A few months back I replaced my Saitek Switch Panel with the 1015 Cessna Combo Panel from Desktop Aviator. It’s a great product, very much like the real thing, and one of the best units I’ve bought for the sim. Here’s a short video review, and thanks to Bob at Desktop Aviator for making such a great unit.
Readers know that I was lucky to be gifted a pretty big set of photorealistic ortho scenery for X-Plane. It covers a nice part of the West where I like to use the sim, but I also enjoy the Tampa area and didn’t have scenery for that part of the world. So today I downloaded Ortho4XP and generated my first two tiles, covering the greater Tampa area. I downloaded the Ortho4XP files from the creator here, followed the instructions in this brief video (and there is more information here if you need it), and that was all there was to it. It took about five minutes to get installed and running, and about 10 minutes per tile (but I do have a fast connection). Here are some screen grabs showing the results, and note that this is zoom level 17. With this process being so easy, there is absolutely no reason for X-Plane users to not be creating and enjoying photorealistic scenery for any part of the world in which they wish to fly. And best of all, it’s FREE.
I just found this post at the REX forums that suggests they are considering a product for X-Plane 11. While I have enjoyed xEnviro, and consider it a huge upgrade to X-Plane’s default weather engine, I’ve found the METAR data spotty and it is still (and in fairness to those devs, who have been great) very much a platform in development. In P3D I was a huge fan of REX Direct’s work, and would love to see them produce a cloud or weather product for X-Plane.
REX guys … if you’re reading this: name the price and the entire XP world will follow. And if you’d like a beta tester, let me know.
Updated to version 2.0 with some significant updates:
And a few other changes here and there. You may get the updated scenery here, and happy flying.
