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Guest gasebah

What is all the fuzz about LC Secenery packs and FSScen

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Guest gasebah

I bought these two add-ons and I have to say after all the hype around them I am fairly disappointed.The FSScene Europe Textures are only 8bit. They look blurry even without the FS2002 blurries. Great. Get Lennart's Europe Textures. They are 4 times better, and hey, they are for free.FSLandclass Scenery Packs are a great idea, but hey, the realization lacks heavily on effort. I still have residential areas right next to my airports. For this price I expect a little more accuracy. Shuffling the textures randomly is simply not enough.The stuff surely gives FS2002 an other look. But I doubt they are worth the money.Just a little warning.If you are flying Europe get Dreamfleet's Archer and their 737. Get Lennarts textures. Get German airports and Austrian airports. Get FSMeteo. Get autogenius. These add-ons are worth every cent. And thx a lot to those freeware authors.After that FS2002 is just great fun.Had to get this from my chest.Cheers,Alex

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"....FSLandclass Scenery Packs are a great idea, but hey, the realization lacks heavily on effort. I still have residential areas right next to my airports. For this price I expect a little more accuracy. Shuffling the textures randomly is simply not enough...."You can always take advantage of the FSLandclass scenery packs, and use Landclass Assistant to touch up the areas which are less accurate (even FSLandclass itself does this)... I still believe the scenery packs are a better base to start with than the default scenery...John, Author -Landclass Assistant

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Guest gasebah

John,yeah I will try your assistent one of thoes days. From what I read it sounded a bit complicated though. I am not sure if I will find enough time to make it right. Still have to work on some airorts with AFCAD (thx to the author). I hope a lot of guys will upload their results. Thx again to all those freeware authors. Thx for your assistent John. I guess the packs are a better base to start from. What I cannot understand is why they lack of accurcy right where we need it.And before I forget, I add FDC to my list of good add-ons.Alex

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Landclass Assistant is not complicated at all - it's simple! Even I can handle it! ;)Get version 1.2. Ist very handy to use and the jobs are usually done within a few minutes (off course depending on the size of the area you want to upgrade).Regards,Wolfgang

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Guest JonP01

Gasebah,I have to agree with you about the FS Scene replacement textures. I bought them a couple of weeks ago and was quite disappointed with them to tell the truth. Tehy didn't look very realistic to my eyes and I thought the default MS textures looked more natural. Granted, there was at least a demo, but I thought the winter demo textures were better than the other seasons!

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Hi, Alex. Both Lennart's textures and Autogenious are outstanding. The only catch is that the two don't seem to go hand in hand. Autogenious will work wonders on FS default textures, but not on Lennart's or FSScene's. After much trial, I had to resort back to the original textures of FS2002 to see the beauty of Autogenious.Of course you can put the two together, but you won't see the good results; you will see lots of autogen objects (eg houses, trees) haphazardly spread on the third-party textures, whereas on the default textures you will see them properly and realistically lined-up on roads and on the side or center of fields. Autogenious seems to enhance that and increase the number of autogen objects depending on the texture beneath.That is what I noticed from all the trials I've done with them anyway.All the best.

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Guest gasebah

Dear Nahji,I can only agree partly. Because there is an easy workaround.1. Lennarts textures were created with the original MS autogen in mind.2. Autogenius was created with the original MS textures in mind.3.That means most of the autogen from autogenius will fit Lennart's textures superbly.There are around 10-20% of Lennart's textures left where you have the effect you mentioned.Here is my workaround that worked like a charm for me:1. Locate the textures where the autogen does not fit. This can be easily done because it is mainly field texture. write down their names.2. When you installed autogenius you learned that the autogen information is stored in the agn files that are directly corresponding in name with the textures. Locate the corresponding agn files.3. Replace the autogenius agn files that do not fit Lennart's textures with the original MS agn files. This is around 15 minutes of work that pays off great.Cheers,Alex

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Alex, First of all, I really appreciate this thread. I don't think there is nearly enough information on what makes the best scenery experience in FS02, and this has given me a heads up on all kinds of useful info (like Lennart and autogenious, neither of which I had even heard of before).I would like to venture the opinion that not all FSLandclass Scenery Packs are created equal, however. I bought the North America ones (both east and west) and in my flying over cities I know quite well (like my home town of Carson) I believe the scenery is done very well indeed. It's *much* better than the default scenery, and while not perfect at least allows me to have the illusion my city actually exists (unlike in the default version, where it appears I live in a cow pasture unlike the capitol of Nevada -- yes, it quite often has been mistaken for a cow pasture :>)I note that the scenery packs are created by different authors, so perhaps the European ones are not as well done than the U.S. (there is a lot more public domain aerial shots available for the U.S., for one thing, so I suspect that contributes to the accuracy).I'd love for everyone trying to fit all of these things together (the best mesh -- for me FSGenesis, the best landclass stuff, the best autogen usage, etc. etc.) to compare notes and see if we could come up with a consensus on what is the ideal scenery setup given what's currently available. Perhaps another thread on this subject would be worthwhile.

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Guest gasebah

Kelly,"I don't think there is nearly enough information on what makes the best scenery experience in FS02, ..." That is the beauty of FS2002 and this forum. Everyone can build his own personal sim. I guess for some that is even more fun than actually flying.Maybe I was a little rough on the LC Scenery packs. That might be the case because everyone is cheering them up. My expectations might have been simply too high. And yes I also have the North American packs and I think they are better. However living in Germany it is hard for me to give a good judgement about the U.S..Alex

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I'm glad Wolfgang spoke up--having written the app, any comment I'd make about ease of use would be a bit prejudiced :)"What I cannot understand is why they lack of accurcy right where we need it"There's really two issues... One is availability of source data--I've noticed that while working with Terrascene for Fly!, which uses US Survey data. Phoenix, AZ rendered with Terrascene comes out about the way it looked 10-15 years ago, when there were a million fewer folks living here. It wasn't a fault of Terrascene--it rendered beautifully the most current information available to it. Europe is even farther behind, as far as availability of current data. Granted there's quite a bit of sat. and air photo coverage in .jpg, .tga or .bmp format, but that information can't be easily converted to land use data. The makers of FSLandclass I am sure had the best data they could get ahold of given any developer's priority to come up with a product inexpensive enough for the public to buy....The second issue is one of scaling and conversion. FS2002 has a pretty loose grid system--the textures take up an area of around 1.5 sq. kilometers. That's no problem with photoreal scenery, since each texture is unique in a photoreal project. But with landclass assignments, it restricts the accuracy of the data. FS2002 "blends" everything together to make it look real precise. I'm amazed at how well it does it. I added Minden/Gardnerville to the Carson City project used in my Landclass Assistant tutorial. Whereas the land around Carson City is more desert like, Minden/Gardnerville is part farmland. FS2002 adds a greener hue to the city textures placed there, whereas it picks a desert hue to blend with Carson City. Pretty amazing!Given these two issues, the only choice is to do spot touchups--and accept that it may be several years before some of the newer land use data being gathered today finds its way into sims. And by its release, Phoenix will have grown by another million :)John, KPHX

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Guest gasebah

John,thx a lot fr ur indeep thread. For a naive amateur like myself it is really hard to judge an other guys work as I do not know the problems he encounters doing his work. However I would still expect those touch ups at least around the most important airports from an add-on at that price.Thx,Alex

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Guest gasebah

And one more thing. O.K. I am convinced

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Be sure to DL and install the 1.2 and .inf updates....I'm only an email away if you have questions!-John

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Hi Alex,Could you tell me which ones to replace? How can I tell which texture is displayed at a given position?Paul>>There are around 10-20% of Lennart's textures left where you >have the effect you mentioned. >>Here is my workaround that worked like a charm for me: >1. Locate the textures where the autogen does not fit. This >can be easily done because it is mainly field texture. write >down their names. >2. When you installed autogenius you learned that the >autogen information is stored in the agn files that are >directly corresponding in name with the textures. Locate the >corresponding agn files. >3. Replace the autogenius agn files that do not fit >Lennart's textures with the original MS agn files. >>This is around 15 minutes of work that pays off great. >>Cheers, >Alex

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