Revolution X

I purchased RevolutionX on 28 November and have been experimenting with it since, encountering a few problems. I have had FSX since it was first available and now run the main program on one SSD and all scenery add-ons on a second. GenX is in an All-In-One folder (AIO). It would have been nice to have had some detail about the installation on the JF product page as the manual is only available after starting the install program. If you have an AIO folder it is necessary to install RevX into that to enable it to find the texture files. Many of these Texture file (.agn) are then overwritten, so as explained earlier, practically all Treescapes are gone.

The main problem probably lies in the shared Autogen folder as some of RevX information (probably in default.xml) overwrites some other products data contained here. The greatest problem for me has been that Earth Simulations superb Shawbury Fields and the Scilly Isles were changed to RevX. Even overwriting those texture files after RevX installation fails to get these two ES items working. A sad loss and one I was not aware of before purchase.

So what about RevX? Well, there are some interesting and positive points. It allows good frame rates, as others have said though, with less trees than Treescapes. If you have previously installed other trees packages, it will overwrite some of these in the Scenery/Global/Texture folder. If you have some scenery add-ons in your Scenery Library these will still work and so you can make the autogen more variable by adding these - like UK Refineries (this one does have a bit of a frame rate hit though) and UK Ports etc. I also have Cardiff which has the Castle, Millennium Stadium, Civic Centre etc and several tall buildings which integrate into RevX to break up the urban landscape. These and many more are available free on Avsim.

An interesting thing regarding the mention of mainly white buildings – I actually have brick with the occasional white gable! If you have developed your sim over the years like mine, these variations/alterations will be in the Autogen folder and depending on what RevX calls up – that is what you get. I suspect a virgin FSX installation will have the mainly white buildings.

The night lighting works well and if you use UTX roads you will see traffic. As far as I am aware this traffic is not included in RevX – as an experiment I turned it off in the Scenery Library and then there was no traffic.

One particular problem are the churches – these will sometimes appear on top of other buildings, on roads and on beaches.   From JF support “Unfortunately, due to the limitations with FSX, there is not much we can do to make it any better. Revolution X uses Auto gen to place buildings in areas which are highlighted as populated or airfields etc. This means that we cannot position the buildings on every house etc so it guesses where they are”.

So there you have it – it is a good add-on which transforms your plain Photoscenery without a substantial FPS hit – but be very aware you could lose some of your other installs..

The problem was caused by the RevX developers changing the default.xml file in the  Autogen folder.   Although the original default.xml is backed up in the installation process (this backup is called Default.RXBack), the RevX replacement file appears to ignore the fact you might have other scenery installed other then the default, thereby preventing that scenery's proper operation.  In my Autogen folder the original default.xml file was 17,190kb, whilst the RevX replacement was just  7,413kb - it's pretty obvious by those sizes that something previously required is no longer there to do it's job.   I have received very useful assistance from Earth Simulations which has enabled me to fully get my Shawbury Fields and Scilly Isles back again and also even be able to run RevX.

If you are a genuine registered user of Earth Simulations products and have similar problems after installing RevX, then I recommend you contacting Darren and Vikki at ES via their support system.