Orbx True Earth Great Britain South: The Future Of X-Plane Scenery Is Here

Yesterday I was able to download and install (on my own dime, not as a promotion) the new True Earth Great Britain South scenery from Orbx for X-Plane. I had posted about this upcoming scenery earlier in the month, along with some Orbx screen caps. It looked fantastic, and in all candor this was an announcement I’d been waiting some time to see. I used Orbx scenery extensively when I used P3D, and while the ability to create your own photorealistic scenery in X-Plane (for free) is a huge asset, as is the availability of HD mesh (also for free), there’s nothing quite like photo scenery, mesh, and landmarks created by someone who’s really doing it with intention.

And after spending about 90 minutes kicking the tires on the scenery in VR yesterday, I can say without hesitation that Orbx has created an amzaing product for X-Plane. I streamed that VR flight online, and it’s posted below. It was my first flight in the scenery, and we started in London, in part to find out what it does to my frames, optimal settings, etc. So if you choose to watch the video, know that much of the first 40 minutes or so are me trying different settings, re-loading the scenery and X-Plane, etc. Summary of the London experience? Really hard on my frames in VR, although people in the comments noted that it seemed to be much easier on frames in their physical cockpits. So perhaps it’s something about the VR rendering. It was not unflyable — nothing is unflyable if you compromise your settings — but to have what looked like a natural draw distance of objects, and a decent density to my taste (one notch below full on the object slider), my frames were really being tested. I can tolerate it, but it doesn’t make me eager to spend a lot of time flying around London (at least not until I upgrade my PC and video card).

We also ported to three other locations, though, and that experience was spectacular. Good-looking tiles, fantastic color-correction of the ortho scenery, trees everywhere (and of many different varieties), fantastic autogen buildings, gorgeous blending of the water textures on the seashore, and many, many custom local objects just where they should be — with highly flyable frames (at least on my rig). It was nothing short of thrilling in VR, and it looks good at all times of day (including at night, with all kinds of unique strobes, flashing red lights, etc. on different objects).

Summary: If you like to fly GA, this scenery is a must have. GB Central and North are next, and then Orbx plans to move to the US. And if you are tracking the path of X-Plane scenery development, all I can say is that Orbx have done it. The future is here.

Video and screen caps from the video are below.

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4 thoughts on “Orbx True Earth Great Britain South: The Future Of X-Plane Scenery Is Here

  1. I fly only the West coast, mostly in SoCal, pretty much sure that after ORBX “Test Drive” they will start to cover north America as well. It will interesting to compare between Orth4XP & ORBX

  2. I was watching some of the live stream, and I was wondering if it was possible that you might have had Simheaven’s overlay scenery also installed in that region — the give-a-way was there is supposed to be a large dome-like structure near EGLC but it was showing up as a facade-style building in the stream instead. Hopefully you will able to get it all sorted out in the near future!

    Anyways, big fan of your videos especially your VR streams — I was originally on the fence about VR but seeing how you convincingly manged your workflow in VR made me try it out too. Right now I’m using Trinus VR and a simple Smart Phone + Google cardboard for my VR, it’s a bit crude but it works, now I want to save up and get a real proper VR headset because the sense of depth and scale you see is unmatched.

    Looking forward to more videos!

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