Hello Guys n Girls,

I really do not want this to develop into an XPlane vs MSFS war.

Firstly, I am having some difficulties downloading and processing ortho content for Australia initially, followed by Indonesia and New Zealand. I am looking for a really good and simple guide to the whole process (preferably video tutorials) please.

Secondly, mostly due to the incredibly bad VR, particularly controller issues, implementation for MSFS, I find myself increasingly drawn to XPlane.  The only really good, and I mean, good, aspect of MSFS is the scenery graphics and this includes VR of course.

So, what I am looking for is some opinions from diehard XPlaners who have tried MSFS and can give me some sort of comparisons regarding Ortho quality scenery for XPlane vs MSFS scenery graphics.

Further to this, if practical, I would like to have ortho general scenery set at 17 with airports and near surrounds at 18 or 19.  I do appreciate that this will take up an awful lot of Disc space but I wonder if anyone could estimate just what space I would be requiring.  I am looking at a 4TB HDD just for the ortho scenery and am wondering if this will be sufficient.

Any information would be very much appreciated.

Regards

Tony

PS Like, I guess, all of us, I am really looking forward to XPlane12

https://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/files/24755/x-plane-11-australia-complete-photoreal-scenery/

mSparks,

Thanks mate, downloading now. Any comment on ortho quality vs MSFS? Also do you know what  the tile size is (ie 16, 17 etc)

Tony 

2 minutes ago, himmelhorse said:

Any comment on ortho quality vs MSFS?

Its a mixed bag aiui, afraid I only know what people tell me about MSFS.

 I am here

but any GA is still TBD.

First, it's almost certain that ortho scenery for XP11 will work just fine in XP12- thats how it was with XP10 -> XP11 and LR doesn't seem to be changing the scenery system. So rest assured you will probably only have to generate the scenery once and just plop it into XP12 once it releases.

As for file size, the increase is exponential with a given zoom level. It varies based on how much water is in a given area (water isn't drawn in ortho4xp so an area with many lakes and rivers will have a smaller size). ZL16 is about 2 gb per tile, ZL17 is about 8gb, and ZL18 is about 32GB. Personally, I find ZL16 for general areas I will only fly over at high levels to be completely adequate, and use ZL17 for areas around airports. You won't notice a huge difference between ZL16 and ZL17 at FL350. The tiles posted above are ZL14, except Sydney which is ZL17. So if you want to fly around Perth, Melbourne, etc you might want to generate your own but it's fine for areas you'll fly over at high altitudes.

Of course, MSFS ortho scenery looks way better at lower levels. You would have to have a tile at ZL18 or 19 to match the detail shown at low levels in MSFS. Ortho4XP has more issues with color variation than MSFS, but when the colors are uniform I find that XP orhos have a more 'crisp' and realistic quality than in MSFS. One of the few areas where XP's visuals are a bit better.

Regarding hard drives, it sounds like you might be familiar with linking your scenery into XPlane so you can store it on a different drive from the main sim. You can do this from as many drives as you want but sim loading times might suffer a tiny bit. 4TB is OK but if I were you I'd get a bigger HDD and just store all your custom scenery (orthos, airports and all) on one hard drive and link that into XP. I found a 20TB HDD from Seagate at Microcenter for like $300USD which is more than adequate.

 

What issues were you having with generating ortho tiles?

3 minutes ago, avgaskoolaid said:

First, it's almost certain that ortho scenery for XP11 will work just fine in XP12- thats how it was with XP10 -> XP11 and LR doesn't seem to be changing the scenery system. So rest assured you will probably only have to generate the scenery once and just plop it into XP12 once it releases.

As for file size, the increase is exponential with a given zoom level. It varies based on how much water is in a given area (water isn't drawn in ortho4xp so an area with many lakes and rivers will have a smaller size). ZL16 is about 2 gb per tile, ZL17 is about 8gb, and ZL18 is about 32GB. Personally, I find ZL16 for general areas I will only fly over at high levels to be completely adequate, and use ZL17 for areas around airports. You won't notice a huge difference between ZL16 and ZL17 at FL350. The tiles posted above are ZL14, except Sydney which is ZL17. So if you want to fly around Perth, Melbourne, etc you might want to generate your own but it's fine for areas you'll fly over at high altitudes.

Of course, MSFS ortho scenery looks way better at lower levels. You would have to have a tile at ZL18 or 19 to match the detail shown at low levels in MSFS. Ortho4XP has more issues with color variation than MSFS, but when the colors are uniform I find that XP orhos have a more 'crisp' and realistic quality than in MSFS. One of the few areas where XP's visuals are a bit better.

Regarding hard drives, it sounds like you might be familiar with linking your scenery into XPlane so you can store it on a different drive from the main sim. You can do this from as many drives as you want but sim loading times might suffer a tiny bit. 4TB is OK but if I were you I'd get a bigger HDD and just store all your custom scenery (orthos, airports and all) on one hard drive and link that into XP. I found a 20TB HDD from Seagate at Microcenter for like $300USD which is more than adequate.

 

What issues were you having with generating ortho tiles?

Basically I am just having trouble understanding the process.

"So if you want to fly around Perth, Melbourne, etc you might want to generate your own but it's fine for areas you'll fly over at high altitudes."

The cheapest 20TB HDD I can find here is about AUD1100.00 so that is impractical.  I did find a 10TB for AUD449.00 So I may start off with that.

Size is going to be important because I mainly fly GA wi8th some Zibo 737 and my beloved Phenom 300 being basically the only high altitude aircraft I use. I am now just wondering if I should settle for ZL16 for most areas and go to 18 or 19 for major airports.  

Another question, and this may sound silly, but, are ZL18 airports functional or do I have to download the airports themselves as well?  As you may be aware, there is very little available payware airports for Australia and the WED airports are not really realistic.

Regards

Tony

9 minutes ago, himmelhorse said:

Size is going to be important because

There's also a VR trade off.

You _can_ go higher than ZL16, BUT you probably dont want to, because it hammers the memory bandwidth and doesn't just murder load times but also VR fps.

You can also overcome the blurriness of ZL16 at low altitude with:

That's as true today as it was in 2017.

Edited February 8, 20224 yr by mSparks

mSparks,

Those graphics in that video look bloody awful even given vintage (XPL10). My standard graphics today are much better than that but nowhere near MSFS quality and with those fences etc look fairly unrealistic. 

I have only 81 hours to go for my download so I may hold off further discussion on this until I have installed that.  

Can you direct me to a good tutorial on downloading and installing please.

Regards

Tony

6 minutes ago, himmelhorse said:

Those graphics in that video look bloody awful

The point is adding the decals to the ortho (there's an option in Ortho4XP to do it automatically), that, plus playing with WED turns what would otherwise be a single colour field (even at high zoom levels) into

9 minutes ago, himmelhorse said:

Can you direct me to a good tutorial on downloading and installing please.

Oopppf, been a long time since anyone asked me that question.... I suspect it will be asked a lot again soon.

I think, at this point, (and taking aus into consideration) my recommendation would be to treat yourself to OrbX Florida

https://orbxdirect.com/product/us-florida-hd-xp11

OrbX have some great phenomenal assets you can use elsewhere (via WED) until they get round to doing the rest of the world. It will save you a ton of time (they have an auto installer which does all the hard work for you) and you will get a great result in the end.

All Xplane scenery happens in Custom Scenery/

There is a scenery_packs.ini file in there which determines the order things load in, basically all the zOrtho4xp_ folders need to be at the bottom of that file and you are good to go. I would expect that download to have installation instructions included with it.

Scenery is a very personal thing in X-Plane, you dont want or need 200MB of data to make a small area out of Belgrade look nearly perfect. remember Ortho is _just_ the textures - for all the 3D object placement you can edit with WED if there is something you dont like (or not, sometimes things are "just fine")

Also have a look through

https://simheaven.com/xp11-sceneries/

The people that take scenery really seriously share a lot of stuff from there.

 

Hi Tony,

I would suggest entering the phrase "Ortho4XP" into your google search window and hit enter. You will then find the no.1 premier site that will be able to answer all of your questions pretty much straight to the point.

I have never tried the tool, but I understand that there is a bit of a learning curve - with the payout being that you can finely tune the generated orthophoto scenery to your needs.

Coming from MSFS you need to give up on the hope to create something that will look "as good" - there are benefits to using X-Plane, but there are drawbacks, too - scenery fidelity and graphics certainly being the premier one. Trying to get "the best of both worlds" will fail.

Its like setting up a bulk cargo delivery service but insisting to do so with sportscars only because you like going really fast. 😉

Cheers, Jan

 

Edited February 9, 20224 yr by Janov

Ortho4XP isn't particularly hard to use, at its most simplest it's simply a chose a tile, zoom level and click a button and wait. You'll then have a 1x1 degree tile of scenery that you can fly over. A single 1x1 degree tile at ZL17 (approx 1m/px) will use about 9.6GB of space, and ZL16 (2m/px approx) will use 2.4ish.. and if you generally fly above 3000ft or so, ZL16 is not to bad and will work fine. ZL15 or lower I don't recommend unless you are flying at 30000ft or so.

However, to get decent results, you need to do a little bit of work to find the best sources of imagery for the area you want, and maybe even run some colour adjustments on them to make them look a bit better in the sim. e.g. Bing may be full of clouds in the area you want, but Google or Arc may have better sources.. You may even find another non-listed source such as a local county's free aerial imagery you can use. There may also be users who have done this for you, e.g. (For New Zealand there are the excellent free orthos by Lyndiman https://mildlyalert.wordpress.com/lyndimans-new-zealand-ortho-photography-set/ )

Don't expect to get results like MFS without further work or addons. MFS, whilst they use Bing and you can do the same in X-Plane, the imagery is enhanced, darkened, a tint is added to blend between different areas, and of course it has matching autogen generated on top of it that is colour matched. Whilst MFS's process isn't perfect (e.g. The orthos are way too green IMO and has way too many trees), it'll sill look way better than flying over plain vanilla orthos.

As for Australia and Indonesia, there really aren't that many options outside of low resolution or sparse data. Simheaven have a free autogen package for Australia you can put on the orthos to get buildings (it has good coverage now as it uses MS building data) and some vegetation.