Late to the party, sadly...

B

Bone

Charter Member
I really love FSX with the Bluesky photoscenery, it looks just about as real as what I see when I'm at work flying. It's incredible, and with no blurries down low and fast. However, I keep FS9 around for certain things like the MAIW work, the Section8 Sabre (which I dearly love), and the Cloud9 Phantom/Starfighter, ect...and I can load it up with AI...works good, lasts a long time. But, honestly, I REALLY HATE the FS9 stock terrain textures, so I don't stay in FS9 long before heading back to FSX and the awesome photoscenery. I've tried the Bluesky photoscenery for FS9, and while it looks good, it loads slowly even without alot of AI in the picture, and the result is a herky jerky flight. It's just not the same as the FSX Bluesky photoscenery.

Today, I bought the Ground Environement Pro 2.13 scenery textures. It's, it's...OH MY GOD!...it's BEAUTIFULL! Oh man, I am so late to this party.

!
 
GE Pro looks great, but for me, the absence of autogen trees is a killer. I fly LOW....and often through mountain valleys and passes, and I like seeing 3D trees around. I could care less about the sky scrapers and the fast food places, but I do like seeing the farms and such as I putter along through my FS9 simulated world. If there were a way to have the ground textures of GEP and the autogen of the stock stuff, I'd go for it.

OBIO
 
i use a real hodge podge of scenery textures, from GE Pro to Ultimate Terrain and FSGlobal 2010/X mesh... i have trees with GE Pro Obio.... heres an image from their page...

fs9_ge_pro_10.jpg


i see trees there :icon_lol:
 
OBIO said:
GE Pro looks great, but for me, the absence of autogen trees is a killer. I fly LOW....and often through mountain valleys and passes, and I like seeing 3D trees around. I could care less about the sky scrapers and the fast food places, but I do like seeing the farms and such as I putter along through my FS9 simulated world. If there were a way to have the ground textures of GEP and the autogen of the stock stuff, I'd go for it.

OBIO
Click to expand...

That's how it works. GEP is only ground textures. It's not photoreal. I've been using it for years and it's great. GEP does not affect autogen so you see it all. If you don't want some of the fancy features you can get GE, same ground textures, and save $20. That's what I originally did and later upgraded (with a full credit for GE).
 
Looking at the screen shots of GE Pro on the Flight1 site, I couldn't see any autogen.....mainly because the pics were taken from alts much higher than I normally fly. I tend to fly everything down low....1000 feet or less AGL. I like to look at the world I am flying over and not just at empty sky and clouds.

I will add GE to my wish list for Christmas.

OBIO
 
Welcome to the Party

FS9 has such a depth of development, you can find things even now that completely change the game.
I had that experience with Active Sky, never saw the reason for "another weather engine".
Believe me, you can never go back once you've seen it.
Best of all, it interfaces with GE Pro if you're really serious about the FS environment.

A "serious" flight goes like this:
Start AS, import a flight plan so it can set up weather en route.
AS Prompt: do you want to load GE Pro textures to suit the weather set?
Yes, GE Pro starts, and sets it up
GE Pro Prompt: Do you want to load a saved flight?
Yes, GE Pro starts the sim...

Especially for tube flying into large airports, this is an amazing experience, more so if loaded up with good AI.
These days, I go the WOAI site, pick the start/end points from their airport selection, and install whatever AI is applicable.

Sublime...and all reasons I stuck to FS9 in the first place.
 
I wasn't so happy with AS.

Recently got REX and it's much better imo. It will install clouds and water plus a few other things for your current weather. For example, if the weather is stormy, the waves will be higher. Then while that's installing you can install the current weather ground textures from GEP. As soon as the clouds and water installs, you press go fly and it opens fs9. It's maybe an extra click or two but the cloud/sky textures are much better than AS. Imo it looks much nicer but I think it's personal taste. And the whole thing, including flight planner and weather engine, is only $35, less than the AS weather engine by itself.
 
...of course, everyone will have their favourite combination of bits.

So behind AS sits Flight Environment, which takes care of water, sky and most cloud textures - with the exception of cumulus, which are Pablo Diaz HD.

And this sim install is old, so like many, consists of dozens and dozens of individual textures which just stayed put at the time

So it goes... an ongoing WIP
Anyone here have a "finished" sim??
 
Wing_Z said:
...of course, everyone will have their favourite combination of bits.

So behind AS sits Flight Environment, which takes care of water, sky and most cloud textures - with the exception of cumulus, which are Pablo Diaz HD.

And this sim install is old, so like many, consists of dozens and dozens of individual textures which just stayed put at the time

So it goes... an ongoing WIP
Anyone here have a "finished" sim??
Click to expand...

When you say Flight Environement is behind AS, do you mean they are basicly the same thing? Are the Pable Diaz clouds a separate addon, or within?
 
I had Flight Environment already installed - it is only a sky/clouds/water textures package, and still the one to beat, although Zinertek does a very good water package.
AS has sky and cloud graphics, but not as good as FE so I don't activate them.
But it has this amazing weather engine.

Pablo's HDE textures package is brilliant, and I overwrite FE cumulus clouds with it.

It's all rather wasteful I suppose...

Pablo's work is freeware:
Category: Flight Simulator 2004 - Miscellaneous Files
HDE - High Definition Environment, v2.0

Images related to this file:

sendfile.php
File Description:
Photorealistic texture pack that will change the aspect of your Clouds (cumulus, stratus, cirrus), sky color, aircraft reflections and ground detail.

What's new in V2.0? - New and better photorealistic cumulus, better sky colors, some new cirrus, ENBseries.ini (Bloom effect with great performance). HDE v2 is compatible with your favorite weather engine and environment software.

Filename:hdev2.zip
License:Freeware
Added:9th April 2010
Downloads:30886
Author:Pablo Diaz
Size:24180kb
 
Trees???
You want trees Tim?
I have a similar mix of bits and pieces from assorted packages and the old Silver Wings package gives me a very appealing set of trees.

View attachment 47778

I prefer the immediate Post WW2 era for my flying so Silver Wings+Aero Files (Commercial) Water+Pablo Diaz Clouds+ENB Bloom+Odd Textures(collected from packages I can't recall right now) works for me.
As my other preferred region is Australia VOZ is a must have (in a separate FS9 install) which, provided you keep VOZ textures enabled, spices up the standard FS9 offering.
However, you can't fiddle with VOZ too much, adding the Pablo Diaz extras is about as far as I go.
:kilroy:
 
A little alternative way here, from what I remember from my FS9 days...
At that time, I had installed three main freeware ground textures packs in my FS9. Those were some "regionnal" textures, but instead of installing them in the corresponding region only, I had installed them in the "world" texture folder, so that they would impact a wider area. I was extremely pleased with the resuts that I got, which was quite close to the screenshot posted by Smothie above.

What I intalled:
- Lennart's terrain textures (all of them)
- Alaskan terrain textures (on top, overwritting)
- US Mid-east terrain textures (this pack cannot be found anymore...)
- Treegen (to get smaller and more realistic trees)
The result was really nice. Of course, prior to overwritte anything, I had made a copy of my FS9\scenery\world\texture folder, just in case :p

Those are old shots from my FS9 days, taken around Concrete Mun, with the scenery North Cascades from Holder Sandmann which was providing a great landclass for this area :)

image47.jpg


image43.jpg


image44.jpg


image58.jpg
 
Wing_Z said:
Pablo's work is freeware:


sendfile.php

File Description:
Photorealistic texture pack that will change the aspect of your Clouds (cumulus, stratus, cirrus), sky color, aircraft reflections and ground detail.

What's new in V2.0? - New and better photorealistic cumulus, better sky colors, some new cirrus, ENBseries.ini (Bloom effect with great performance). HDE v2 is compatible with your favorite weather engine and environment software.


Filename:
hdev2.zip
License:
Freeware
Added:
9th April 2010
Downloads:
30886
Author:
Pablo Diaz
Size:
24180kb
Click to expand...



Thanks for the link.
 
The HD clouds and new sky textures by Pablo are phenomenal, thanks again.


Wasn't there a "tree" replacement by someone, also?
 
Yes SOH member fengz did these:

[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Category: Flight Simulator 2004 - Scenery[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]TreeGen v1.0[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]File Description:
The default FS9 trees are over-sized and too sparse. As a result, they never create a believable tree-line, or give you the sense of mass and density. I've reduced the size of the trees down by 40%, and increased their numbers. There is no performance hit at all. In fact, you should get better performance because these files are at half the size compared to the original. I've reduced the quality down slightly, but you shouldn't notice any difference once airborn at 200 feet and above. All seasons are included. You can see additional screenshots at http://www.fengzhudesign.com/fs[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Filename:[/FONT][FONT=verdana, sans-serif]treegen.zip[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]License:[/FONT][FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Freeware[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Added:[/FONT][FONT=verdana, sans-serif]18th April 2006[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Downloads:[/FONT][FONT=verdana, sans-serif]35542[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Author:[/FONT][FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Feng Zhu[/FONT]
[FONT=verdana, sans-serif]Size:[/FONT][FONT=verdana, sans-serif]2709kb[/FONT]
[/FONT]
 
Yeah, that's the one I was thinking of. I had it at one time but never installed it, I'll get it and try it this time. I did find this one today, and it's very nice. Looks good in the sim.

http://www.flightsim.com/file.php


EDIT: OK, I've got the "treegen" file and have looked at it. It is only textures, but the author talks about reducing the size of the tree's by 40% and increasing the autogen density, but I don't see where just having the texture files will do that. Apparantly, I'm missing something here.
 
You're not missing anything. Treegen is a pack of trees textures which will make the trees look smaller by "painting" them smaller. The tree 3D object will stay of the same size, but since the 3D object is transparent, the only thing you'll notice will be the smaller trees.

If I remember correctly, the screenshots included in the archive were quite explicit on the results :)
 
Daube said:
You're not missing anything. Treegen is a pack of trees textures which will make the trees look smaller by "painting" them smaller. The tree 3D object will stay of the same size, but since the 3D object is transparent, the only thing you'll notice will be the smaller trees.

If I remember correctly, the screenshots included in the archive were quite explicit on the results :)
Click to expand...

Ahh, smoke and mirrors it is. Thanks.
 
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