06-03-2015, 10:13 PM
If you are like me and love photo scenery, here is the best way to install it.
There's great photo scenery freeware out there. The 2 best websites I have found are Simivation and Blue Sky Scenery. Gottfried and Joop over at Blue Sky have
scenery that is far better than Megascenery 2.0 ( in my opinion ). You can tell that they put a lot of care in their work and it is a labor of love for them. I know that there
are simmers who can't live without autogen but I like flying over real scenery. You should check out Blue Sky Scenery if for no other reason than the great coloring and
contrast.
Photo scenery does eat up a lot of hard drive space and I would recommend you invest in a 2TB drive. You can pick them up for around $60 US. Some will tell you that
a lot of photo scenery will cause out of memory errors (OOM). That is only true when you combine photo scenery with autogen and set all the graphic sliders full right,
then add a high end aircraft model (PMDG) into the mix along with REX 4 clouds. You get the idea. You just can't do all that on a 32 bit program with a max of 4 gig
virtual address space(VAS) no matter how great your computer is.
The fact is Blue Sky Scenery actually improves VAS usage over long flights. I have done tests using (LAX) as a base and flying around it in circles. With the default
FSX scenery once loaded and the autogen set to dence, my VAS sits about 1.8 gig. Changing views and looking around can cause it to jump 200 to 300 MB. and flying
in circles will put it well into the 2.5 to 2.8 gig range. Now adding a high end aircraft and Rex4 clouds in the same loop will cause a jump to around 3.2 to 3.5 gig and it
continues to grow. My alarm will sound at around 3.925 gig.
Using Blue Sky Scenery in the same test dropped the usage down 500 to 800 MB! You can also get a better frame rate with photo scenery, for me about 8 to 10 fps
better.
Since photo scenery takes a lot of drive space and increases loading time in FSX, there is a great way to install it taking the loading time down from your scenery
library.
Go to http://www.blueskyscenery.com and in the download section find the state you want and pull up the map. This will show you all the scenery file locations in that state.
You can then decide on what areas you wish to download all in blocks that cover 3625 sq km. each. Resolution of 1 m/pix and a 10 m high resolution elevation mesh.
Putting your mouse pointer over the section you are interested in will give you a file name Example: JAC_North4West10. If you decide you want the whole state there
would be anywhere from 30 to 100 files to download. The great thing about the Blue Sky's website is that they do not have a speed limit imposed so a 800 mb file will
average in at 1.75 to 3.75 MBPS download speed ,depending on your internet provider.
Create a folder on your desktop to extract the files and name it Example:" Blue Sky Utah"
Once you have downloaded the first section extract it to your desktop folder. Delete the read me txt. and you should have a single folder "scenery" showing inside the
"Blue Sky Utah" desktop folder.
Now download the next file but this time rather than extracting it into your desktop folder, open its scenery file and copy and paste all the BGL files within it into your
desktop folder ( Blue Sky Utah) . Continue this process untill you have the complete state. This will eliminate the need extract file after file and have to activate each
one separately in your FSX scenery library. With all the BGL's in a single folder you will only have to activate it once in FSX but keep the folder you created as a back
up so if you should ever have to re-install fsx, putting in the scenery again is as simple as copy and paste the" Blue Sky Utah" folder into your add-on scenery and
activate it!
You can use the above process with just about any photo scenery that require multiple downloads from the internet. It helps FSX with downloading scenery BGL's into
memory because it only needs to read a single folder for the information instead of 100.
To best set up your FSX config for viewing this wonderful scenery make sure you have the following: Only for quad core or better systems and windows 7 and up with a
minimum of 4 gigs ram. and a wide screen monitor
In the display section
WideViewAspect=True
In the graphic section
TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=2048
HIGHMEMFIX=1
[BUFFERPOOLS]
Poolsize=0
In the terrain section
LOD_RADIUS=6.500000
In the start-up section
[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=14
Enjoy!
Post Edited ( 03-06-15 23:14 )
There's great photo scenery freeware out there. The 2 best websites I have found are Simivation and Blue Sky Scenery. Gottfried and Joop over at Blue Sky have
scenery that is far better than Megascenery 2.0 ( in my opinion ). You can tell that they put a lot of care in their work and it is a labor of love for them. I know that there
are simmers who can't live without autogen but I like flying over real scenery. You should check out Blue Sky Scenery if for no other reason than the great coloring and
contrast.
Photo scenery does eat up a lot of hard drive space and I would recommend you invest in a 2TB drive. You can pick them up for around $60 US. Some will tell you that
a lot of photo scenery will cause out of memory errors (OOM). That is only true when you combine photo scenery with autogen and set all the graphic sliders full right,
then add a high end aircraft model (PMDG) into the mix along with REX 4 clouds. You get the idea. You just can't do all that on a 32 bit program with a max of 4 gig
virtual address space(VAS) no matter how great your computer is.
The fact is Blue Sky Scenery actually improves VAS usage over long flights. I have done tests using (LAX) as a base and flying around it in circles. With the default
FSX scenery once loaded and the autogen set to dence, my VAS sits about 1.8 gig. Changing views and looking around can cause it to jump 200 to 300 MB. and flying
in circles will put it well into the 2.5 to 2.8 gig range. Now adding a high end aircraft and Rex4 clouds in the same loop will cause a jump to around 3.2 to 3.5 gig and it
continues to grow. My alarm will sound at around 3.925 gig.
Using Blue Sky Scenery in the same test dropped the usage down 500 to 800 MB! You can also get a better frame rate with photo scenery, for me about 8 to 10 fps
better.
Since photo scenery takes a lot of drive space and increases loading time in FSX, there is a great way to install it taking the loading time down from your scenery
library.
Go to http://www.blueskyscenery.com and in the download section find the state you want and pull up the map. This will show you all the scenery file locations in that state.
You can then decide on what areas you wish to download all in blocks that cover 3625 sq km. each. Resolution of 1 m/pix and a 10 m high resolution elevation mesh.
Putting your mouse pointer over the section you are interested in will give you a file name Example: JAC_North4West10. If you decide you want the whole state there
would be anywhere from 30 to 100 files to download. The great thing about the Blue Sky's website is that they do not have a speed limit imposed so a 800 mb file will
average in at 1.75 to 3.75 MBPS download speed ,depending on your internet provider.
Create a folder on your desktop to extract the files and name it Example:" Blue Sky Utah"
Once you have downloaded the first section extract it to your desktop folder. Delete the read me txt. and you should have a single folder "scenery" showing inside the
"Blue Sky Utah" desktop folder.
Now download the next file but this time rather than extracting it into your desktop folder, open its scenery file and copy and paste all the BGL files within it into your
desktop folder ( Blue Sky Utah) . Continue this process untill you have the complete state. This will eliminate the need extract file after file and have to activate each
one separately in your FSX scenery library. With all the BGL's in a single folder you will only have to activate it once in FSX but keep the folder you created as a back
up so if you should ever have to re-install fsx, putting in the scenery again is as simple as copy and paste the" Blue Sky Utah" folder into your add-on scenery and
activate it!
You can use the above process with just about any photo scenery that require multiple downloads from the internet. It helps FSX with downloading scenery BGL's into
memory because it only needs to read a single folder for the information instead of 100.
To best set up your FSX config for viewing this wonderful scenery make sure you have the following: Only for quad core or better systems and windows 7 and up with a
minimum of 4 gigs ram. and a wide screen monitor
In the display section
WideViewAspect=True
In the graphic section
TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=2048
HIGHMEMFIX=1
[BUFFERPOOLS]
Poolsize=0
In the terrain section
LOD_RADIUS=6.500000
In the start-up section
[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=14
Enjoy!
Post Edited ( 03-06-15 23:14 )
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