1 hour ago, GoranM said:

Scenery improvements.  Not "new", per se.  Probably a bad choice of words.  They're going to improve on what has been added.

Some official statements:

Some additional information regarding the last update.

- This is not a radical change in scenery. We acknowledge the community demand for better scenery!

- A "recut" is where we've fed additional parameters and requirements on our scenery engine to export into DSFs

- Some obvious improvements that can be witnessed are areas such as "EGLC" where the surrounding autogen, forests, mesh and water more accurately reflect the surrounding scenery

 

Sounds like a simheaven autogen type of upgrade.

15 minutes ago, strider1 said:

Sounds like a simheaven autogen type of upgrade.

Definitely a possibility. 

Considering that Armin, SimHeaven's developer has been very quiet lately...

Let me just  make a wild guess here: Armin is working for Laminar now, if only part time. The recut was step 1, i.e. getting the build chain up and running, fixing some data assignments in turn. Step 2 would be up to date source data, as a start only for the areas he can directly work his X-World experience on, i.e. processing what can be pulled from OSM, but still using the assets present in 12.1. Once that is done, it's step 3, with new mesh, new land use data and a new terrain data compression method implemented by Ben to drive down storage requirements and get everything to low-bandwith users. While they're at it, they may as well throw in new art assets. The result is a new gen scenery for a huge milestone like 12.5.

4 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Considering that Armin, SimHeaven's developer has been very quiet lately...

Let me just  make a wild guess here: Armin is working for Laminar now, if only part time. The recut was step 1, i.e. getting the build chain up and running, fixing some data assignments in turn. Step 2 would be up to date source data, as a start only for the areas he can directly work his X-World experience on, i.e. processing what can be pulled from OSM, but still using the assets present in 12.1. Once that is done, it's step 3, with new mesh, new land use data and a new terrain data compression method implemented by Ben to drive down storage requirements and get everything to low-bandwith users. While they're at it, they may as well throw in new art assets. The result is a new gen scenery for a huge milestone like 12.5.

Got some nice airport assets now for wed, finally got proper cargo pods and luggage carts. nice

5 hours ago, DD_Arthur said:

There are forests around EGLC?

Interesting…..

One's definition of "forest" may vary to others.  I'm guessing you're thinking of forests as large areas of trees that take up several square kilometres, like what is falsely depicted in the city of Sydney in another flight sim, where there should be no trees...at all.

Perhaps whoever wrote the statement about forests around London City was referring to the trees and parkland surrounding it.  Example...At the airports 8 o'clock and 3 o'clock, along with the tree areas off to the left across the river, as pictured below.

Edited January 16, 20242 yr by GoranM

Fair enough. Since this is an area I'm very familiar with, I wonder what it looks like in X-Plane 12?

23 minutes ago, DD_Arthur said:

Fair enough. Since this is an area I'm very familiar with, I wonder what it looks like in X-Plane 12?

Not too bad for autogen.  Obviously not as good as ortho/streaming scenery.  

No, not too bad at all for stock sim. If they could do something about the roads....

58 minutes ago, GoranM said:

Not too bad for autogen.  Obviously not as good as ortho/streaming scenery.  

As much as I like to praise XPlane from time to time, I can't really call that "not too bad". Ignoring the ground textures which are off-topic right now, the autogen itself is extremely sparse and nowhere near anything we see on the real picture. How could this be "not too bad" ? What would "bad" be, then ? 😕

45 minutes ago, Daube said:

As much as I like to praise XPlane from time to time, I can't really call that "not too bad". Ignoring the ground textures which are off-topic right now, the autogen itself is extremely sparse and nowhere near anything we see on the real picture. How could this be "not too bad" ? What would "bad" be, then ? 😕

What can I say?  Opinions will always be subjective. “Bad” would be an airport that doesn’t even closely resemble the real world counterpart. 
As I said, it’s not too bad for autogen. I’m not expecting much from it. 
If I said “it’s not too bad for scenery”, I’d agree with you, in that it’s…”bad”.

I've started appreciating XP12's default scenery again after becoming a fan and intensive user of Airlinetools FlightDeck A32x....

FlightDeck Simulator A32x by airlinetools - European Airports.. (a3xxflightdeck.com)

It always depends on the use you give to the sim...

I use XP12 mainly to fly the Toliss A32N, and a couple freeware GAs, because of the "feel of flight" as well as very acceptable weather modelling and effects... I use Airlinetools for "serious" A320 "training".... Sometimes I can't use the most nice looking scenery browser sim because it feels so detached from reality flying-wise that it makes me want to stay away from it for a while and decompress 🙂

Edited January 16, 20242 yr by jcomm

3 hours ago, Daube said:

As much as I like to praise XPlane from time to time, I can't really call that "not too bad". Ignoring the ground textures which are off-topic right now, the autogen itself is extremely sparse and nowhere near anything we see on the real picture. How could this be "not too bad" ? What would "bad" be, then ? 😕

He's running low settings.

Default:

Xworld

 

7 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

Got some nice airport assets now for wed, finally got proper cargo pods and luggage carts. nice

Wasn't talking about airports.

My default 12.0.8 global scenery LCY looks like this, by the way:

Edited January 16, 20242 yr by Bjoern

7 hours ago, GoranM said:

One's definition of "forest" may vary to others.  I'm guessing you're thinking of forests as large areas of trees that take up several square kilometres, like what is falsely depicted in the city of Sydney in another flight sim, where there should be no trees...at all.

Perhaps whoever wrote the statement about forests around London City was referring to the trees and parkland surrounding it.  Example...At the airports 8 o'clock and 3 o'clock, along with the tree areas off to the left across the river, as pictured below.

WOW!!! XP13 is coming along nicely