Combination of sceneries for P3Dv4

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Heigo
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Dec 17, 2017 3:02 pm

Combination of sceneries for P3Dv4

Post by Heigo »

Hi everyone!

I am pretty sure that some of the P3Dv4 users here are looking for something similar I was, for a quite some time. So I thought it might be worth to share.

Flying VFR at low level isn’t right without a photoreal ground, looking for highways, golf courses, deserts, villages, etc. is completely different experience with photoreal. Yes, there are ORBX and other products, but if you put them side by side, the "landclass/vector data" vs photoreal are not really comparable. ORBX alone (sorry) is still boring. Photoreal in ESP series has also had its limitations. First it used to be one of the root causes for “out of memory” errors, the other story is with visibility range and third is auto-gen buildings and vegetation. Most of the photoreal sceneries are shipped without any autogen. And flying without an autogen = deficient depth perception. OOM and visibility range are also now finally cured so lets get started.

What happens if You put basically all scenery add-on-s, that are available for the SoCal/P3Dv4 (Jan 2018) together?

- Lets start from the ground, free photoreal is available from the http://www.blueskyscenery.com/. Downloading will take time, but it is free and almost at the same level with other payware products. Just as an example, photoreal from north of SFO until Mexico and east to PHX will take around 100GB.
- Another layer that we have is autogen, after trying several options (most of them had issues), I stuck with http://www.nuvecta.com/ca.html. And it worked perfectly with blueskyscenery. other areas are also available (by state). Just drop 194 616 .agn files to the blueskyscenery texture folder :). It should work with other photoreal products as well.
- What we have left are ORBX Socal and Norcal regions. We need them as well, to get scenery obejcts (hollywood sign as an example), 3D lights and "better than deafult" airports. I guess the ORBX does not need to be linked.
- And of top of that, You can add all of the sceneries You need (from FSDT LAX to Turbulent Designs L35).I have tested some of them and they will bend in pretty well, KTNP even has an option for blueskyscenery, to match the colors.

I just hope that the speedtrees (3D vegetation) density will be increased in upcoming releases of P3D. And I guess it wont run on each and every hardware, I saw 30-ish around LAX/SFO area, but 30-60+ in other "less dense" areas on i7 7700K@5Ghz with GTX1080 (8GB) @2560*1440 with rather high settings.

Only layering needs to be correct, so far, it seems to work like on the image below. Note that if You run FTX Central, it will reorder the library (unnecessarily) so that the given solution wont work. Ofc there are some small issues with autogen placement (age of photoreal vs age of autogen) and at some places, ORBX airport scenery exclude areas can remove small areas of autogen etc.

So thats how it looks on a screenshot (it is ofc. even better "in live"):

BR
Heigo

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norman99
Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Jan 01, 2018 11:41 pm

Re: Combination of sceneries for P3Dv4

Post by norman99 »

Nice shots. I've recently settled on a Socal scenery combination myself.

I use MegaSenery Socal v3 with the older Ultra Res LA & San Diego on top. Underneath (importantly) both of these is Aerosoft US Cities X Los Angeles. This allows the 5000 odd custom buildings from this package to show, whilst still keeping the MS photoreal visible. Lastly I use a freeware autogen package for all of California available here http://www.f-bmpl.com/index.php/monde-a ... llemagne-2

A couple notes. The autogen is created from land usage data and doesn't place trees in urban areas (such as in front/backyards) except for parks, reserves, etc. It really makes the LA sprawl quite intense. It can also make identifying some photoscenery landmarks such as freeways hard to identify at low altitude, especially if perpendicular to your viewing direction. This may actually be more realistic, I'm not sure. Lastly, I only fly in the area during the day, so I haven't attempted to create a working night solution, but don't think this has any lighting.

Performance isn't great on my machine, and I have to dial back the autogen and buildings quite a bit, but I'm running an old laptop with an i7-2860QM and an AMD HD6770M. It should do much better on a modern desktop.

I'll see if I can post some shots myself in the next couple days.
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