FSX USA & Europe Replacement Ground Textures

Modified replacement ground textures for the USA and Europe including all parts 1-8.

These textures replace/upgrade the default ground textures in FSX.

With these textures I have tried to solve three problems, in the first place, to deal with the 'desert' problem that so many people have complained of, secondly, to deal with the winter textures and thirdly and finally to deal with the autumn textures.

With regard to the 'desert' problem, I have modified the default textures in tone and color to try, so far as is possible, to reduce or eliminate the barren brown color of the default textures. The result is that mountainous areas now no longer look as if they are covered with sand! In addition, since I found the drab washed-out fawn color of the winter textures utterly unrealistic I modified those, too, in an attempt to make winter look more like winter!

Finally, I thought that many of the autumn textures were too orange so I unsaturated them a little as well as making one or two other little changes.

So far as the USA textures are concerned, my biggest difficulty was with a large number of non-field textures: there are, for example, textures to represent many different types of desert terrain, bare desert, semi-desert sage, semi-desert shrubs, and the list goes on. I do not live in the US so I have no direct experience of what such landscapes look like. I relied in part on Google Earth to get some impression of the appearance of the types of various terrain but there are obvious difficulties and problems with this.

The satellite photographs are affected by, amongst other things, dirt in the atmosphere as well as by the way the images have been processed and colored. It might well be, therefore, that in some cases the textures do not provide an accurate representation of the landscapes they are supposed to be representations of.

I have endeavored to modify the textures in such a way as to increase the verisimilitude of the simulated world. As I have already said, for the most part, I have modified only the autumn and winter textures but in some cases, I have been obliged to modify whole seasonal sets. It is for this reason that I have not divided the texture sets by seasons.

I should have noted in my comments on the European textures that they look best when visibility is limited; I checked them using settings of 40 miles and 50 miles as the visibility limits. In my opinion, the unlimited visibility setting does no favors to any of the textures (and the same was true in Fs2004 of such excellent products as Ground Environment and Bird's Eye View).

The texture set comes in 8 parts. Because all the textures blend with one another I think it probably best to install them all rather than doing it piecemeal one part at a time.

• Parts 1 to 2 comprise the field textures
• Parts 3 to 7 comprise the non-field textures
• Part 8 comprises the town textures.

Installation:

Before installing these textures please backup your original textures should you wish to restore them.

Simply unpack the files into a folder of your choice and then move them into the FSX (or whatever you have called the root simulator folder)SceneryWorldTexture folder - that's it.