by NickN » Sun Mar 16, 2008 6:05 pm
As with any add-on they must be set up as well...
UTX is a landclass replacement which adds real roads, beaches, shorelines, in the correct geographical positions. Night lighting is a huge hit on performance but the rest of it is pretty clean.. none the less car traffic is increased by its use and therefore you must adjust car traffic down to take up the hit. Once UTX is set up for the system ability it need not be changed.
GEX in a basic texture replacement and it reorganizes autogen for those textures. As such it gets rid of the bland desert look everywhere and reduces the impact of autogen but increases the clarity by giving back resources and through the texture design sharpness
FEX adds the quality sky, clouds and water. There are defined them I use and rarely change them
FTX is currently only available for one section of Australia right now however it is a complete scenery replacement system that goes farther than anyone else does in scenery design. Its a nice package and since they designed their own autogen, and, they also replace the default FSX autogen descriptions and core files, it allows more to be seen on lesser systems. You must turn off the FTX system when outside of their area and it will restore the default core files.
LANDCLASS replacements such as FSGenesis, SceneryTech, XClass when properly placed in the scenery library with UTX will change the texture layout for areas UTX does not cover. In example small one-horse towns that the default FSX landclass does not show become visible in the sim... mountain valleys the default landclass render with lousy flat and bland textures, display much better results in vegetation.. this is what landclass provides and payware landclass increases the realistic visual impact as compared to the real world.
MESH... I use FSGenesis 10m mesh. Mesh lands the terrain in the correct place and makes elevations correct to their corresponding real world counterparts.
How it all works - Landclass is the 'KEY' to select the right texture that covers the mesh.. the mesh is a wire frame and the landclass tells FSX what texture type lands where on that mesh. So if its a farm, it gets a farm texture layout, if its a industrial park, it gets that texture covering... think of the landclass as the BACK of a jigsaw puzzle board with the KEY to the parts and where they belong, the textures are the puzzle parts and the mesh adds the 3D depth to it all
In that the mesh and the textures are always the same... but you can switch puzzle KEYS which is the landclass and one may have more detail in a area you fly than another.. meaning one landclass (key) may show all vegetation in a mountain valley, where another landclass (key) may have small towns in its code that the other was missing and when enabled it will tell the texture engine to grab small town puzzle parts and add them to the valley vegetation correctly. The mesh just makes sure the terrain is displayed in correct elevation. The textures are stretched over the mesh in some places, others they may lay flat or not be stretched.
This hobby can get expensive. It requires an investment in hardware for one, an investment in time to learn how to use and setup the sim and then and investment in add-ons to replace the default to raise the level of realism
This purchases are not mandatory, however it depends on what you are trying to achieve and willing to settle for.
There are freeware addons as well... I really like many of the 'AREA" addons and aircraft available for FSX. In that the payware mentioned above is really just the base to get the sim to a much more realistic look, after that... the freeware in scenery and aircraft are added and it all comes together to deliver the goods.
BTX, AI aircraft and car traffic on that processor you are using will choke the sim.. keep those low.. cars at 5-8% and aircraft no more than 25%
Last edited by
NickN on Sun Mar 16, 2008 6:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.
btw my settings are around 3/4 towards max 