EnvTex: the best skies in Prepar3D are parked at the holding point

The last thing TOGA Projects published is a blog post called "Holding point." It went up on 6 November 2025 and opens by apologising for nearly two years of silence. Four paragraphs down is the sentence a Prepar3D user actually needs. The plan had been to port the Env-series to P3D v6; it did not happen. "I'm so sorry we did not make it," Maxime wrote, before explaining that after twelve years of trying he had finally been hired by a major airline and was back in the books. He signed off: "TOGA projects is not dead but it is waiting at the holding point for an undetermined time."

That is a strange epitaph for a product still sitting at number seven on simMarket's all-time chart, still priced at €21.00, and still, on the evidence, one of the best-looking things you can bolt onto a Prepar3D install.

EnvTex is an environment texture package for the FSX and Prepar3D generation — roughly 11,000 files covering skies, clouds, water, runways, taxiway markings, airport signage and lighting, the sun, the moon, the Milky Way, contrails, wingtip vortices, tyre marks and aurora. It first went on sale on 8 December 2016. The version simMarket currently serves is 1.2.7.1, an 18.60 GB download. Nothing about it has changed since 19 June 2023.

So the review writes itself into a single question, and it is not "is EnvTex good." The record on that is emphatic and has been for a decade. The question is whether a legacy-generation texture pack that will never be updated again, whose headline feature is switched off by Prepar3D's own Enhanced Atmospherics, and whose companion tooling has a long public history of refusing to start, is worth €21.00 in 2026. Those are three separate objections and only two of them are fatal.

We read 26 sources for this: the simMarket listing and its 41 customer ratings, TOGA's own product page and blog archive, eleven years of AVSIM threads, HiFi's and Flight Sim Labs' forums, the French community at Pilote-Virtuel, and FSElite's coverage from the 2016 announcement through the 2019 video review. Reddit is structurally unavailable to us, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing — for a product whose community argument mostly happened on AVSIM between 2017 and 2022, that matters less than it usually would.

What you are actually buying

One SKU, one price, one store. TOGA Projects has no shop of its own: the "Buy Envtex" button on togaprojects.com points straight at simMarket, which makes the €21.00 both the store price and the developer price. There is no second figure to compare it against, and that is worth saying plainly rather than pretending to a price survey we cannot run.

The one caveat is VAT. simMarket's terms state that displayed prices "include the respectively applicable value added tax," which for a browser with no resolved account means 0% — so €21.00 is the ex-VAT figure and an EU buyer will see more at checkout. This is not theoretical. During a 30%-off sale in November 2020, AVSIM's Bargain Hunter's Shack recorded the headline price as €13.70 while a European poster reported "for us Euro-peans it's 17-19 at the checkout (VAT)." Budget accordingly.

Item	Price (simMarket, checked 19 August 2026)	What it does
EnvTex	€21.00	The texture pack. Skies, clouds, water, ground, effects, astronomical objects
EnvShade	€5.60	Shader replacement. Edits P3D's own HLSL rather than post-processing
EnvPlus	€9.60	Customisation extension, released 22 December 2022
EnvSound	€9.00	Sound replacement
EnvDir	free	The shared control panel and updater. Required by all of the above

Buyers confuse these constantly, so: EnvTex is the textures and EnvShade is the shaders. They are separate purchases that solve different problems, and the recurring horror stories about broken installs and shader restores attach overwhelmingly to EnvShade, not to EnvTex. There is also no such thing as a standalone "EnvTex Water" product — water is one module inside EnvTex, alongside sky, clouds, ground and effects. There is no bundle. If you buy one thing, buy EnvTex.

It is not a bag of bitmaps. Since version 1.1.1 on 8 November 2017 the package installs behind EnvDir, a configurator that lets you pick quality tiers per category, run ready-made presets, back up what it overwrites and pull patches through a semi-automatic EnvUpdater. That tooling is genuinely part of the product — and, as below, genuinely part of the complaint file.

The SKU covers Prepar3D v2 through v5, FSX and FSX: Steam Edition. TOGA's own site still advertises "7 supported simulators" including FS2004; the store listing says six and drops it, because FS9 development stopped at SP1 in August 2017 and the FS2004 build went freeware. There is no P3D v6 build and there will not be one. Lockheed Martin shipped v6 on 3 July 2023; TOGA's last compatibility patch, for v5.4, landed on 19 June 2023, two weeks earlier. That patch is where the product stops.

What the community consistently praises

The skies. This is the finding that repeats everywhere, and it survives being tested against rivals. In a May 2021 AVSIM comparison thread that ran to 38 replies and 12,300 views, one poster put it flatly: "When it comes to sky colors, nothing beats Envtex in my opinion. They look the most natural of all sky add-ons, while others may look spectacular, but quite artificial." A simMarket reviewer in March 2020 said the same unprompted — the sky textures are the best and "no other addon comes close." A JetMax-and-projector owner writing in July 2019 singled out the evening skies. Eleven years of coverage and the sentence barely varies.

The performance cost, which is close to nothing. EnvTex was pitched on this from the start; FSElite's September 2016 announcement piece flagged the promise of being "VAS and FPS friendly" as the intriguing part. The record backs it. "No discernible frame-rate hit" (simMarket, July 2019). "Amazing made my sim so much smoother" (January 2021). A Flight Sim Labs thread running December 2020 to March 2021 found no significant degradation across several users. Because you choose your resolution tier in EnvDir, a 32-bit FSX user can take the sky work and skip the VAS penalty entirely — which is exactly the configurability the marketing claims.

It plays with the weather engines instead of fighting them. EnvTex ships 64 sky presets with automatic integration for HiFi's Active Sky Cloud Art, plus 24 cloud textures for ASCA and 8 for REX SkyForce 3D. This is why "ASCA + ENVTEX for sky textures only" became the canonical AVSIM recommendation as far back as January 2018 and stayed there. If a colleague is reviewing Active Sky Cloud Art in parallel, the honest placement is that these two are complements, not rivals: Cloud Art does the dynamic cloud injection, EnvTex supplies skies Cloud Art's own defaults are widely thought to lose to.

Historic update responsiveness, when the team was working. Lockheed Martin shipped P3D v5.3 Hotfix 1 in December 2021; TOGA had compatibility patches out through EnvUpdater by 22 December, and AVSIM noticed. The free P3D v5 PBR expansion on 7 May 2020 cost existing owners nothing. For six years this was a developer that patched fast and did not charge for it.

The store record, read properly. simMarket shows a headline 5 out of 5 over 41 reviews. The spread is 35 five-star, 1 four, 2 three, 1 two and 2 one-star, which averages 4.61 — still excellent, and the low ratings cluster around installation rather than looks.

What keeps coming up as a problem

EnvDir will not start, and the products are welded together. Still open. This is the single most damaging recurring complaint and it is documented across at least three independent AVSIM threads. In April 2022 a user found that uninstalling EnvShade stopped EnvDir launching altogether — "as soon as ENVSOUND, ENVTEX or ENVSHADE was uninstalled, the basic program no longer starts." A community workaround exists, a Troubleshooting.bat in the EnvDir resource folder, and it did not work for him. By July 2022 another poster wrote that EnvDir fails to start "for me and for many many others as well, without a lot of jiggery pokery," and that "this bug has plagued many customers for quite some time now." Five months later, in December 2022, TOGA's founder replied to a customer on AVSIM that "there is no installation issue remaining that are on our known issues list." Both things were being said in public in the same year.

Windows 11 was never supported. Still open. In April 2022 a customer reported that TOGA's own forum told him plainly they do not support Windows 11. Another poster in the same thread was blunt about the consequence: nobody had announced that to prospective buyers. Four years on, with no further development, that has not changed.

Enhanced Atmospherics bypasses the best part of the product. Still open, and not TOGA's fault. From P3D v5, Lockheed Martin's Enhanced Atmospherics generates sky and cloud from shaders rather than textures. Sky, cloud and atmosphere therefore cannot be adjusted while EA is on. Two AVSIM users reached the same conclusion independently in March 2021 — "with Enhanced Atmospherics they don't make a huge difference" — and the thread starter, who had come to the forum ready to buy, decided not to. The community's working answer, from the Flight Sim Labs thread in December 2020, is to run EA off with ASCA and EnvTex skies on top. That is a real configuration that real people fly and it looks superb. It is also, in 2026, asking a v5 owner to switch off one of v5's headline features.

REX beats it on clouds, consistently. The May 2021 comparison is not close. "In comparison, REX is far superior regarding clouds textures and shapes," wrote one owner of both; another had "recently switched back to rex for clouds. It's a lot better than anything else for that." EnvTex's own cloud work exists mostly to feed ASCA and SkyForce rather than to beat them.

Antivirus and firewall friction. Mitigated by workarounds, never fixed. Windows Defender has flagged TOGA patches as false positives (December 2021), and on HiFi's own forum in November 2021 a user's EnvTex cloud themes failed to appear in ASCA until he dropped his firewall and re-pushed the files from EnvDir. HiFi's tester's advice was to add exclusions. Both are ordinary small-developer problems; both still cost you an evening.

Support has no ticket system, and has been gone for three years. Still open. In July 2022 the founder confirmed on AVSIM: "We don't have any ticket system." Support ran through the TOGA forum — which customers were simultaneously complaining had become a spam magnet — and through email that at least one customer said went unanswered for months. Since June 2023 there has been effectively no support at all.

Performance and stability

There is no performance story here, and that is a compliment. Across eleven years of threads we found no repeated complaint that EnvTex costs frames, and several independent statements that it does not. It replaces texture files rather than injecting a post-process layer, so once the files are on disk the sim is doing the same work it was doing before, at whatever resolution you told EnvDir to install. Owners of 32-bit FSX get an explicit VAS-optimised tier.

The instability is entirely in the tooling. EnvDir is the single point of failure: it is the installer, the configurator and the updater, it is shared across four products, and it has a documented history of refusing to launch after any one of those products is removed. When it works, the product is invisible and stable. When it does not, you have an 18.60 GB download you cannot configure. Note also that EnvTex writes into the simulator's own texture folders rather than sitting behind an add-on.xml — it keeps backups, and the backup system was promised and delivered as far back as the 2016 announcement thread, but it is an invasive install by design.

Who should buy it

The P3D v4 or v5 flyer who runs Enhanced Atmospherics off. Buy it. This is the profile the entire positive record is written by, and nothing in ten years has produced a better sky for legacy atmospherics. Pair it with Active Sky and ASCA, use EnvTex for the sky textures, and accept that you are building a 2021 setup on purpose.

The FSX or FSX: Steam Edition holdout. Buy it. The performance tiers were designed for you, the alternatives have mostly moved on, and €21.00 for 11,000 texture files is the best per-euro deal in this review.

The P3D v5 flyer who loves Enhanced Atmospherics. Do not buy it. You will be paying €21.00 for water, ground, runway markings, airport lighting and the moon, because EA will overrule the part you actually wanted. If those secondary textures appeal, wait for a sale — but go in knowing the skies are not yours.

The P3D v6 user. Do not buy it. There is no v6 build, the developer has said in public that the port was attempted and abandoned, and we found no verified account of anyone getting it working in v6 by hand. Anything you spend here you are spending on hope.

The MSFS 2020 or 2024 pilot. This is not for you and never was. TOGA never shipped an MSFS Env product.

Anyone who needs support. Do not buy it. The developer is on an indefinite hiatus he announced himself, there is no ticket system, and the forum has been quiet since 2023. If your install goes wrong you are on AVSIM's archive and a batch file.

Where it stands today

The uncomfortable thing about EnvTex is how well it has aged as a piece of work and how badly it has aged as a purchase. The textures are still beautiful. The configurator is still cleverer than most of what shipped alongside it. The price has not moved since December 2018, when FSElite reported SP2 at €21.00 — which, after seven and a half years of inflation, is quietly a much better deal than it was, and also a sign that nobody has been in the room to change it.

Legacy is not the same as abandoned, and it would be lazy to file this under dead. Prepar3D has a real userbase, much of it deliberately parked on v4 and v5 for add-on reasons, and for that userbase EnvTex still installs, still runs and still does the one thing it is famous for. But a €21.00 purchase carries an implicit promise about tomorrow, and the marketing still says "Continuous development with free updates" on a product whose developer wrote, nine months ago, that the studio is holding for an undetermined time. Buy it for what it is today, at the state it reached on 19 June 2023, or do not buy it at all.

The founder's own framing is the fairest one available. He built this with two friends while he could not get a flying job, it ran for nine years, and he stopped because he finally got the job. That is a better ending than most add-on studios get. It is just not an ending that a 2026 buyer should have to discover four paragraphs into a blog post.