AionSky Studios, a new-to-the-scene developer have released AliveGrass, a new scenery utility for X-Plane 11 & 12. It aims to make the grass in X-Plane more realistic by adjusting color and density based on environmental and geographical factors.
What does AliveGrass bring to the sim?
AliveGrass brings regional & biome-based 3D vegetation, grass and flowers to the sim, featuring different varieties and species depending on location within the world, with natural variation in height, scale, orientation and distribution. The utility uses terrain-aware placement to ensure that vegetation is only located where it should be, such as on grass airfields, airport lawns and surrounding terrain, with scenery-based exclusions preventing it from placing on recognized roads, water, airport runways, taxiways or buildings.
Automatic Season Selection is included, so that throughout different times of the year, vegetation will appear differently and authentically for that specific season with the utility using simulator date, latitude and available environmental signals to select the correct vegetation automatically.
Which Version(s) of X-Plane is AliveGrass for?
AliveGrass ships with compatibility for both X-Plane 11 & 12, however, AionSky states that X-Plane 11 does not provide the same usable ground-snow signals as X-Plane 12, so the same snow response in X-Plane 11 is not supported.
How about performance?
With any scenery add-on in any flight simulator, performance is always of prime importance. AliveGrass vegetation follows the cockpit, external or free camera views with an adjustable draw distance of up to 2,000m, whilst movement-aware preparation uses groundspeed and direction of travel to prepare upcoming coverage and terrain. Settings are also included for low, medium, dense and ultra presets, as well as for field detail, close clump population and vegetation height.
According to AionSky, one of their users tested V1.0 of the utility using a system featuring an RTX3060 (12GB) GPU, Ryzen 7 CPU with 32GB of RAM and reportedly only experienced a 5-15FPS change in performance. Though performance heavily depends upon the system, settings as well as other add-ons used, this provides some interesting insight as to how it could potentially perform on other systems.
Closing notes:
AliveGrass by AionSky Studios is now available for purchase on simMarket for € 15.00 (excluding VAT), alternatively this product can be purchased on the X-Plane.org store for $15.00USD. If you would like view more of our X-Plane coverage, it is available here.
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