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It's gotta look good!

spotlope said:
If the shorelines in FSX bug you, you will be thrilled with Ultimate Terrain X. In fact, I had UTX installed when I was designing Plum Island, which uses aerial photography for the terrain. At all the edges where my phototerrain ran out, it blended perfectly (and I mean perfectly) with the UTX shorlines and waterways. You can't get any better than that.
Click to expand...


Hi Bill,

Plum Island looks fantastic! Great work and definitily a keeper. Not meaning to be a buzzkill or anything, but from a couple of screenshots I've seen the water still looks, well, FSX. I have not flown the Plum Island Addon so I'm talking out my rear end a little here. Once I fly it (which I plan too) maybe I'll see different.

http://www.screenshotartist.co.uk/plum_island_review.htm



Codeseven

Edit: I tried to post just the water pic's.
 
codeseven said:
Hi Bill,

Plum Island looks fantastic! Great work and definitily a keeper. Not meaning to be a buzzkill or anything, but from a couple of screenshots I've seen the water still looks, well, FSX. I have not flown the Plum Island Addon so I'm talking out my rear end a little here. Once I fly it (which I plan too) maybe I'll see different.

http://www.screenshotartist.co.uk/plum_island_review.htm



Codeseven

Edit: I tried to post just the water pic's.
Click to expand...

I'll let you in on a little :gossip: ... the water is FSX! Okay, sarcasm mode off. The photoscenery in Plum Island does enhance the water a bit by adding more blending colors and details, but the wave height is a separate thing altogether, and not something I addressed. With a little tweaking, you can even make this look 100% better, but it takes some work on the part of the user.
 
spotlope said:
I'll let you in on a little :gossip: ... the water is FSX! Okay, sarcasm mode off. The photoscenery in Plum Island does enhance the water a bit by adding more blending colors and details, but the wave height is a separate thing altogether, and not something I addressed. With a little tweaking, you can even make this look 100% better, but it takes some work on the part of the user.
Click to expand...

Fair enough, thanks.
 
If I had to buy one scenery add-on, it would be Ultimate Terrain X. Okay, and pair that with the FSGenesis landclass, which makes it two.. :) But that combo will do a darn good job accurately representing roads, coastlines, rivers, and cities/landclass.

For some high-quality free planes, check out all of Piglet's FSX planes here on the Outhouse. Outstanding freeware.

Shame you went with XP Home instead of Vista; despite what you've heard, Vista's better. (90% of the whining can be addressed by turning off Vista's protective UAC feature.) This is a good take on the ridiculous Vista reaction: XKCD invokes Godwin's Law on Vista.
 
Not having bought 3rd party Scenery before, do you have to buy certain scenery packages to get the best Clouds and Weather?
 
For clouds and weather you'll need a dedicated program....ActiveSkyX/GraphicsX pack,ActiveSky Advanced or Real Environment Xtreme (REX).:)

EDIT: Also Flight Environment Xtreme (FEX)
 
codeseven said:
Not having bought 3rd party Scenery before, do you have to buy certain scenery packages to get the best Clouds and Weather?
Click to expand...

For clouds and water there is only once choice in my mind, and that is REX(Real Environment Xtreme). Don't bother with Xgraphics, as it's the poorest of the three products when it comes to eye candy, and hardly an improvement over default. FEX(Flight Environment X) was the best choice at one time, but now that REX is out FEX is old hat.

REX has by far the best water textures ever seen in FS, and to me it's the most drastic eye candy improvement I have yet seen with FSX, as I'm stunned by it every time I fly. The best REX water texture is the one called Sparkling, and here's what it looks like. It looks pretty good in screenshots but much better in motion, as you can't see the animation in static screens. The cloud textures are also REX textures.

rexwater3.jpg


rexwater2.jpg


rex35.jpg
 
Wow!

Thanks guys.

Real Envirement Xtreme looks fantastic! It's got beautiful water, land and clouds and even includes a weather engine, nice package.

As far as aircraft, their all great suggestions. But, it's a tossup between the A2A P-40 or RealFlight F6F Hellcat.
 
I see from gathering Addon info around the net that some folks say they are going to install multiple Addon packs like, 'I plan on installing GEX, UTX, FEX, My Traffic, REX and then a few planes'. Can you just randomly install Addons, perhaps to try them out, then un-install them at your will? Thanks


Edit: Also, It occured to me that I may not be able to run some of these Addons satisfactorily if my system specs are not up to snuff so I should have included them in my initial post. Can I expect to run the above Addons (for example, I heard REX required a hefty system to run smooth) with decent frame rates? Thanks

XP Home SP3
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8GHz 1066MHz frontside bus with 6MB L2 Cache
4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory
320GB 7200RPM Hard Drive
 
You can if you want. But remember that most of the commercial packages you'll have to buy first, so if you don't like it, you're kind of stuck. Flight1 has a 30-day money-back return policy, which makes it much easier to try things out and see if you like 'em. Some other publishers have similar policies, I believe.
 
spotlope said:
You can if you want. But remember that most of the commercial packages you'll have to buy first, so if you don't like it, you're kind of stuck. Flight1 has a 30-day money-back return policy, which makes it much easier to try things out and see if you like 'em. Some other publishers have similar policies, I believe.
Click to expand...

Thanks Bill.
 
You probably won't be able to run the 4096 resolution REX clouds with that video card, but that doesn't matter too much. The default cloud resolution is 1024, and that's the resolution I was using in the first two REX shots above and it still looks great. The F-16 shot has the 4096 clouds. Other than a weak video card your system will work very well as you've got a fast CPU, and FSX is CPU bottlenecked in almost every case.
 
SolarEagle said:
You probably won't be able to run the 4096 resolution REX clouds with that video card, but that doesn't matter too much. The default cloud resolution is 1024, and that's the resolution I was using in the first two REX shots above and it still looks great. The F-16 shot has the 4096 clouds. Other than a weak video card your system will work very well as you've got a fast CPU, and FSX is CPU bottlenecked in almost every case.
Click to expand...


Good to know, thanks.

To set up my OS and FSX install I found a couple of thorough guides...

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1208959973

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=29041&PN=1

O&O Defrag and Nod32 is on the way.
 
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