Best payware general scenery enhancement?

[Guest Star_Journey]

Hello all, I did a search on this topic but am simply not familiar enough with the various payware options to make sense of the results.What do you think is the best general scenery enhancement out there? I'm not looking for photorealistic area stuff, just any kind of general upgrade to the whole scenery experience.There are a very few areas that I love enough to buy photorealistic scenery for but for the most part I just want FSX to look better!I hope this all makes sense :)Thanks for any help you can give meScott

[Jack_McDonald 0]

For Australia and Pacific Northwest nothing beats FTX (www.fullterrain.com) :( :( :( Also Aerosoft has some nice sceneries.Thanks,Jack

[woodhick 504]

IMHO, what you are looking for is probably best handled using the Ultimate Terrain Series, Ground Environment X and the Scenery-Tech landclass series available from Flight 1. These are all differing programs that greatly enhance the flight sim experience. For the best efects, you need all three. They play well together and with others too. Check them out here.

[Tony P 160]

Best bang for the buck is without a doubt, GEX. Like the other posters stated, ORBX is also great but limited to certain areas. GEX covers USA/Canada. I have UTX as well but have it disabled becuase I just can't live with the perfomance hit even after many months of tweaking and tweaking.

[molleh 451]

I use Ground Environment X combined with SceneryTech landclass. It looks great and the two together only cost about $53, and that's for most of north america. There's also GEX Europe and Europe SceneryTech if you want to fly there. Highly recommended!

[ziffel 0]

I concur with the others. For a raw, vanilla FSX build I would upgrade in this fashion:1. Ground Environment X 1.09 (a.k.a. "GEX")2. Ultimate Terrain X 1.31 (a.k.a. UTX)3. a land mesh upgrade (adds detail to the terrain 'floor'). There are a lot of options for this, I went with FSGenesis myself and have been pleased)4. FTX, aka ORBX, aka FullTerrain. This is only #4 on my list because of it's limited scope. In terms of quality, it's #1 by a wide margin. GEX and UTX give you generalized features and texture upgrades. FTX gives you highly specific and realistic terrain, roads, meshes, the works, but for a limited area. Currently they offer the 4 quadrants of Austrailia, and the U.S. Pacific NW. They are masterpieces, IMO, and worth every penny.GEX can be purchased for USA/Canada, and a separate package for Europe. Same for UTX.All of these can transform a vanilla FSX from an ugly duckling to the proverbial swan. Enjoy.

[trisager 2]

REX2 for sky, clouds, water, and airport environment.Beware, you are entering a slippery slope - before you know what happened, you will have GEX, UTX, SceneryTech, REX, FSGlobal mesh, ORBX, and Tongass Fjords X installed, and a lot less money in the bank :(

[ziffel 0]

REX2 for sky, clouds, water, and airport environment.Beware, you are entering a slippery slope - before you know what happened, you will have GEX, UTX, SceneryTech, REX, FSGlobal mesh, ORBX, and Tongass Fjords X installed, and a lot less money in the bank :(

Truer words never spoken. My slope started with an $18 standard version of FSX, and ended up at ... ah, who am I kidding? It hasn't ended :(

[Guest]

4. FTX, aka ORBX, aka FullTerrain. This is only #4 on my list because of it's limited scope. In terms of quality, it's #1 by a wide margin. GEX and UTX give you generalized features and texture upgrades. FTX gives you highly specific and realistic terrain, roads, meshes, the works, but for a limited area. Currently they offer the 4 quadrants of Austrailia, and the U.S. Pacific NW. They are masterpieces, IMO, and worth every penny.

Since I rather have a smaller area with extreme quality, FTX is my number 1. Indeed by a wide margin. I currently only fly above PNW and will do so until the next region is released by Orbx. ;) I also have two Australian area's but I only flew there because there was nothing better at the time. The day PNW was released, I moved up there. And btw about that 'smaller': when you buy all 4 Australian regions, you can't talk about small anymore...! However, a large part of down (Red) under isn't too interesting imho... PNW is exactly the kind of scenery I wanted.Of course it also depends on what you like to do in FSX: I fly GA only, so PNW is perfect for me. If you are into airliner and long hauls, UTX and GEX might me more interesting because they indeed cover a much larger region. Still, if you want a "general upgrade to the whole scenery experience", you will have to spend quite some money: there isn't ONE addon that does the whole world in a nice way.

[CanadaOne 36]

Best bang for the buck right now: Orbx PNW. One easy install and one very fair price and you get the best North American flying region in top shelf detail. Lots and lots of flying fun in this one.After that, GEX and UTX and Genesis mesh for the rest of North America.Just my humble opinion. :(

[Chock 17,769]

There are lots of nice scenery-altering add-ons out there, but unless you want to melt your credit card, what you will have to decide is, which aspect do you want to improve most?If it is the sky environment and some of the airport and water textures, then REX is a good bet, as it offers a lot of bang for your bucks and makes for very visually pleasing skies. On the other hand, if you want an overall spruce up of a large swathe of terrain, Ultimate Terrain add-ons are worth a look to tidy up landclasses and roads etc (this addresses one of the biggest problems with FSX as far as scenery goes). The Ultimate Terrain add-ons are especially good if you like night flights, since they make a big improvements to the lighting over cities and such, but the tweak does not come without a bit of a hit on frame rates.If you make a lot of airliner flights, you may want to look at FS Altitude, which adds very convincing high altitude photo-realistic terrain that gradually fades in as you climb to cruise heights, by taking advantage of the layered scenery FSX can handle, so FSA works in parallel with any low altitude scenery add-ons you have. FS Altitude ain't cheap, but it does make high altitude scenery of the kind you see from the window seat of a 747 look spectacular.VFR photo sceneries (of which there are many) are a better choice for cruising around in a Cessna and navigating with a map, but that is becoming rarer these days now that GPS is what most pilots use to find their way, nevertheless, if you like to fly around locally and spot your house from the air etc, this would be a better way to go than all of the above, but you'd be into a high cost to cover the entire Earth, unless.... You check out Tile Proxy (basically a streamed feed of Google Earth as scenery) for this VFR type of thing, which is certainly an inexpensive way to go for VFR stuff, providing your computer is up to the job.The point of all that is, you could spend a fortune and have everything look great, but if you don't want to do that, then a bit of thought with regard to what is most likely to appeal to you and be most useful for the kind of flying you do in FS, will save you a lot of money.Al

[Guest Star_Journey]

I pretty much do low an slow flying only. Grumman Goose, Rans S-7 (back in FS9), stuff like that. I fly all over the world and rarely fly above 5000', so I'm mostly looking for a general ground and airport enhancement. Based on y'alls replies, I'm mostly looking at GEX and UTX. I've already got the photorealistic for my absolute favorite locations (Chicago, Oahu and Pacific Southwest), so I'm just looking for a way to spruce up the rest.....Thanks for all the replies!Scott

[Tabs 2,790]

For something that's going to affect the entire sim no matter where you are it has to be REX2. It makes the sky and airport textures look so much more realistic than the defaults.After that you probably want the UT/GE/mesh/landclass combo for wherever you fly most.PNW is absolutely awesome but it's limited to that small region of the US, that's why I don't list it first.

[woodhick 504]

If you ever wander down to OZ (Australia), be sure to pop for the very pricey Au Series from the Orbix people. The stuff is ungodly expensive but if you like low and slow, the four add-ons will make OZ (especially the Outback) a wonder to behold.Have fun!! Low & slow rules!!

[yellowjack 28]

I pretty much do low an slow flying only. Grumman Goose, Rans S-7 (back in FS9), stuff like that. I fly all over the world and rarely fly above 5000', so I'm mostly looking for a general ground and airport enhancement. Based on y'alls replies, I'm mostly looking at GEX and UTX. I've already got the photorealistic for my absolute favorite locations (Chicago, Oahu and Pacific Southwest), so I'm just looking for a way to spruce up the rest.....Thanks for all the replies!Scott

Excellent choice I built, owned and flew my own Rans S7 Courier (RW) now I use a Super Cub as a poor substitute! :(