active Scenery does not appear active or as vivid as expected.

[AAL5]

Hello - 

 

I recently purchased FTX Global and FTX North America and upon installation I am seeing some changes, more scenery and auto-gen items, but I am not seeing a high level of detail as I expected from the screenshots. The order number for the FTX Base pack is   59151f8925dc8.  and the order number for North America is  5915285fa5f25.

 

Here is a screenshot of my Scenery Area 

 

Here is a screenshot of my global scenery settings: 

 

 

But in game the auto-gen and a lot of the scenery is still looking "fsx" delivered and not quite the caliber as demoed on the screenshots. From the screenshots I was expecting something a little closer to the X-Plane graphics?

 

The water looks a lot better and some of the scenery looks better but still not quite what I expected from the screenshots. Do my settings look correct? 

 

Thank you for any clarification!

 

Beau

[Jethro VH-JET]

Hello Beau,

 

I procrastinated over answering this one, until I was absolutely certain where your pictures were taken in the sim. After much guesswork I believe the 1st Picture is KLGA LaGuardia Looking across Taxiway D-D toward Rikers Island. The 2nd Picture is looking across Roosevelt Island towards New York City. 3rd Picture must be close by, but to be honest, without Shift+Z co-ordinates this makes diagnosis extraordinarily difficult.

By just looking at your pictures there are some glaringly obvious Graphics and Scenery setup issues. My FSX setup with just FTXGlobal base in this area has way more Autogen Trees and Buildings with (Extremely Dense Autogen), and a nice sharp display of textures Autogen objects. (See my system specs in my sig hidden spoiler, they are fairly mid range for systems these days) I should tell you I do not run FTX OLC or Vector, Just Global base outside the FTX regions I use.

 

Graphics / Scenery
(Although these items below have some bearing on your visual degradation, they are not the whole story.) perhaps you could make some adjustments to your setup then see if it improves the situation. Post pictures with Shift+Z co-ordinates & list your system specs. 
In your pictures you have a "extremely close zoom level" which compounds the visual distortion on objects in both the nearer distance and objects on the boundary of your LOD radius (Max 4.5 default). (example in Pic #1 is the view across Rikers from T/way D-D, the grey crane way in the distance is both jagged and blurry as are the buildings and trees in the foreground ( the airfield Perimeter fence also can't be seen). Combine this with a Default Maximum LOD Radius of 4.5nm and your viewpoint will be right in the middle of 2 bad situations. I would suggest you pull back your Zoom 0.80 for (Cockpit with no panel) so that you are appropriately positioned in your cockpit at the correct zoom for the foreground and mid-distance. Zoom 0.50 for VirtualCockpit, having a view of the instrument panel from a normal human seating position, which gives an appropriate mid distance view of the scenery through the windscreen. External views can be anything you like but 1.00 is good for viewing both scenery at the appropriate range and the aircraft itself. You will instantly notice the scenery sharpen up.

It is quite difficult to determine from your pictures what else might be happening with the scenery textures and autogen, because of the overly close Zoom level, low AA, and Low TextureFiltering, You have Triliner instead of (Anisotropic x16) but there are some shader enhancement utilities like EMB SweetFX and of course DX10 Steves Payware Fixer that will bring your sim out of the bland default greyness. (More vibrancy colour and life in the display of scenery).

I will leave it to others to make suggestions with regard to setup issues, other than what I recommended above and below. 

• You will need to provide the team with your PC specs as it is difficult to know what Slider settings are best for your rig.
• You have "1m mesh Resolution" which is unnecessary, 5m will suffice. Orbx generally uses 5m recommended
• You have "Max2x water effects", Med2x or High2x is as high as anyone should go, anything more is a waste of CPU resources.
• You have "Level Of Detail Radius - Large" which is 4.5nm (Max - Default), If you have not also tweaked it to higher LOD Radius in your FSX.cfg
• You have Autogen set to "Extremely Dense" (The maximum setting) but you do not have the displayed amount of Autogen buildings and trees showing in your simulator.
• Your Antialiasing is set very low, hence the jaggy wing cloth on the Default Ultralite Tricycle. And the poor display quality of your textures, Autogen, trees and buildings (particularly the Jaggy edge on the D-D taxiway/grass and the crane on the other side of Rikers Island.
• If you can, you should have AA set to at least 8x in your Graphics card setup utility and the Antialiasing box checked in FSX, you might also benefit by use of Nvidia Inspector/Profiler if you use an Nvidia Graphics card.
• You most likely have set your "Texture filtering" in FSX to "Triliner", instead you should set it to Anisotropic, and also set within your Nvidia utility or Nvidia inspector/profiler 16x Anisotropic filtering.

Give these a try, hopefully someone will chime in, at this stage it is hard to tell until you sort out your setup.