Hi all, after decades of flying P3D, FSX and many of their predecessors, I decided to take the plunge and give X-Plane 11 a shot.  With the base sim around the same price as a single quality P3D addon, and with lots of good freeware available I decided "why not?".

After getting past the initial "ugh, this is different, I don't like different" phase, I'm starting to settle right in with X-Plane.  I'll still spend a lot of time in P3D flying heavy iron, but I'm loving GA flying in X-Plane (I have to admit the FlyJSim 737 and 727 look very nice...so maybe not only GA flying LOL). 

I picked  up the wonderful Aerobask DA62 to cruise around in, spent some time playing around with ortho4xp, and voila, the Bow River Valley is now available in beautiful detail in my sim.  This blew me away...this area is probably my favorite place on earth, I've visited 6-7 times, and flying through it in X-Plane brought back a wealth of memories. Enough blabbing, here's a few quick screens:

Flying over the Banff townsite with distinctive Mount Rundle in the background:

Norquay Ski Hill:

Heading west toward Lake Louise:

I can't say enough how amazing ortho4xp is...I've spent more time so far creating scenery than I have actually flying!  I'm about 2/3 done my home province of Nova Scotia.  My next screenshots will be a flight through the Cape Breton Highlands.

I'm glad I decide to give X-Plane a shot, wish I had done it sooner.

Looks great! What source did you use for generating the tiles?

Thanks!  I used Bing as the source.  It seems for most areas I'm switching between Bing or Arc...up around the Athabasca Glacier I used google as it was the clearest.

13 hours ago, regis9 said:

I'm glad I decide to give X-Plane a shot, wish I had done it sooner.

Now you can make up for lost time. If you don't already have the Zibo 737 mod, then I really recommend it. Free, but you can donate.

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/138974-b737-800x-zibo-mod-info-installation-download-links/ 

 

It gets updated quite frequently. 

Thanks Jude!  I read about that, will have to check it out.

Ahh, memories of my one and only visit to Banff and Jasper, back in 1972 on my school church choir's tour of Canada and the Western US.  The Canadians were so kind to us, they kept giving me money, especially kind were the ones in Kamloops and Edson Alberta just outside of Jasper on Alberta's prairie.  I stayed on a farm there and eleven at night, in the summer, it was broad daylight outside.

Nice screenshots and memories indeed!

John

Nice area! :)

Do not forget to:

1) generate your overlays
2) add a shortcut to the overlays in your Custom Scenery folder.

This will give you a fairly accuratly placed autogen on top of your ortho tiles.

Ping me if this needs some screenshots to clarify :)

 

Regards,
Vital

5 hours ago, regis9 said:

Thanks!  I used Bing as the source.  It seems for most areas I'm switching between Bing or Arc...up around the Athabasca Glacier I used google as it was the clearest.

I use Bing mostly now, but I used to generate quite a few tiles with Google. Google no longer works for me -- I just get plain blue tiles. I think they block the application from downloading their ortho photos now and others have said the same, so I'm surprised you've had some success with them. Did you have to change anything in the program files to make that happen?

1 hour ago, turnandbank said:

I use Bing mostly now, but I used to generate quite a few tiles with Google. Google no longer works for me -- I just get plain blue tiles. I think they block the application from downloading their ortho photos now and others have said the same, so I'm surprised you've had some success with them. Did you have to change anything in the program files to make that happen?

I spoke too soon, I went to fly in the area I had generated with google and got a few error messages followed by xplane shutting down...looks like google is in fact not working.  I’m trying to recompile the area now.

3 hours ago, vesalius said:

Nice area! 🙂

Do not forget to:

1) generate your overlays
2) add a shortcut to the overlays in your Custom Scenery folder.

This will give you a fairly accuratly placed autogen on top of your ortho tiles.

Ping me if this needs some screenshots to clarify 🙂

 

Regards,
Vital

Thanks Vital, I've had mixed success getting the overlays to work, some do and some don't, often on adjacent tiles.  I'll send you a PM.