20 hours ago, mSparks said:

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.

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

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

My brain has a hard time admitting.Awesome!

23 hours ago, Daube said:

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.

I used MSFS a lot and Map Enhancement also but the rendering distance is much more disastrous not to mention the huge color differences in some places, it's day and night.

 Regarding the colors of screenshots with shader addon or nVidia freestyle you would probably have found my photos prettier without.Shader addon or nVidia freestyle allow you to capture the settings you could make for exemple with all the options of your Monitor or your TV.

I only fly in real weather with MSFS and it is total imbalance between the light, the shape and the color of the clouds suddenly it creates completely unrealistic colors on the horizon on the ground  (flashy green).

But the problem already starts with planes move on the ground and the rest follows, 

"Super Mario" World for me.

I really don't feel this with XP12 at all despite its weaknesses at certain levels.

" you can buy all the best footballers in the world that's not why you're going to win the champions league"

XP12 will definitely ramp up

 

You are right about the ground textures colors, which are very often "strange" to say the least. And yes, when switching MSFS to other textures providers, it can lead to catastrophic results due to the complete lack of harmonization of the various areas. In that aspect, payware products such a OrbX TrueEarth really bring a drastic improvement. The rendering distance has never been a problem for me, especially since I fly in VR, but even in 2D screen I never had a problem with it.

Yesterday I have succeeded reinstalling my OrbX TrueEarth Washington in XPlane 12, although I had to go for the SD version instead of the HD. The HD downloaded pretty fast, but the "convert file" phase of the installation was taking forever (like, 5 files in 3 seconds, for a total of 19.000 files!!!). The installation of the SD version went much faster and I could finally enjoy the glorious Darrington Muni airport in the XP12 graphic engine ! 🙂 Contrary to XPlane 11, XPlane 12 will finally allow me to explore that scenery with nice lighting and CLOUDS ! (with no flashing shadows or other irritating bugs that made me delete XP11...)

However, from that point I started experiencing some issues with VR, but I'll create a separate topic for that...