As I said before I am myself most interested in the project because I want to preserve P3d on the long run. And to be honest I didn't know about fcscenerys yet
and now I've looked at their website and it looks good, may be perfectly what we need to install worldwide scenery as desired for P3d for a little money.
I am myself a multisimmer since longtime, look at my signature, and all my sims are 100 % functional so I basically know it all what will be needed to make this work.
I will now list a random list of information here just for those who are interested and to support the project, hope this will help.
FSX/P3d are most identical in terms of functionality but with the 32-bit limitations on memory usage FSX cannot really use sceneries based on aerial images, so it's out.
FSX 4.5 is a perfect sim for those who really know it and can handle really all native fsx files, most important. This works a little less for v5 which I don't have and for v6.1 but
seems to be more similar for v5 and v6, must always be tried out.
The P3dv6 is a very strong sim and compared to v4.5 it has a better performance and new graphics/environment setup and a collection of postprocessing sliders to adjust
it. And it can run most v4.5 sceneries based on aerialmages such as Orbx True Earth, so the entire True Earth England but True Earth is not available for all countries.
It can also run the Orbx HD airports which may be used on top of also landclass sceneries but most airports are only upgraded for v5, so try it out.
The sim is at patch v6.1.1 and works well but it seems to be that LM are not really active in the desktop market currently though all sims and downloads are available on the website.
Of course again all 32-bit versions are out for the project here again.
The Pilots mesh (FS Global) is a wellknown worldwide mesh since FSX so it can be used with an older version as well to start the project but the new version 2024 is more precise.
Orbx FTX Global Base is a huge texture upgrade and here also a lot of details look better. Primarily installs and ovewrites textures with Orbx high qualitiy.
Orbx FTX Global landclass offers basic landclass based on OSM data and covers a few continents based on a little dataspace but is a bit outdated and cannot compete in visuals.
For storage in the beginning a diskspace will be sufficient which fits the individuel project. My recommendation to start from scratch is first install fcscenery for Ireland
and check it all out and than Orbx True Earth England all 3 parts and this will be a huge coverage for longtime fun and flying. 1 TB diskspace will do it.
And this may either be stored on SSD or HDD. My experience is that a SSD here does not improve the performance so much and it may be an external usb drive as well.
And for any reason the WD 2TB 2,5" pocketdrive for example works better than the 4TB. Startup times will be more influenced by the main thread but for copying
entire sceneries to a backup the very fast expensive usb ssd will be a huge advantage.
Default airports:
This is the feature where default P3d completely looses and Xplane is by far the best and for free. The P3d default airports are mostly based on FSX and are very simple
if there is no upgrade available installed by addons. The msfs default airports are simple as well and it's because they assume that it will be upgraded by hd airports everywhere.
But who wants to buy 100 hd airports for 2000 €? So the winner is Xplane here. The concept is to provide a so called
"scenery gateway" which is always active and the sim will download the current version for all airports worldwide. And these are constantly upgraded for free by the community.
Flightmodel: The winner again is Xplane because of the only physical based flight model, than P3d and than msfs which is considered to be more a game also by microsoft themselfs.
Autogen: These complete Ortho sceneries are made out of aerial images and autogen/overlay and for P3d the images are stored in xxxx.bgl files and the autogen in xxx.agn files.
Important: The xxx.agn files are mainly responsable to do the object classification and placement of the autogen, the visual appearence of the object more depends on all the
texture files in the sim. So it's possible to improve it by upgrading this independent from the placement.
Most important: To activate a huge amount of addons in P3d will only be sucessful by using the addons system for a lot of reasons. All scenery and aircraft addons must
be loaded via addons.cfg and you must ensure that all layer numbers are correctly defined in the addons.xml inside the addons folder. This can be achieved using
the free Lorby Addon Organizer and you will see how it works. Don't have the download link available here now....
Shots show Munich Area and Orbx Germany South Region Scenery which is landclass. First class landclass scenery but outdated.
I will next week or so download the FCsceneries for Germany and Belgium and do a first test. And shots again from there.
Cheers
Andreas