Here's proof hand made scenery like FTX is the best way to go(Vancouver+)

[solareagle]

This is a little comparison I did just north of Vancouver.  Knowing how spectacular Holgers Vancouver+ scenery is, and in anticipation of the PNW region, I wanted to see what difference various scenery products make on the sim.  I was originally going to do the comparison south of Vancouver since that would be within the PNW coverage, but since I have Vancouver+ I decided on north of Vancouver. 

I won't save the best for last so the first image shows what you get with Vancouver+.  I think V+ has its own 20m mesh, but I'm using 20m mesh for the rest of the images as well.  The highest mesh LOD is around the red cross, so it gets a bit low res toward the top due to the way I cropped it.  The second image is FSX Default scenery, which looks surprisingly good.  The third image adds UTX Canada, which removes the snow caps and improves the urband landclass. There's not much change to the water and rivers, so the default data must be quite good already.  The fourth image includes Xclass Canada, which adds variety but it hardly seems accurate.  The textures are GEX if that makes a difference, but luckily the custom textures in the V+ area were not affected when I installed GEX.

After seeing this it seems pretty clear hand placed landclass like whats in FTX is the way to go, especially if you you get some hand made rivers and coastlines too.  Even with FTX on the scene Vancouver+ is still my favorite localized area, but I can't wait to see how the PNW region looks. 

[John Venema]

Interesting comparison shots. FTX PNW will indeed combine the best of all the above with the unique FTX touch. We will be showing alpha screen shots in the coming months. There's been a lot of background work done already and we're getting pretty excited in the Orbx offices about it.

The bottom line is: there is simply no alternative than hand-crafted landclass made one square km at a time. The only thing that's better is actual photoreal, and we all know how flat and lifeless that can be, and of course you can only fly in summer

[Penzoil3]

  Not true. If you have your drives formatted with NTFS rather than FAT 32, you can see Megascenery packages in all seasons. Of course, it's still not as good as OrbX !

Respectfully

  Sue

[solareagle]

  Not true. If you have your drives formatted with NTFS rather than FAT 32, you can see Megascenery packages in all seasons. Of course, it's still not as good as OrbX !

Respectfully

   Sue

Cool. I'm going to run off and reformat my system right now!!!