35 minutes ago, Litjan said:

I am totally happy with the default Global Scenery in X-Plane

This is how Venice, Italy, not exactly some obscure place, is rendered in a vanilla XP 12.4

 

If you are happy with the above then you are far away from what many simmers want in a flight sim.
This is not to discredit the many excellent features of XP12 by all means, I just cannot comprehend how you can be satisfied with the current scenery.
Even if you only fly airliners and only cruise above 30000 feet and never takeoff or land.

Anyway, we know LR is working on next-gen but until then there is no alternative to some sort of aerial imagery.

Also Jan, are you not partially employed by Laminar? Or an external contributor highly regarded by the team? 

 

4 hours ago, peroni said:

Also Jan, are you not partially employed by Laminar? Or an external contributor highly regarded by the team? 

That is correct, I work as a contracted technical advisor for Laminar Research and also make airports for them.

I have flown in reality to LIPZ many times in my life - and visited the city as well, I have seen it.

When I fly to LIPZ in X-Plane, I do not do it to look at Venice, I do it to experience the challenge of operating an aircraft and to end the flight by hitting the runway at the correct spot with the correct parameters. It does not interest me what the city of Venice looks like, if I want to see it, I will watch a YouTube video of it or travel there myself.

Please do not misunderstand my statement. I have NO objections to making the scenery more life-like, using Orthos, Photogrammetry, anything like that. As I said - I do not care, but I certainly do not "prefer" the default scenery.
I also know that I am "far away from what many simmers want in a flight sim", there is no need to remind me of that - I have already stated that I am aware of my outlier position in the post preceding yours.

Cheers, Jan

 

Edited May 6May 6 by Litjan

I look at that Venice pic and think about the differences to Simzilla. XP can already display photogrammetry and ortho and artists can already go in and manipulate the underlying terrain meshes, etc. None of that is new. Simheaven already places accurate building footprints and near-airport regions can be loaded up with ground clutter (with a human artist's touch). Certainly the new engine will be multi-core friendly which means better performance with lots of that clutter and high poly-count buildings and 3d models.

My bet is that most folks screaming for scenery change will be under-whelmed when it finally gets released simply because they (sometimes intentionally) under-estimate how much work it takes to make the scenery of their dreams or because they think there will be network-stream-from-LR ortho-grammetry. There will certainly be an airport or 2 fully flexing the new engine's muscles. Maybe SW USA will look more plausible, but aside from the performance benefits I'm not expecting to see much change. New autogen buildings will still be autogen.

LR also won't suddenly sink all the current 3rd party scenery products. The new scenery engine will introduce new capabilities but won't look drastically different for a few years yet, until the artists can catch up with the new dev goodies.

There isn't any need to prove the desire for next-gen scenery. Pretty much everyone at Laminar wants it (including Austin to peoples shock. I see alot of telephone game on the interwebz)

I just think people's levels of contentment or desired aspects of a flight sim are far different, and that should be acknowledged. Far too often, I see factions fight over who is more important. We're all rowing in the same boat here 🙂

On 5/5/2026 at 1:27 AM, Bjoern said:

I'm dug in on this, barbed wire, mine field, artillery kill zone, drone nets and everything else.

Yes, but are you SURE...? 

😁👍

On 4/23/2026 at 3:57 PM, fognozzle said:

Having just spent most of the last 4 days getting any sim to work to my satisfaction on my hardware, I've arrived at XP 11 running in Win 10 on an iMac with the Radeon Pro 570 X GPU. I am very happy with the performance of XP 11 , but I am disappointed with Auto Ortho. The main problem is: I don't know what I was supposed to experience. What is it really supposed to look like? The next problem is: I predominantly fly VFR and use the sim for rehearsing my real world flights in regional Victoria, Australia, so I need reasonably accurate terrain, roads, railways, power lines, buildings, airports and buildings for a reasonably accurate experience. Also I like to add in my own VFR reporting points and landmarks. What is the best answer, or isn't there one? 

I've read through a long post on visuals and I saw lots of acronyms that I don't understand, and I saw references to Orbx True Earth, FENIX, SimHeaven and DCS. Will any of these do what I need? I'd appreciate any advice on these before I spend days and days installing each only to find that they don't deliver.

Thanks in advance

 

Foggy

 

On 4/24/2026 at 3:02 PM, fognozzle said:

Thanks for the responses. I am very impressed with the videos, and I have played with the settings in XP II, and I can see some improvements and the interaction between the scenery quality and frame rates.

I suspect that I'm not going to get much more out of my old 2019 iMac. 

I now need to decide between XP 12 and MSFS. It looks like my requirements are best met in Windows, and this needs a complete new machine. I still have more testing to do with the VFR folks in VATPAC before I decide on Windows, because everything else I do is in MACOS, and I've got to purchase a laptop for travel later this year. Looks like it may be one machine for good simming at home and another machine for travel and everything else.

I had been considering giving up on real flying, but this gear could be expensive enough to change my mind.

Foggiest

I used to be a dyed-in-the-wool mac user, both at work (advertising/publishing) and at home.

Then I discovered flight sim. Got X-Plane. Loved it. Loved the high fidelity reputation.

Then I started seeing other sims, none of which run on MacOS, and started doing research.

Eventually, I ran across a great deal on a decent Dell Gaming laptop for $675 and decided to go for it.

Best decision I ever made in terms of personal entertainment. Now I can run whatever simulator I want and get to experience all the benefits (and downsides) of each.

While I've frequently and emphatically asserted that XP has more than enough scenery accuracy for not only VFR but also Pilotage and Dead Reckoning (at least in the US where I reside)...

...it just doesn't satisfy without enhancements.

I'm presently at the unenviable point where I love flying in XP but I can't fly it over my home area - even WITH ortho and SimHeaven. It's just not realistic enough any longer because I can't UN-see the inaccuracies.

So when I fly XP, it's usually over Orbx TrueEarth Great Britain for XP 12, and the other Orbx TrueEarth's for XP11 (they work fine in 12, just the colors are a bit off with all the lighting changes).

When I want to "serious simmer" around the local area for IRL practice, or anywhere NOT covered by Orbx, I hop into MSFS 2024 with a High Fidelity GA addon such as those from A2A Simulations or Black Square, and I've got accurate avionics, systems, navigation, AND great looking, hyper-accurate scenery.

Bonus for you is that MSFS 2024 released World Update 21 covering Australia just yesterday! Gorgeous work and included with the sim for free. 👍

TBH, there are pluses and minuses to both sims for your use case, and you should carefully evaluate both to see which best fits your preferences.

And yeah, I highly recommend you go Windows so that you have the most options. Generally, you're going to be able to get a very good experience for the same amount of money as any Apple that has the oomph to run a flight sim well.

And no matter what, it's gonna be cheaper than IRL flying 😉 

 

23 hours ago, Litjan said:

You are German, like me, and so you are maybe not aware that you are not using the correct word here - although the German "effizient" means the same thing as "efficient".

Effizienz (Efficiency) is a measure of how much effort you need to put in to get a certain result. It is not a measure of the total effort required. If you build a car that needs 100 liters to drive 100 kilometers, that is not "very efficient" by todays standards, but if other cars were to need 2000 liters, that is suddenly very efficient!

So if your goal is to store the whole world in ZL14 Orthos and it needs 10TB... you can not say anything about efficiency, it is simply the way it is. If you can do the same at 1 TB, you are ten times as efficient, but if another method needs 1000TB, then it is very efficient, compared to that.

The words you are looking for are "feasible", "practical" or "worthwhile" and "cost-effective".

Jawohl, Herr Oberlehrer! Sehr wohl, Herr Oberlehrer!

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Jawohl, Herr Oberlehrer! Sehr wohl, Herr Oberlehrer!

Thats the spirit!

Setzen!