Interesting product for UK photoscenery users

[Adrian Petford]

I expect these won't be answerable until more people have tried it, but...

Can you select what elements to install (just trees, buildings etc) or is it an all or nothing approach?

I'm interested in this for buildings but already have trees covered by Treescapes. Also has anyone used it with Scotflight and if so, are there any issues?

I'd also like to know about P3Dv2.

Many thanks.

[J0hn]

I've just installed it to P3Dv2 and FSX with no issues at all. I'll tell you how - you can tell it where the target sim directory is, but it actually installs the files you activate into wherever your photo scenery folders are. Mine are on a disc with only about 1.5GB left and it completely ate that up, so I had to uninstall some stuff to fit it all in (nice of them to warn us beforehand...).

Unfortunately, I don't have time to test it this evening, in-sim, but I will try tomorrow and definitely over the weekend, in both sims. I am planning to do a short (5mins approx) video to upload to YouTube - so you will be able to see for yourself, though my video quality is low due to my very slow upload speed requiring as small a file as I can manage.

The guy on JF's forum said what he'd seen of it so far looked good.

There is some talk about treescapes on the Overclockers UK forum - apparently it is possible to do some file fiddling, but no info on exactly how - so if you ask the guy who posted it (you'll have to do what I did and Google it, I'm afraid) he might tell you how he does it.

Thing is, from what they are saying, I understand that any scenery you have above the Rev.X entry in your library will show up as normal - so if treescapes is entered into the scenery config, it shouldn't be a problem.

You can also install just a part of the RevX stuff - i.e. only a single volume of your photo scenery or any number of volumes as you require.

I'm going to go and take some screens of the GUI - back soon

Here we are:










Oh, and btw guys (and especially you, Dave, as you are concerned) you can use your own textures over the top. So if you use, for example GEX, like I do, you can add them in after you have installed Rev.X and it will use them instead - it says that in the instructions on the GUI. So if you have some decent (i.e. UK-style) building textures to replace the default autogen ones with, it will let you do that, and use those as the 'pop-up' buildings instead. Sounds good - hope it is that easy!

[Brian Franklin]

Update, after the installer failed to find any of the GenX products (which I default installed) I read the section about expected titles. Allowed the installer to open the scenery.cfg to check. Sure enough the names were different from the 'expected' ones. I changed the Vol4 ones (the smallest) to match and the installer now found the product and installed the autogen elements. Great new I thought, looking forward to seeing this.

Start up FSX and behold - The Scenery.cfg file is missing or damaged, please reinstall Flight Simulator to restore or repair the file. No amount of renaming or deleting the scenery.cfg file to let FSX rebuild it has succeeded so I'm now FSXless



Later amendment...

After hours of tracing FSX to see what it's looking for and manually repairing cfg file I've finally got it working. Was it worth the trouble? well yes actually. It's not perfect but certainly brings things to life a bit more without the expected frame penalties. My PC is circa 2007 too. So all in all a good buy but just be careful with the Horizon installation details as it can cost you.

[J0hn]

For those concerned about using treescapes, I noticed this section in the Rev.X manual:

Revolution-X is fully integrated with whichever Photo-Scenery product is selected during
installation. It does not have its own Scenery Area entry in the Scenery Library, but rather
it will inherit the priority given to the corresponding Photo-Scenery layer.
It is therefore important to correctly configure the Priority Order of your selected Photo-
Scenery product relative to any other scenery add-ons you may have within the list of
Areas on the Scenery Library Settings screen. As a general rule, where two Areas overlap
within the FSX world, Scenery Areas which are given a higher Priority in the list will take
precedence. However, Photo-Scenery Areas (and therefore Revolution-X objects) will
always take precedence over Landclass Scenery Areas, wherever they are placed in the
list. With this in mind, we recommend that you move your Photo-Scenery products below
all other add-ons if you wish these to take precedence, and order your Photo-Scenery
Areas immediately above the default Area called ‘Propeller Objects’.

So you should be able to see your treescapes by using them in the same way you do with standard GenX - although as I don't have that myself, I can't test it.

[DaveB]

Glad you managed to get up and running again Brian

I so want to buy this addon but the dreaded white houses are stopping it dead in it's tracks. I'd sooner see none at all or fly in Scotflight's Scotland (which is surprisingly full of red-brick autogen houses). If a solution can be found (one that doesn't require getting a degree in quantum physics) I'll un-stow the plastic

ATB
DaveB

[J0hn]

Oh dear - JF's Rich has just posted ref Treescapes in the JF forum:

Hi,
In regards to whether or not Rev-X will work with Treescapes.
In the FSX system each 1km square in the world has a specific grid number which is used to identify it. This number is used to define the autogen ( .agn ) file that matches a particular location. This means that filenames are predetermined and there can only be one agn file for any given 1km square.
ES-Treescapes uses the same autogen system as RevolutionX so installing RX to an area will overwrite the existing ES-T files.
However for each grid square RX agn files will contain the data for the trees (as with ES-T) and also the buildings so in most cases the results will be preferable.
If you reinstall ES-Treescapes after installing RX you will find that most buildings will disappear as the “trees plus buildings” files are overwritten by “trees only” files

Both products do a similar job using the same FSX systems and, unavoidably, using the same filenames. You should install one or the other but not both.

If you have any custom agn files (such as those from the VFRAddon project or ones you may have created yourself) that you wish to retain then these should be backed up before adding the area with RX and restored afterwards.

As far as I know Scotflight isn`t autogen-based so should not be affected by RX

So thanks to him for clearing that up, but not good news for those who want to continue using Treescapes - unless the RevX stuff does the job as well.

[Adrian Petford]

Thanks for the feedback gents, very helpful.

I do like the idea of a full autogen layer, especially as it's based on GIS data and covers the whole of GB in one package. Though I agree, the white houses do seem very out of place apart from when you're flying at the seaside!

At the moment, I only have Treescapes 1-3 (which is about to be replaced by a new version) and the free 4-5 volume so I could use this instead if the trees are acceptable. That said, it'll be a wrench to remove anything by Earth Simulations as I rate their stuff so highly.

Will need to ponder it some more I think.

[J0hn]

Well, I have shot my video, covering Waddington to London, via Lincoln, Coningsby, Boston, Skeggy and then down to the Thames Estuary flying inland.

Just a little editing, then I'll start uploading.

The white houses are only a downer when you zoom in. At normal zoom level, from the cockpit, you seldom notice them. Whoever mentioned the size of the buildings was spot on, though - where you would have maybe 3 or 4 houses in reality, there is one large autogen building covering the lot.

Overall, I think the price is quite reasonable for what you get. Just don't expect perfection.

[davem]

Thanks John,

even though I'd be way above them, the fact that the scale is all shot to you know where would still bug the hell out of me...!

[J0hn]

No probs, mate. My video is just uploading now - just over 16 minutes' worth (and at 291MB takes over an hour to upload! Roll on next year and FTTC!!).

It shows the points very well, in as far as a YT flash video can - but I suggest it isn't watched full-screen, as it would blur too much then. Recording/conversion resolution was 840x486.

There's a very good example of how oversized the buildings are - I thought I had seen a representation of Lincoln Cathedral - it was one of the largest buildings around and looked like an American style church (white again!) but in fact the cathedral was spotted when I watched the recording afterwards and it was dwarfed by this church-like building! Say no more...

Now available to watch on YouTube:

http://youtu.be/7BCZx-5axZA

You can also see it on my website - HERE