When I read here on Avsim about the new FSFS 2020, many people hope that the scenery is good enough so that we can discover new places with scenery that looks somewhat realistic without the repetitive landclass tiles or cities, where we are for example faced with streets and railway tracks running across buildings.

Should you have X Plane, part of this is reality already now. It is called Ortho4XP and gives us the world to explore in photoscenery. Well, at least in theory, because

1.    We would need a lot of disc space to download the entire ortho world and

2.    Not all of the world is feasible in X Plane, because of the quality of the tiles. I have tried for example to download the Papua Newguinea ortho tiles. It doesn’t work because of too many clouds baked into the scenery. And I have tried all sources from Bing to USA2. Africa on the other hand works extremely well. I have tried South Africa, Victoria Falls, Serengeti, Ethiopia and the African rift valley. All of it is quite good. Also most of North Africa and the Middle East is excellent. Further south east, all of NZ and the Australian Gold Coast is fantastic (I haven’t tried other parts of Australia yet, as I also have Australia v2 from ORBX for P3D). And coming to Asia, I found that Taiwan for example is quite well represented. Please have a look:

 

I have used USA2 as source, ZL17. As you will see in the pics, there is excellent freeware scenery available for Taiwan (over at the org) 

My starting point is Taichung on Central Taiwan's west coast. From here I will fly across the Central Mountain Range and make my way to Hualien on the island’s east coast. It will be fun.

 

 

GO AWAY!!!

 

Approaching the city of Taichung

 

This looks fantastic

 

Our next destination is one of the most popular tourist destinations in central Taiwan

 

It’s called Sun-Moon Lake

 

Taiwan has some of the highest mountains in Asia with its tallest peak reaching 3,860 m (12,644 ft)

 

 

Heading towards the east coast. Those white spots in the distance are clouds, baked into the scenery tiles. It’s a bit of an effort to get rid of them, but it is doable

 

Hualien is dead ahead

 

It appears that PAPI is a thing that is not known in this part of the world. 😉  Well, weather is fine, so we can manage without it 

 

This Carrefour hypermarket looks exactly like in real life

 

Also the airport looks superb. Remember, it’s freeware!

 

 

I hope you enjoyed this little trip. I did 😉

Edited August 29, 20196 yr by bernd1151

Very nice.

I am an Ortho4XP junkie. I bought two 8 terabyte drives for handle my obsession. Once flying ortho its hard to go back to anything else. I am selective on what areas, and complimented now with Orbx's TE stuff.

Bryan

Thanks for a very enjoyable tour.

John

Interesting...never explored much outside of the USA in flightsim.

That's an odd duck of a plane LOL

6 hours ago, 1st fltsimguy said:

Very nice.

I am an Ortho4XP junkie. I bought two 8 terabyte drives for handle my obsession. Once flying ortho its hard to go back to anything else. I am selective on what areas, and complimented now with Orbx's TE stuff.

Bryan

I do exactly the same, Bryan, also adding ORBX TE to my orthos. This works quite well for example with Washington and the adjacent BC region. I also don't fly in anything else anymore. I'm now in the process creating my (selective) European scenery, using four 5 TB drives as storage. The Alps look spectacular!

 

5 hours ago, John F said:

Thanks for a very enjoyable tour.

John

Am happy you like it, John

4 hours ago, ryanbatcund said:

That's an odd duck of a plane LOL

That odd duck is an Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante 😊😊

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_EMB_110_Bandeirante 

I remain much interested in your topics of world-wide photoscenery explorations (including the mountainous regions...🙂...) with Ortho4XP....

Very nice pictures here...!