4 hours ago, Tork_Curve said:

But the wekaness for me is that i predominantly fly low level VFR and in MSFS i can recog ise landmarks i use in a real plane in the real world and navigate by them....not a chance with xplane unfortunately. Roads and hills can look awful at low level.

Maybe in the base sim, but you can download ortho scenery at much higher quality than what is available in the base MSFS sim.  I have the whole of the USA and Europe downloaded and it looks far higher resolution than MSFS.  I appreciate some people will only want to use XP12 out the box, but it really looks spectacular with some effort.

Now that's more like it. X-Plane 'out of the box' is weak graphically when it comes to scenery, it's just something MSFS does WAY better. But the above is what I'm trying to get to and don't mind investing and putting the time in to get there as X-Plane is better than MSFS in other areas. What add-ons do you use if you don't mind me asking?

At the moment ortho4xp is not 100% compatible with XP12, there were rumours it would be upgraded at some point.
Another drawback is that any orthoimagery will cause XP12 to take a long time to load compared to XP11.

Of course there's also the issue of the time and disk space required to create the tiles. Something that could be eventually fixed by autoortho

 

Edited January 13, 20233 yr by peroni

MrBitstFlyer

re: "...it really looks spectacular with some effort."

Your pictures are very impressive. I use ortho4xp and I have good results, but nothing like yours. So, if you can, please tell us what you did to get such great results.

Thanks.

8 hours ago, Tork_Curve said:

Now that's more like it. X-Plane 'out of the box' is weak graphically when it comes to scenery, it's just something MSFS does WAY better. But the above is what I'm trying to get to and don't mind investing and putting the time in to get there as X-Plane is better than MSFS in other areas. What add-ons do you use if you don't mind me asking?

SimHeaven X-World America / Europe
Global Forests V2
Ortho4XP using a base Zoom Level 17 (ZL17), and ZL18 3km around airports (works fine, but new version being developed for XP12)
X-Roads to stop XP12 roads from showing, allowing roads in the Ortho to be seen.

 

6 hours ago, jcjimmy said:

MrBitstFlyer

re: "...it really looks spectacular with some effort."

Your pictures are very impressive. I use ortho4xp and I have good results, but nothing like yours. So, if you can, please tell us what you did to get such great results.

Thanks.

I fly GA so find I need ZL17 which gives sharp textures above 1000ft.  I use ZL18 3km around airports so textures remain sharp as I descend for landing. My Ortho4XP settings (using Google Maps 'GO2' are:

Edited January 13, 20233 yr by MrBitstFlyer

15 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

I appreciate some people will only want to use XP12 out the box, but it really looks spectacular with some effort.

2nd shot is superb :-)

I have terabytes of Ortho and if you go anywhere outside of the most popular regions in the US and Europe, the result is often atrocious. Clouds everywhere, awful coloring issues, weird glitches and resolution problems of all sorts. Yes, if everything works as expected, the result is similar to MSFS, but the total area of the world where this happens is, unfortunately, minuscule.

Currently I am using MSFS about 70% of the time. If XP had the same quality scenery as MSFS does, that would be 50/50. 

41 minutes ago, GCBraun said:

Currently I am using MSFS about 70% of the time. If XP had the same quality scenery as MSFS does, that would be 50/50. 

I love picking up some area in MSFS I'd never fly in. e.g. I flew across the Arabian peninsular and it was incredible scenery as well as random places in the USA. However, the areas I knew well.. the results were mixed. My home town here in Poland looked really bad, that I made my own overlay and orthos:

 

2 hours ago, GCBraun said:

I have terabytes of Ortho and if you go anywhere outside of the most popular regions in the US and Europe, the result is often atrocious. Clouds everywhere, awful coloring issues, weird glitches and resolution problems of all sorts. Yes, if everything works as expected, the result is similar to MSFS, but the total area of the world where this happens is, unfortunately, minuscule.

 

It just uses Bing... I also found the USGS data sources extremely good for the US.

13 hours ago, peroni said:

Of course there's also the issue of the time and disk space required to create the tiles. Something that could be eventually fixed by autoortho

I believe AutoOrtho uses ZL16 as a base, which I find far too low for GA flying.  ZL16 is OK above about 4000ft.  Does AutoOrtho just take data straight from Google / Bing? If so it will display all the issues described before with colour variations.  at least with Ortho4XP, different map providers can be used in a single tile to mitigate this.

For pinn sharp textures for GA flying I find a base of ZL17 with ZL18 around airports gives excellent results.  I will continue to monitor AutoOrtho to see if the zoom levels become editable.

4 hours ago, tonywob said:

that I made my own overlay and orthos

Wow, how does one do that?

On 1/12/2023 at 10:06 PM, Pe11e said:

to make the vector roads invisible. 🙂

Right, but that does it for all scenery, and I've gone back to default "almost" everywhere save a few places I fly very low. So the choice is between not great roads with ortho (roads dont look like ortho either) and no roads anywhere else.

Or those everywhere, which are not that much worse than ortho after a few K altitude.

Edited January 14, 20233 yr by mSparks

Alps scenery by Frank Dainese and Fabio Bellini is gorgeous in XP12. Devoting a full detailed documentary video to the region. Here are a few pics from the video in production.

8 hours ago, tonywob said:

It just uses Bing... I also found the USGS data sources extremely good for the US.

There are for sure many improvements made to the base map. Take Brazil or northern Latin America for instance, on XP (using bing) most of the region is covered with clouds, whereas on MSFS I see none.