USA ortho

[Zimmerbz 153]

I am just curious about Ortho4xp and was wondering approximately how long would it take and how much storage would I need to cover the entire US?  I’m starting to learn a little more about xplane and am intrigued by this scenery. However something tells me I’d need crazy amo7nts of storage to cover the US. Thanks

[avgaskoolaid 292]

23 minutes ago, Zimmerbz said:

I am just curious about Ortho4xp and was wondering approximately how long would it take and how much storage would I need to cover the entire US?  I’m starting to learn a little more about xplane and am intrigued by this scenery. However something tells me I’d need crazy amo7nts of storage to cover the US. Thanks

There's a package of US orthophotos distributed by state/region made by 'forkboy' on the x-plane.org forums. It covers most of the US with the exception of Louisiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Misissippi, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, Iowa, parts of Wisconsin, and parts of Tenessee. I have all the packages installed and they take up about 1.5tb fully installed. To cover to rest of the US, I'm guessing you'd need an extra .5-2TB (there's no set space for each tile because they all cover different land areas and have different terrain features so this is just a guess).  What I did was buy a cheap 5TB HDD from newegg. It cost under $150 and I have all the space I'll ever need. Right now, with all of forkboy's orthos and some self-generated ones for parts of Europe and the Middle East I've only taken up 1.8TB. With XPlane it's incredibly easy to store your ortho tiles on an external drive and link them to the sim. In fact I don't have any scenery stored on the same HD where I have the rest of the sim installed. 

Keep in mind that forkboy's orthos will take the better part of a day to download via torrent with a very fast internet connection, or much longer with a slow one. Also, you'll need to convert the files that come with the download (forkboy distributes the texture files in a format allowing for a faster download, but they need to be converted to work in the sim). The process is handled automatically but can take hours upon hours for each state/region to complete. Overall you're looking at a solid 2-3 days of downloading/converting to get all of forkboy's tiles installed. From there, the process of building up the rest of the US yourself will take a very long time. To avoid data caps you'll need to spread it out over weeks or months. 

None of this is complicated, and the results are worth it, but the process of getting all of the US covered in orthos is very time consuming and somewhat tedious.