 feet and below is all that matters, that's where you can enjoy all the scenery or autogen objects and see how well how realistic they blend with the ground. It applies both to flying a small propeller or an airliner on final. Even in r/l I wouldn't poke out much to see how the land/sea are colored from higher altitudes. MSFS does a good (better) job with a few other add-ons that retain autogen objects. I've noticed the info on some future autogen with VFR, that I personally haven't seen yet, but stil it does not make the above statement any right. VFR England's gathering dust in the meantime.

I want both! Autogen-especially trees when low to the ground 600-800 ft. agl-then I want them to vanish when the phototextures start to show up.When low-a smaller radius of autogen would be needed giving better performane-and when higher getting rid of it would give good performance and realistic looks.My answer to the worlds problems! :-lolhttp://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg