Best aftermarket ground textures for FSX

L

Landman

Charter Member
In your opinion, what is the best add-on set of ground textures for FSX? I do most of my flying in the Western U. S. in desert and mountainous areas. I have used Ground Environment for a few years but its desert and mountain textures can be very plain looking especially in Nevada and Socal. I have seen screenshots people take of various aircraft they have painted and the terrain textures in the shots look awesome and very detailed. So what good packages are out there?
 
That won't point him to the right direction :)

To the OP, you'll have to decide wether you want to go for photoreal or landclass style ground textures. Personally I prefer photoreal, but that's a matter of taste.
If you want to give it a try you might want to download Maurizio G. and Holger Sandmans excellent Death Valley and Grand Canyon photoreal scenery from:

http://aussiex.org/forum/index.php?/files/category/1-ozx-scenery/

There are many others, just google for the region you are interested in and fsx+photoreal.

Cheers,
Mark
 
For photosceneries, there are also the nice Blue Sky Scenery tiles for several US states. There is no autogen or night textures, but nonethless they are of high quality. Best thing is they are donationware, so you can download them for free and you decide how to support the devs. There are kazillions of options to choose, if you just focus on the smaller areas and not even try to improve whole globe. I have huge amount of different sceneries from Aerosoft Antarctica to PacSim islands and from ORBX to MegasceneryX photoreals (SoCal is by the way incredible!).

If you are looking generic world wide improvement, things narrow down tremendously. There are, as you know the GEX-packages, which improve pretty large areas. I used GEXNA with FSX but ditched it when I transferred to Prepar3D. There are FScene Packs, which I own, but they are sort of a mixed bag and I don't use them. Best general improvement so far are Leclercq's freeware season packs added with his 30cm/50cm projects. I have those installed with Cloud9 landclass and FSGenesis mesh where available and I'm completely satisfied with the results in the areas, which are not part of any specific high detail scenery packs. Also, using just good landlclass and mesh can improve the overall look of the scenery tremendously.
 
Landman said:
In your opinion, what is the best add-on set of ground textures for FSX? I do most of my flying in the Western U. S. in desert and mountainous areas. I have used Ground Environment for a few years but its desert and mountain textures can be very plain looking especially in Nevada and Socal. I have seen screenshots people take of various aircraft they have painted and the terrain textures in the shots look awesome and very detailed. So what good packages are out there?
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I wouldn't be surprised if the screenshots you've seen are using ORBX sceneries. They don't cover the whole world as a tile set though, but they are so much better than all the other options for low 'n' slow flying that I limit my flying time to the areas they cover.
 
The topic is "Ground Textures". Not airports. Which is the Orbx main forte. The ground textures they provided are far from excellent.
 
The GEX products are a must-have IMHO. They cover large areas so they are generally a very good value. Together with UTX it makes FS look great.

I completely disagree about orbx textures. They are considerably better than default and are better than GEX, though cover a fraction of the area.
 
OleBoy said:
The topic is "Ground Textures". Not airports. Which is the Orbx main forte. The ground textures they provided are far from excellent.
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They do both! I only fly in ORBX areas simply because no other textures come close and now we have FTX England I can fly at home too!
 
I checked out the screenshots on the MegasceneryX website and they look absolutely [BEEP]-ing awesome. If any of you have used these textures do they cut your frame rates at all? SoCal is a very dense scenery area with all the cities in the Los Angeles Basin and the multitude of small airports with AI traffic. My computer runs usually runs 20 to 30 FPS in this area if I used dense autogen and enough AI to look halfway realistic. How much of a performance hit do the MegaSceneryX textures cause?
 
Landman said:
I checked out the screenshots on the MegasceneryX website and they look absolutely [BEEP]-ing awesome. If any of you have used these textures do they cut your frame rates at all? SoCal is a very dense scenery area with all the cities in the Los Angeles Basin and the multitude of small airports with AI traffic. My computer runs usually runs 20 to 30 FPS in this area if I used dense autogen and enough AI to look halfway realistic. How much of a performance hit do the MegaSceneryX textures cause?
Click to expand...

If you want to jump in right now for minimal cost, PC Aviator has a Megascenery X bundle right now for $11.97USD, which might give you a better idea too, if your system can handle it.
It's only available until the 7th of December...

Oahu, Las Vegas, and Reno/Tahoe:
http://www.pcaviator.com/store/product.php?productid=18273&cat=705&page=1
 
MegasceneryX SoCal is my most valued photo scenery. My frames stay locked at 30, but, I don't use autogen. Since I fly a lot of aerial firefighting missions and I live here, I've always hated autogen. I like seeing every house and tree where its supposed to be. :)
 
'Picnic' is nice for grass textures, but unfortunately is gives only short grass, like in a well-kept garden. I don’t know of any worldwide add-on that provides long grass like you see in, for example, Rise of Flight.
 
USA Ground Textures by Adam Mills over at flightsim.com, it's in 8 Zip files and it's free, also has a set for Europe. A big improvement over the standard textures, and better winter snow also.
 
P38man said:
I love these freeware HD textures same as TheGrunt posted above - from memory was about 6 GBs in total.

The links on his page are dead but all the files are on Avsim and flightsim (a bit each).

I printed the download page and then got all the files and crossed them off.
https://sites.google.com/site/aimecreations/ALCreations/download

Mountains look great. Backup your default textures first.

Try freeware terrain mesh from simviation
http://simviation.com/1/browse-Terrain+Mesh-64-0
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I also use these in areaas not covered by my ORBX sceneries. As for ORBX ground textures....I think they are the best out there. I would LOVE for ORBX to develope a texture set to replace the FSX standards.
 
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