FS GLOBAL 2010 (PC)

This product makes a significant difference to your terrain relief. This is a terrain mesh addon, not scenery as such which recreates more accurately the shape of hills and mountains for the entire world! This product works best when combined with FTX Global Base, FTX Open LC and FTX Global Vectors from Orbx, which fixes all the coastline problems,to create a truly stunning world for your flight sim hobby. This product caused no impact on performance on my system, however as always the minimum required system specs for FSX as published by Microsoft will absolutely NOT cut it! Great product and, along with the other scenery mentioned above, a nice finishing touch to my FSX world!

This is quite expensive, but it's an enormous amount of data about the real world and as flying FS is for me the only economic and practical alternative to the real thing, I am seeking to make the virtual world of FS as near an accurate reproduction of the real one as possible. This is one step along the way for this and makes the landscape more like the real thing. There are issues with integration with the world as presented out of the box by Microsoft. As an example, the waterfalls at Niagra no longer match the terrain, as the Global representation places it more accurately (and different) to MS. There are tools to fix this especially if you have the deluxe edition of FSX and the instructions with FS Global 2010 tell you how to do this. If you're after reality in the flight sim world this is the way to go.

Very expensive present. Would I buy it otherwise NO Need a very powerful computer. Microsoft FSX does not like running large addons. So it cuses issues within FSX Alps and other large mountains are superb.

good add on

One of the weakest aspects of the Microsoft series of flight simulators has always been the poor quality of the stock scenery. For those whose interest in the topography of landscapes worldwide matches their passion for aviation, purchase of FS Global is worth considering. As an existing user of FS Global 2005 SE, I was still so dissatisfied with its restricted range of latitudes (60°S to 60°N) and its inaccurate representation of the high Himalaya that I ignored the subsequent FS Global 2008. However the latest version FS Global 2010 promised to attend to the resolution of scenery at high latitudes and further to improve selected areas such as the south west of the USA. These benefits together with those introduced in FS Global 2008 suggested that the latest version might be £50 well spent. The database is twice as large as that of FS Global 2005. The package duplicates the database in 2 formats intended respectively for Microsoft FS9 and FSX. Either or both can be installed from the six DVD discs supplied. The blurb omits to state that installation is possible only if the computer is on-line so it appears that not all the database is present on the DVDs. So much data is involved that the user is recommended to go for a coffee but that advice is impractical as the distribution of the two versions among the six discs is unequal e.g. disc 2 contains little of FSX scenery and disc 3 little of FS9 scenery. Installation time for the FSX version was 3 hours and for the FS9 version it exceeded 3½ hours and there was no choice of target directory; FSG2010 and FSGX2010 respectively arrive in the root directory. Installation of the FSX version is fully automatic but for the FS9 version the new scenery folders need to be added to the scenery library. The supplied discs contain an additional facility AFX to adjust the elevation of airports to match the enhanced scenery, although freeware such as ADE is already available for that purpose. The manual is at pains to remind us that the highly irritating mismatches of coastlines and lakes to FS Global 2010 are "nuffin to do wif me guv" i.e. are they are inherent in the Microsoft products. In general I am pleased with my purchase. I had feared that the device of saving database space by increasing the mesh size within level regions might have the consequence of losing some interesting features such as meteorite craters but the resolution of these is at least as good as in FS Global 2005. The craters at the Nevada nuclear weapon test sites are now much clearer than hitherto. The altitudes and positions of mountain peaks are now acceptably accurate. Perhaps it is mean to deny the product 5 stars but the installation instructions were less than perfect and action must be taken about coastlines and waterways; after all, certain other producers of high quality scenery for MSFS did so years ago - admittedly not on the global scale.

Great