Thinking about trying XP, but concerned about scenery

[AviatorMan 253]

I am a P3Dv4.5 user now and have been in P3D since it was introduced. Have thought about trying XP, but downloaded the free tryout version, and was very disappointed with the default scenery. The default scenery on P3D is also generally unusable in my opinion, but I don't think any serious simmers use it as there are scores of great Orbx scenery to use. It seems that Orbx offers XP TE sceneries for Great Britain and Washington state in the U.S., but I think TE will overtax my machine (I have it for P3D and it isn't workable). So in general, what are the addon scenery options available for XP outside of airports and Orbx TE? 

[dmarques69 316]

There are several options but the one to go is ortho4xp, that is free, gives you the best scenery you can get in a FS.

I advise to take a look in forums.x-plane.org.

 

[dal330200 216]

I've also been a long-time P3D user who switched to x-plane a couple of months ago.  Both are incomplete sims in their own right, but x-plane looks better out of the box- and with Orthos, it can look fantastic.  I wouldn't waste money on ORBX products for Xplane.  Too performance-heavy, too expensive.  I haven't bought a scenery for x-plane yet since most default and user-created addons are sufficient due to the beauty of the orthos in my opinion.  Hopefully there will be good renditions of seasons by the end of the year too.  I do miss thunderstorms which don't render well in x-plane, but other than that, there are so many addons and plugins that improve skies/clouds, and there are also tweaks that are easier to manage than P3D also for the look and feel of the sim. 

Takes some gettin' used to, but I'm glad I ditched P3D and never looked back.

Edited August 5, 2019 by dal330200

[Speedbird21 17]

My time is split these days between P3D and XPL and I would have to agree, the out of box experience of both sims leaves a lot to be desired, but once enhanced they both look amazing. One of the good things about XPL is the amount of free scenery available. You could easily overload your system and never buy a single add-on. As was suggested, check out X-Plane.org and the Scenery Gateway. Installing scenery is very easy on x-plane as well, you just extract and copy it to your Custom Scenery folder and that's it for the most part.

Hope that helps,

David

[Flyfox 114]

I also tried the switch to XP11 including some sophisticated aircraft addons. Yes, the scenery out of the box is more convincing, but the aircraft flight dynamics have not (yet) convinced me. I am a RW pilot with SEP rating and experience on several aircraft types. And I must say that for me P3DV4 shows more believable flight dynamics. So, at least for the time being, P3D is the way to go for me.

[Jude Bradley 659]

Fly over the Netherlands and your mind will be changed forever. Compare it to the shapes in P3D and you will see the differrence.

 

[fireone 7]

If scenery is an important criterion , a quick look in the files section of the .org provides perspective on what is available as freeware. Some of it is exceptional . In the region in which I fly , Australia,  there are magnificent examples of scenery like Sydney Airport by ISDG ,  And ortho4xp means you can go quasi photorealistic anywhere in the world ( provided you fly at a certain altitude). Youtube is the best resource for viewing sceneries created by ortho4xp

[Janov 2,383]

1 hour ago, Speedbird21 said:

and the Scenery Gateway

A word of caution: As a normal (layman) user you never need to download anything from the Scenery Gateway. In fact, it can be detrimental to your experience down the road. All Scenery Gateway airports will be added to your installation AUTOMATICALLY during the course of X-Plane updates.

Cheers, Jan

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

Regarding the Orbx TE scenery: I don't think you can draw any conclusions from poor performance with the P3D version. I have similar computer specs to the ones you list (see mine below) and the same GTX 970 card.

I get the same frame rates with Orbx TE GB South and TE Washington that I do with the default XP11 scenery, somewhere in the 35-40 fps zone and never below 30 fps. It's very well optimized. 

[AviatorMan 253]

Thanks for the comments so far. Seems like a mixed view. Since I generally fly low altitude VFR, the ortho scenery addon may not be suitable for me. I am not generally unhappy with P3D, just a bit tired of runways that are perfectly level, when I know that they are not in the real world. I gather than X-P does uneven elevation runways?

[Paraffin 2,197]

Yes, X-Plane does sloped/uneven runways. One nice example is the famous one at KAVX Catalina Island.

Once in a while, you might find a runway where there isn't a Gateway (user-created) airport in the scenery, just a runway and taxiway that don't sit right on the underlying mesh. This can cause problems. I remember crashing once when landing at some obscure airport on an FSEconomy assignment, due to a "hump" in the runway I wasn't expecting and shouldn't have been there. That's rare though, as the Gateway keeps filling up the world with airports and tweaking any mesh problems.

[ryanbatc 12,799]

7 hours ago, AviatorMan said:

Thanks for the comments so far. Seems like a mixed view. Since I generally fly low altitude VFR, the ortho scenery addon may not be suitable for me. I am not generally unhappy with P3D, just a bit tired of runways that are perfectly level, when I know that they are not in the real world. I gather than X-P does uneven elevation runways?

Depending on how low....Ortho can still provide excellent views....but at a cost to your HDD space.  In the ortho world there's terms like ZL16.  Zoom Level 16...I use this for all of my southern California flights.  I didn't have the massive HDD space I have now when I made all the scenery...otherwise I would have went a higher resolution like ZL17.  At my current 16 level....most of the scenery is blurry below 1000 AGL.  However you can easily have the autogen automatically fill in over the textures and usually it matches up pretty well.  ZL17 would look pretty good below 1000 AGL I think.  So you might try creating some tiles in your favorite area in the world at that zoom level and see if its acceptable.