Orbx TrueEarth is definitely the best by far and even crushes MSFS in this area.

I'm not going to take out my whole photo album either, and I'm not going to rewrite history either...

It's clean, clear and precise and we are talking here about a product that is already several years old.

Kudos to Tony for that!!!

5 hours ago, jcomm said:

Kudos to Tony for that!!!

Tony did an amazing job there's no denying it!

True Earth is not XP12 compatible and there is no indication from ORBX when or if it will be so available for XP12. Even som it always had a limited coverage or areas available, so for many many places on the Globe there was no ORBX True Earth. May look great in XP11 but loses a lot of features that are standard in XP12, like trees, seasons, lighting etc. SimHeaven will do for a pick me up and if you have unlimited disk space then you go Ortho the globe!

24 minutes ago, coastaldriver said:

True Earth is not XP12 compatible

Its supposed to be? XP11 scenery is all supposed to be forward compatible with XP12.

There is a relatively minor known bug with all ortho wrt water, that is on Laminar to fix as they cross off the other prerequisites to do so.

What makes you say it isnt compatible? 

Laminar really need to fix the clouds, but I think this could take a very long time to happen.

They also need to support the latest upscaling FSR 3 (minimum) and DLSS 3.  

Then good ortho and XP could be back in the game.

2 hours ago, mSparks said:

Its supposed to be? XP11 scenery is all supposed to be forward compatible with XP12.

There is a relatively minor known bug with all ortho wrt water, that is on Laminar to fix as they cross off the other prerequisites to do so.

What makes you say it isnt compatible? 

I will clarify - yes it will work as I understand it with XP12 but it will not show the new XP trees, seasonal changes, rain etc and seasons as far as I can establish - I could be totally wrong! I have lots of XP11 scenery that works fine in XP12 just does not have the new trees etc, guess it depends on what rocks your boat!

My problem with ORBX was that they never did LC or Mesh or True Earth for ASIA or Oceania (The Pacific) apart from OZ and NZ. Which is where I like to go sim flying.  The star for Pacific scenery has turned out to be Cami de Bellis (bless her!)

4 hours ago, Greazer said:

Laminar really need to fix the clouds, but I think this could take a very long time to happen.

They also need to support the latest upscaling FSR 3 (minimum) and DLSS 3.  

Then good ortho and XP could be back in the game.

Agree partly - the cloud issue is a problem only with high level but there is a more perfidious problem I only discovered yesterday on an all day sim session from sunup to sundown. Namely weird artifacts generated on the horizon by the lighting engine trying to capture cloud shadow which gave the impression that there were mountains as high as the Himalayas in Western Australia but those artifacts disappeared once the sun got up above the horizon otherwise lighting and clouds was fine for the whole day. 

I also discovered that some OZ Metars are not being captured or picked up by NOAA. Meekatharra (YMEK) was the case - XP and Navigraph both said no metar and referred to the nearest YPGN (Geraldton) but I had the AirServices Australia forecast/met report page open at the same time and Meekatharra had on the half hour metars all day which is to be expected as it is a nominated bad weather alternate for Perth (707s and 747s have over the years diverted there when Perth has been fogged in). You win some you lose some I guess! 

Anyway good enough and getting better from this users perspective. 

Here is sunset heading south from Meekatharra to Perth

Edited April 26, 20233 yr by coastaldriver

6 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

True Earth is not XP12 compatible and there is no indication from ORBX when or if it will be so available for XP12

It does work, but it's the old trees and mesh is missing new features (bathymetry, soundscapes, season support etc),. I also think the orthos need a refresh with better imagery.

I want to update it to XP12, but it's up to ORBX if they want me to do this now since they only concentrate on MFS these days.

Tonywob, well ORBX must have something in mind, they have updated all their libraries to XP12 - at the moment though that is all they have to offer an XP12 user such as myself. Time will tell. 

Edited April 26, 20233 yr by coastaldriver

7 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

True Earth is not XP12 compatible and there is no indication from ORBX when or if it will be so available for XP12. Even som it always had a limited coverage or areas available, so for many many places on the Globe there was no ORBX True Earth. May look great in XP11 but loses a lot of features that are standard in XP12, like trees, seasons, lighting etc. SimHeaven will do for a pick me up and if you have unlimited disk space then you go Ortho the globe!

Despite the lack of True Earth functionality combined with XP12 is simply a fantastic feeling of realism.

https://forum.orbxdirect.com/topic/215001-so-natural-so-true/

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/625036-liverpool-manchester-and-nothing-else/?tab=comments#comment-4864378

For the rest, you can't have everything. The proof with MSFS is that you have the whole planet, but the rendering is not good at all except in certain strategic places. It is a complete imbalance between the colors, the resolution and rendering distance.With each flight I have the impression of never being very far from the "Super Mario" world.

 

 

21 minutes ago, filou said:

Despite the lack of True Earth functionality combined with XP12 is simply a fantastic feeling of realism.

https://forum.orbxdirect.com/topic/215001-so-natural-so-true/

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/625036-liverpool-manchester-and-nothing-else/?tab=comments#comment-4864378

For the rest, you can't have everything. The proof with MSFS is that you have the whole planet, but the rendering is not good at all except in certain strategic places. It is a complete imbalance between the colors, the resolution and rendering distance.With each flight I have the impression of never being very far from the "Super Mario" world.

Yes, the ortho textures quality and meshes in MSFS vary a lot, depending on where you are flying. You can manage to get better results depending on the texture providers. Depending where you are flying, you might want to use Google or Bing Latest, instead of the default textures, for example. Concerning the colors, these are indeed really nice in your screenshots, but these are not default since you are using an shader addon. Some people also manage to get very good results when tweaking the global rendering (with NVidia Experience or so...). Truth is, "Super Mario" is close in both sims.

Concerning the OrbX TrueEarth, I'm currently trying to free up some space on my hardrive to attempt to install TrueEarth Washington onto my XP12.

For those of you who did it already, a quick question: in the OrbX Central tool, should I also trigger the install of the OrbX Libraries for XP11 ? Or should I only keep the libraries for XP12 ?

7 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

I will clarify - yes it will work as I understand it with XP12 but it will not show the new XP trees, seasonal changes, rain etc and seasons as far as I can establish - I could be totally wrong! I have lots of XP11 scenery that works fine in XP12 just does not have the new trees etc, guess it depends on what rocks your boat!

My problem with ORBX was that they never did LC or Mesh or True Earth for ASIA or Oceania (The Pacific) apart from OZ and NZ. Which is where I like to go sim flying.  The star for Pacific scenery has turned out to be Cami de Bellis (bless her!)

phew.

I am quietly waiting for underlying ortho/mesh/dsftool fixes - I don't really expect to see or hear much from orbx before that - maybe better they dont because I've not seen anyone get particularly cranky over those issues so far, and selling products into them isn't a great idea.

But it sounded like there was some showstopper issue/s I wasnt aware of - they can't really add those atm because the "easy way" is dsftool which is still getting its final touches.

2 hours ago, Daube said:

Truth is, "Super Mario" is close in both sims.

I cant speak for MS, but LR are definately "shooting" for

levels of realism. and are already fairly close in many circumstances. 

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

levels of realism. and are already fairly close in many circumstances. 

That's incredible... hard to tell it wasn't real :)