I am considering purchasing a scenery pack. What is the best scenery I can buy for FSX? I live in Maryland.

Too little info.

1) What do you fly? Airline or GA?

2) Where do you want to fly? Close to home or somewhere else?

1) Why does it matter what I fly? I don't concentrate on one type of AC. I fly fighters mostly and some GA.

2) Close to home near Maryland.

With regards to what you fly, Airliners tend to be better suited toward photo-scenery, as you'll be up at altitude and auto-gen buildings and scenery objects won't be of much use. Photo scenery also can cover a larger area, matching with the tube-liner habit of longer trips.

Conversely, flying GA see's you closer to the ground, where you'd want to focus more on object-oriented scnery like the stuff from ORBX. Unfortunately, the coverage for these areas is limited, and IIRC, they rely on having your object/auto-gen obtions turned up.


For fighters, you're kind of in-between. In general, ORBX makes what many consider to be the 'best' scenery, but again, it's coverage is limited to Australia, New Zeland, and various bits of southern alaska/PNW/Rocky mountains.

Not certain about your expectations for 'scenery' so I'll assume terrain enhancement for now. Since ORBX hasn't developed anything for the east coast yet, I recommend a combination of Ultimate Terrain X and Ground Environment X. UTX will significantly redefine the waterways of the Baltimore area, as well as improve the accuracy of roadways, rail lines, etc. GEX gives you textures that are, to my eyes, better than default FSX. The two products are designed to work together. UTX is very customizable and includes an interface with many options so you can tweak the settings to suit your personal preference.

If you are wanting a more realistic terrain than the UTX/GEX reworking of the default autogen, look into the MegaScenery series. There are drwbacks to photoscenery, including that it does't look sharp at low altitudes. It is also comparatively expensive and covers a very limited area.

Maryland you say?

1) Airliners = longer trips at high altitude = ground scenery that covers larger areas. GA = short trips at low altitude = ground scenery that has to be rather detailed in a small area.

2) There is no very detailed ORBX/FTX for Maryland, hence I suggest Ultimate Terrain X USA/Cananda as a general enhancement with Ground Environment X if you fancy new textures.





I do not recommend photoscenery. It tends to not come in seasonal and night variations and takes up an awful lot of disk space.

I purchased Megascenery earth for Maryland. Will this work with UTX and GEX?

UTX should go over Maryland, but it covers the GEX textures.

When you say it covers the GEX textures do you mean it replaces the megascenery textures?

No replaces GEX textures where Maryland is. The rest of the US will be GEX.

No.

For Maryland, it's either photoscenery or landclass-based scenery, i.e. UTX+GEX.
For the rest of the US, you will see ground textures and landclasses as provided by UTX+GEX.

UTX doesn't replace anything "texture-wise". UTX is a landclass addon, it doesn't include any custom textures.
UTX will basically give you accurate shorelines, lakes, rivers, roads and type of terrain on each tiles. Whatever terrain texture is installed, default FSX or custom ones are used to cover each tiles based on the assigned landclass (i.e. urban area, fields, forest etc...).

You should first define exactly what is a scenery for you, it's a quite broad term in FSX world.

By scenery, do you mean:

Ground textures, terrain accuracy (heights, shores, water etc...), airports, buildings and cities, environments etc...

Depending on your needs, you're probably looking at multiple addon types to fullfill your need.

If you do a lot of VFR, a good landclass addon is a MUST, UTX is a good one that covers most of the world (USA, Canada, Alaska, Europe)

Then, you probably want to switch FSX default ground/water textures. As said a few posts earlier, unless you're doing must of your flying from 30k, I doubt you'll like photo-realistic textures solution. The lower you fly, the ugliest it looks, and a really low altitude, everything looks pretty weird. Also, unless the product include auto-gen and custom building, everything will be pretty flat at medium/low altitude.

Ground Environment X is areal nice package for ground/water textures. Thousands of hi-def textures included for ground and water.
GEX + UTX is a real winner as far as terrain enhancements go.

If you're looking for nice skies and weather, again multiple options. The latest REX+ Overdrive is pretty impressive, or if you want to play it overkill, get Active Sky 2012 for the incredible weather engine, and REX for the amazing textures, although AS2012 now includes quite nice textures as well if you want everything in the same package.

Finally, you may want to have a look at a FS Global or FS Genesis (Mesh addons). One of these products will greatly enhance the topography of the FSX world by replacing the terrain mesh with ones that have been generated from satellite data with much higher resolution than the default FSX mesh (in some area). I wouldn't say it's a must anymore with FSX as MS did a really decent job in this area compared to FS9, but could be interesting

Then you have the millions of airport/cities addons/replacements.

Personally, I really like the BluePrint airports. I'm lucky enough that they produced my local airports (Toronto, Montreal), they are really nice and nice on FPS as well.

If you're flying mostly fighters, ORBX is not really an option for you as most of the sceneries cover small airports not fit for fighters. ORBX are nice addons but they look a bit cartoonish/surreal.


Personally if you wish to enhance your FSX world, I would go in this order, again, depending on what you're looking for:

1. UTX + GEX (terrain enhancements)
2. AS2012 (sky/weather)
3. FS Global Ultimate (mesh)
4. Custom airports/cities of your choice

Hope it helps,

Cheers!

How can I use UTX and GEX along with my Megascenery for Maryland? Is it even possible?

In FSX's Scenery Library, simply place Megascenery's entry above UTX'. That should do.