I live about 10 km south of Vienna, the capitol of Austria/Europe. As a lot of us, my very first flight was about to look for my house, it could find it and was impressed. On my way back to LOWW, i took the route up to Vienna ,to do a little sightseeing tour.
At least, that was my plan.
I could recognize the city, the basic layout with all the streets and the "overall look" was pretty good, compared to the real world. But somehow it still wasn´t "right", I flew around the whole city till i realized, what the problem was: there was not even a single building present, which is so very typical for the city, creating it´s "signature look" and being THE touristic hotspots, each sightseeing tour wants to show. Default Vienna looked totally unreal that way.
I was very much frustrated, having seen all those shiny marketing videos before release, hearing all those stories from testers and magazines, that it all looks so perfectly detailed. For many years, Vienna is voted as THE most worthwile cities to live in, due to it´s beauty, the healthy environment, the low crime rates and lots of other attributes. But MS hasn´t got too much cities 3D scanned yet, Europe is even less scanned, so it looks very "poor" in the default sim.
A bit frustrated, i was hoping for a quick fix by some addon-developer. The Vienna Airport LOWW was released as an commercial addon, but no single sign of any commercial creators to take care of our popular landmarks.
I couldn´t believe it at first sight, but i found out, that someone offered a free addon, to solve this issue. It´s got the most iconic landmarks included already, but it´s never enough, i hope for further development by it´s creator Troglodytus.
The addon works very well for VFR flights, as the needed POIs now are present, where you would expect them in the real world. My rig ain´t a super fast one, but i see no significant fps drop by using the addon. It´s very cool to fly around ,looking out of the windows and discover, what´s now present, that has been missing in the default scenery so much. So, overall, give it a try, you won´t regret it. The pretty huge download count also shows the obvious great interest in this scenery. Enjoy and maybe see you out there one fine day...