I've been playing around with Ortho4XP and in some areas the result is amazing as we all know but in some other areas it's looking really bad.

In order to find these bad areas it would be very convenient if there was some smart way to get a top view where I could quickly zoom out a lot allowing me to get a good overview and identify the bad areas without having to find them while flying.

In FSX/P3D there's something called 'Spot view' where you can do exactly this. Have been looking for a similar view in XP11 but so far to no avail. The closest I've got is using the free camera 'C' and then move up in the air panning around but to get really high to get a good overview that takes quite some time.

Thanks in advance for any tips!

1. Climb in a plane

2. take off (not sure if this is absolutely necessary but I do it)

3. open the x-plane map

4. click on your plane

5. adjust the altitude to how high you want. don't go too high in a Cessna though :) 

6. go to outside view

Thanks, I'll try that.

Tried this out and worked great!

Is there any way to also move horizontally using the map?

Yes, click on the aircraft icon on the map and drag it.

You can also go to 'circle' view and zoom out by pressing comma (,). Pressing shift+comma you'll zoom out extremely fast. Once you're high enough you can press 'C' and move around to inspect your tile with "," and ".", using shift again to speed the movement up (hold down the right mouse button to look around- the camera will move in the direction you're looking)

1 hour ago, Murmur said:

Yes, click on the aircraft icon on the map and drag it.

Already tried that but resulted in the map moving rather than the aircraft but just gave it another go and this time it worked so must have clicked slightly off the aircraft last time.

Thanks for the tip!

1 hour ago, hamoody said:

You can also go to 'circle' view and zoom out by pressing comma (,). Pressing shift+comma you'll zoom out extremely fast. Once you're high enough you can press 'C' and move around to inspect your tile with "," and ".", using shift again to speed the movement up (hold down the right mouse button to look around- the camera will move in the direction you're looking)

Thanks, will try this method as well.

Edited to add I just tried this method and this is by far the easiest way to get the kind of view I need to spot bad photo scenery.

Had already been using this view but didn't realize I was able to zoom further out since I've been using the mouse wheel which for some reason will only allow you to zoom out to a certain and rather short level.

On 2017-8-10 at 11:56 AM, WebMaximus said:

Thanks, will try this method as well.

Edited to add I just tried this method and this is by far the easiest way to get the kind of view I need to spot bad photo scenery.

Had already been using this view but didn't realize I was able to zoom further out since I've been using the mouse wheel which for some reason will only allow you to zoom out to a certain and rather short level.

I would expect the best method would be to select a custom zoom level for any tile you plan to make in ortho, you can then see the whole tile as it looks/will look, before downloading anything. Far faster than having to load it in the sim and explore. 

2 hours ago, Davidrebolton said:

I would expect the best method would be to select a custom zoom level for any tile you plan to make in ortho, you can then see the whole tile as it looks/will look, before downloading anything. Far faster than having to load it in the sim and explore. 

Not so sure about that.

With the goal covering all of Europe that would be quite a number of tiles to manually check with the custom option plus you'll also have to wait for the preview to download for every single tile. And you won't be able to see the complete tile on one screen but will have to manually scroll through it.

Then I think building a large amount of tiles using the batch build process and then just redo any bad tiles will be much faster.