EnvShade: simMarket's ninth best-selling product ever, frozen at Prepar3D 5.4

On 2 December 2025 a Swiss simmer called Bruno posted on AVSIM to say he had bought "the weather tool ENVSHADE", all four modules, and could not get the sky textures to change. Seven days later a commercial member called kmax59 replied, thanked him for the purchase, and explained that the setting he needed was in a different product. kmax59 is Maxime Konareff, who founded TOGA Projects in France in 2016 and who, a month earlier, had written a blog post explaining that he had just joined a major airline and that the company was "not dead but it is waiting at the holding point for an undetermined time".

Almost everything you need to know about EnvShade is in that exchange. A buyer in late 2025 was still handing over money for it. The developer was still answering. And the buyer had bought the wrong product for what he wanted, because the Env-family naming makes that extremely easy to do.

EnvShade is not a texture pack. It is a shader modification: it rewrites Prepar3D's own HLSL shader source so that saturation, brightness, haze, reflection and bloom respond to weather, altitude and time of day instead of sitting at fixed values. EnvTex — which we have reviewed separately — is the texture package, roughly 11,000 files of skies, clouds, water and ground. They are different purchases, they do different jobs, and neither requires the other. If you take one thing from this review: EnvShade changes how the simulator lights and grades what it draws; EnvTex changes what it draws. There is also no such product as "EnvTex Water" — the water and PBR work people mean by that name is a free expansion inside EnvTex, not a separate SKU.

Here is the part that makes EnvShade worth a full review rather than a paragraph. At €5.60 it sits at number nine on simMarket's all-time bestsellers list. Not the P3D chart, not the utilities chart — all-time, across every simulator the store has ever sold for. Nothing else in that neighbourhood costs less than a sandwich. And the product behind that ranking has not received a single update since 20 June 2023, two weeks before Lockheed Martin shipped Prepar3D v6 with a new shader compiler.

We read 30 sources for this: the simMarket listing and its 17 customer reviews, TOGA's own product pages, FAQ, forum and blog, eight AVSIM threads running from April 2020 to December 2025, the FlightSimLabs community thread, FSElite and simFlight coverage from 2017 through 2023, a community preset library, two videos, and the store listings for the sibling products and for the rival that people defected to. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing — for a P3D-only add-on in 2026 that matters less than it would elsewhere, because the P3D conversation lives on AVSIM and always has.

What you are actually buying

EnvShade is a 6.99 MB download, version 1.1.7.5.1, sold only through simMarket. TOGA has no storefront of its own — the buy button on togaprojects.com is a link to simMarket, and simMarket lists TOGA as both publisher and seller. That means there is no second store to price-shop, and it also means the €5.60 you see is not necessarily the €5.60 you pay: simMarket's terms say displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax", and a browser session that has not resolved to a country resolves to 0%. An EU buyer will see the figure move at checkout. Do not read a developer-site price and a simMarket price as like-for-like anywhere in this family; here there is only one price to read.

The wider Env line, all of it running through the free EnvDir launcher:

Product	Price	What it actually does	Simulators
EnvDir	Free	The launcher and installer. Required by everything below	FSX / P3D
EnvTex	€21.00	~11,000 texture files: skies, clouds, water, ground, effects	FSX, FSX:SE, P3D v2–v5
EnvShade	€5.60	Shader rewrite: dynamic saturation, haze, bloom, reflections, night lighting	P3D v3.4, v4.1+, v5 only
EnvSound	€9.00	~80,000 placed ambient sound locations	FSX, FSX:SE, P3D v2–v5
EnvPlus	€9.60 (€8.20 if you own another Env product)	Live customisation layer for Enhanced Atmospherics and EnvShade values. Requires EnvShade	P3D

Two things in that table are load-bearing and neither is obvious from the store page. First, EnvShade does not support FSX. EnvTex and EnvSound do; the shader product does not, and never has. Second, P3D v3 support means v3.4 specifically, and P3D v5 support means up to and including 5.4. There is no v6 build. Prepar3D v6 arrived on 3 July 2023 with, in Lockheed Martin's own release notes, "updated core and shader compilers" and support for shader model 6 — which is precisely the kind of change a shader mod cannot be dragged across without real work.

So: which of these do you want? If you have never bought any of them and you fly P3D v5, EnvShade first. It is the cheapest, it is the one that changes the overall look rather than the individual assets, and it is the one whose effect you cannot get any other way. EnvTex is the bigger and more expensive product and it is genuinely good, but at €21 it is a considered purchase and it overlaps with ASCA and REX if you already own those. EnvPlus is for people who already own EnvShade, already run Enhanced Atmospherics, and have found the sliders too coarse — which, as we will get to, is a real complaint. They are designed to work together and TOGA says EnvShade is "optimized to be used in combination with Envtex", but nothing in EnvShade requires EnvTex and plenty of owners run it alone.

What the community consistently praises

It does not cost frames. This is the claim that survives contact with the record best. EnvShade edits the simulator's shader source and lets P3D compile it; it is not a post-process filter sitting on top of the finished frame. Holger Teutsch made the distinction cleanly on the FlightSimLabs forum on 4 March 2021 when a user asked how it compared to ReShade — EnvShade changes lines in the shader code, ReShade adds a rendering pass, and only one of those has an inherent cost. Across six years of threads the "EnvShade tanked my frame rate" post is conspicuously rare, and where it appears it is contradicted immediately by other users on the same P3D build.

The night and low-visibility work is the good half. The horizon haze, the moisture in the distance, the way light levels stop snapping between day and night — these are what people come back to. The December 2020 update that brought official Enhanced Atmospherics support added haze and distance-moisture controls specifically, and the June 2021 build fixed the large white haze that P3D 5.2's Enhanced Atmospherics produced with Active Sky, a fix confirmed on AVSIM the day it shipped.

Killing P3D v5's HDR auto-exposure. One AVSIM user in May 2020 put it as plainly as anyone: EnvShade removes the luminance adaptation, and that alone is why he runs it. If you are the sort of pilot the pumping exposure of stock v5 drove up the wall, this is a €5.60 fix for it.

TOGA's Prepar3D v5 response was exemplary, and it is on the record with dates. Lockheed Martin shipped v5 on 14 April 2020. TOGA posted the same day that "Envshade will be totally incompatible with Prepar3D v5 as it is right now", promised a compatible build "as a free update", and delivered it on 23 April. Nine days. They floated charging "a very low upgrade fee" for a future TrueSky adaptation and then did not charge for the compatibility work at all. That is a better record than several developers with ten times the revenue.

It is still the most-used shader modifier on P3D, by the only real measurement anyone has taken. AVSIM's poll, opened in August 2019 and closed with 111 votes, put TOGA EnvShade first on 27, PTA on 19, REX Environment Force on 16 and TomatoShade on 13 — with 26 people using no modifier at all. That last number is the honest context for the first one.

The store rating is good, and the arithmetic is worth showing. simMarket displays "5" over 17 reviews. The actual spread is 15 five-star, zero four-star, zero three-star, two two-star and zero one-star, which averages 4.65. A perfectly ordinary distribution for a cheap utility: most people are happy, a couple could not make it work.

What keeps coming up as a problem

"I installed it and I cannot see any difference." Status: still open, and it is structural. This is the most repeated complaint in the entire record and it spans years. May 2020, on AVSIM: sliders moved, shaders reloaded, nothing changed. March 2021: same, from a fresh v5 buyer. June 2021: "I'm hard pressed to tell the difference between their tweaked shaders and default." November 2022: "when I did get it working the differences were hardly noticeable and it was never really clear if it was working as intended." Some of these are genuine installation failures — the install is layered and the "install to sim" step is a separate green button many people never press. But not all of them are. EnvShade is a subtle product by design; TOGA explicitly market it as recreating "the most natural environment as possible… without adding un-natural colors or overtweaking". If you want the punch-in-the-face difference PTA presets gave you on v4, this is not that, and the marketing does not prepare you for it.

The sliders are too narrow. Status: still open, never addressed. Raised on AVSIM in March 2021 and repeatedly since: the ranges have a small span, several categories barely move the picture, and the thing power users actually want — PTA-style numeric entry — was teased as "Envshade+" and never appeared. One AVSIM regular in November 2022 called that tease "vaporware", and on the evidence he is right. EnvPlus, released 22 December 2022 at €9.60, is the closest thing that shipped, and it is a separate purchase.

Orange roads at night. Status: worked around, never fixed. In December 2020 FlightSimLabs users reported that street lighting came out an "aggressive yellow/red that looks completely unreal". Maxime Konareff replied in that thread on 13 December 2020, acknowledged the adaptive street-light brightness as the cause and said an official fix was being prepared. On 19 June 2021 — six months and two updates later — an AVSIM commercial member was still asking whether "the orange lava roads at night are finally gone", and the answer was a hand-tuned workaround: disable P3D's auto exposure, drop terrain saturation, drop HDR night bloom. Another user immediately pointed out the cost: do that and daytime terrain goes colourless. The community asked for time-of-day-variable terrain saturation. It never came.

Enhanced Atmospherics eats a third of the feature list. Status: permanent, by design, and under-disclosed. Turn EA on in P3D v5 and the simulator takes ownership of sky, clouds and atmospheric scattering. Those are the first three headings on EnvShade's own feature list. What survives is terrain, water, lights, aircraft and the HDR block — still worth having, and the December 2020 and March 2021 updates did real work there, including night terrain brightness with EA enabled. But an October 2020 AVSIM answer put the blunt version well: with EA on, EnvShade works "for the most part" only with EA off. That is a defensible engineering reality. It is not what the store page tells you.

Installation is fragile on reinstall. Status: open, and it is where the negative reviews come from. The November 2022 AVSIM thread is the worst hour in this product's public record. A Windows 11 user could not install and was told by TOGA that Windows 11 was not supported. Another had it working, reinstalled P3D, and could never get it back — EnvDir mangling his scenery library each time he touched it. A third followed the whole chain and gave up: "ENVSHADE is broken and I guess will not be fixed." All three moved to RDShade. That thread also carries a widely repeated guess that Maxime "lives in Russia"; he does not, TOGA is French, and the actual explanation — a founder going through airline pilot training — did not become public until three years later.

Support is now effectively a mailbox. Status: open. TOGA's own support forum was described in November 2022 as overrun by spam bots; checking it on 19 August 2026, the forum page does not render at all — the embedded widget fails to load, twice. The Facebook community and email remain. The December 2025 AVSIM exchange shows Maxime does still answer, with a week's turnaround; it also shows the follow-up question going unanswered.

Performance and stability

The default preset is free. That is the consistent finding and we could not find credible evidence against it. TOGA ship two presets and are honest that the second one is not free: the high-quality preset raises cloud and shadow quality "with a cost on performances", which is a straightforward, disclosed trade rather than a hidden one.

The stability picture is narrower but real. On 18 and 19 June 2021, immediately after the P3D 5.2 build, at least three AVSIM users reported DXGI device-hung crashes during the "compiling initial shaders" phase, which stopped when EnvShade was removed. Others on the same build saw nothing. One case turned out to involve an eight-month-old NVIDIA driver; at least one was resolved by applying the free EnvTex P3Dv5 expansion, which some installs need before the shader install completes. This reads as an interaction bug in a narrow band of configurations rather than a general defect, but if your machine is one of them there is no longer anyone shipping a fix.

The safety question matters more than usual here, because this product rewrites simulator files. EnvDir handles it properly: a green button installs to the sim, a red button restores. When the restore path works it works, and AVSIM regulars routinely talk newcomers through it. When something has already gone wrong — a P3D client update, an OS migration, a half-completed install — the recovery is manual: delete the shader cache under AppData\Local\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v5\Shaders, and in the worst cases reinstall the stock ShadersHLSL folder from the P3D client. Back both folders up before you install. Everyone in the record who did that got their simulator back; the people who lost days are the ones who did not.

Who should buy it

If you fly Prepar3D v5.x with Enhanced Atmospherics switched off — buy it. This is the profile the product was built for and it is still the best €5.60 you can spend on how P3D looks. Budget ten minutes for the install order (EnvDir first, then EnvShade, then press the green button) and assign a "reload shaders" key so you can see your changes without restarting.

If you fly P3D v4.x and you already own PTA — do not buy it. PTA's numeric control is deeper than EnvShade's sliders and it works fine on v4.5. EnvShade's advantage over PTA is that it exists on v5 at all, which is worth nothing to you.

If you are on Prepar3D v6 — do not buy it. It will not install and no one is going to make it. This is the profile that should walk away, and given that v6 has been out since July 2023, it is a growing share of the P3D population.

If you run Enhanced Atmospherics and expect it to transform your clouds — do not buy it on that basis. EA owns the sky. What you would be buying is terrain, water, lights and HDR behaviour. That is a real product and some people love it for exactly that, but go in knowing which half you are paying for.

If you already own EnvTex and wondered whether EnvShade adds anything — yes, and they are complementary rather than redundant. EnvTex swaps the assets; EnvShade changes how they are lit and graded. At €5.60 on top of a €21 purchase you have already made, this is the easiest recommendation in the review.

If you want a shader tool with an active developer behind it — look at RDShade instead, with your eyes open. RDShade covers P3D v4 and v5, was last versioned in March 2022, and costs €21.99 — four times EnvShade. Its simMarket rating is 3 out of 5 across three reviews, with complaints about activation and unanswered support. Several of the people who abandoned EnvShade in late 2022 went there. Whether that was an upgrade is genuinely unclear from the public record.

If you are new to shader mods and nervous about a product touching simulator files — start here anyway. The uninstall path is real, the price means a mistake costs €5.60, and a quarter of the AVSIM poll's respondents run no modifier at all and are perfectly happy. You are allowed to be one of them.

Where it stands today

The uncomfortable fact about EnvShade in August 2026 is that its last update landed on 20 June 2023 and Prepar3D v6 landed on 3 July 2023. Thirteen days. TOGA updated all four products for P3D 5.4 — EnvShade got improved fog layers — and then the simulator moved to a new shader compiler and shader model 6, and the port never happened. On 6 November 2025 Maxime Konareff wrote it down himself: the v6 port "would have been a nice present to all of our supporters", a collaborative P3D-and-MSFS project begun in 2023 met delays and TOGA withdrew, he has joined a major airline as his first pilot job, and he is "totally unable to tell you if or when" development resumes.

That is not abandonment, and the distinction is worth defending. Abandoned products do not have a developer answering a customer's install question on a public forum in December 2025. Abandoned products get pulled from stores; EnvShade is still listed, still sells, and still sits ninth on simMarket's all-time chart. What it is, precisely, is finished: a complete product for a simulator generation that has itself stopped moving. Plenty of P3D v5 installs will never go to v6 — the add-on ecosystem around v5 is enormous and much of it did not port either — and for those installs EnvShade works exactly as well today as it did in 2023.

So the honest 2026 answer splits by which simulator you are actually flying. On v5, this is a live product with a dormant developer, and at €5.60 the value calculation is nothing like a €30 utility: you are not buying a support relationship, you are buying a working shader set once. On v6, there is nothing here for you and there will not be. The one thing we would change about the listing is the silence — nine years after release, a store page that still promises EnvShade "will evolve and be improved as much as possible" is selling a future the developer has publicly said he cannot commit to.