Enhance X-Plane 12 scenery for free with X-Europe

hello simmers and welcome to Amsterdam we are in X-Plane 12. and for this video I would really like to show you the effect of the freeware packages X Europe and the freeware Ortho tiles that they can have on the scenery in the simulator um X-Plane 12 open data was released I think it was one or two weeks ago I was dying to do a video on it but I just didn't have the time it was too busy at work but now I have my holiday so there's plenty of time to make some videos so that's what I will do but in the meantime of course the main streaming channels have already displayed a lot of explain 12. so there's not much use for me to to go over all that again two weeks later so I thought it would be nice since there is a lot of criticism on the scenery in explain 12 to do a video to show you what the effect of X Europe and Ortho is on that scenery so we are in Amsterdam we are parked at the Eastern apron of skipple this is the ga and the Business Jet apron and down there is the aviation police with the helicopters um well let's just say something about the scenery in general first of course there's a massive um difference in design philosophy between X-Plane and Microsoft flight simulator because usually people compare the sceneries the default sceneries in X-Plane with the sceneries that you get out of the boxy Microsoft flight simulator and of course they are almost uncomparable because in Microsoft flight simulator you just log on to um like a network and you download the ortho tiles for the area that you are flying currently over whereas X-Plane well they just give you a sort of basic scenery they call it a plausible world um and if you would like to further enhance that that is entirely up to you there is plenty of resources but they are not investing in the photo reel uh scenery that you get with Microsoft flight simulator now the downside is the world's out of the box doesn't look as good as in Microsoft flight simulator but the upside is that the Sim is reasonably small well comparably small in size and that you can get all the systems all the files on your system so that's a big plus I mean if some accountant at Microsoft decides it's not cost effective to run the scenery servers anymore that they can plug they can't just pull the plug and you cannot use your simulator and all the hundreds or maybe uh over the course of time thousands of dollars worth of scenery are just unusual that's not a danger or risk with the use of X-Plane you get all the files on your system and you can use it as long as you have a rig to run it basically so there's a change in philosophy or a difference in philosophy and Austin Myers stated that uh photogram the photo sceneries out of the box are not the top priority for the team at laminar that might be somewhere down the road in the future but nothing to be expected soon and that's not a big problem because with a little bit of effort you can really enhance the scenery in your sim and the two packages that I use to do that will first of all of course ortho4xp but there's plenty of videos on how to create tiles and do that so I'm not going into that too deep but the other package that is X Europe and I would like to demonstrate in this video the effect that X Europe has on the scenery and especially on the autogen now when you look at the surroundings of Amsterdam in the SIM for instance here a bit further to the South this is Runway 624 so here we are at the southwest of the airport now when you look at this area um what strikes me is that the layout of the roads is highly accurate you can really navigate with the real world road map around the Sim the roads they are just spot on as well as the streets but if you look at the um the the layout of the land and you compare that with the footage in Google maps you can see there's a huge difference the way that the land is displayed here that's basically not really Dutch and by that I mean that let me just go to a free view in the Netherlands The Landmark what is really highly uh characteristic of the of the landscape is the very rectangular fields and that has got something to do with the types of soil that we have in the Netherlands and how our ancestors used that soil and that has really shaped the terrain surrounding the airport and you get these highly characteristic like I think it's called peat in in English where you but this was basically very boggy terrain so our ancestors they dug up Pete and they laid that to dry in the Sun and that created Turf and they used the turf to to burn to warm their houses to get these really distinctive long Fields with lots of water surrounding it and then the part where the airport is that's actually a boulder this used to be a lake or a sea that was dried using windmills and some steam pumps and this consists of clay and because this land was dried it was artificially well basically designed so you've got this very nice rectangular fields that were very easy for Farmers to to use to produce their their goods to grow their crops but anyway as you can see in Google Maps the terrain itself doesn't look anything like the terrain in X-Plane 12. and if you want to tackle that bit then you have to install an ortho tile but if we take a look at the autogen let's just go here this is the town of hovdorp I used to live there when I was a small child right after my birth I think think it was something like the first eight or ten years of my life that I lived here and if we fly over this well you'll get and this is what I mean with plausible world you get the idea of flying over a urbanized area with a lot of people living here now let's zoom in a little bit on this area down here because not surprising this is the neighborhood that I lived in for the first couple of years this is called bitter column and when you look at this area well you can see there's a large intersection there are some roads here's some blocks of houses and there's a lot of trees in there but if you look at the same area in Google Maps it is down here you can see that large intersection in here here is a car dealer with a gas station and as you can see there's no such thing as a forest in here there are some buildings these are actually elementary schools here is a shopping mall but none of that is displayed here in the simulator in the cost in the default scenery of X-Plane 12. again the road layout is correct you have that large intersection if you move at this road let me just pull the screen side by side it makes the comparison a lot easier Let's see we are in the SIM so this intersection is this intersection in real life if you move up this roads you get to an intersection if you move up here and then to the right you get this Dead End Street with parking lot well that is in there but you can see there's a row of houses here and here and in here there's only one row of houses there are some trees that aren't there in real life so in terms of scenery it's plausible Worlds at a very low resolution level in the sense that yes this is a neighborhood with just some housing but it doesn't reflect really what is there in real life now what I'm going to do is I'm going to restart my sim with X Europe installed and we'll go back to the same area here and then we'll take a look at the difference in the in the scenery layout so I'll be back in a second so here we are again I just restarted the Sim with X Europe and now we're going to look at some of the differences this is the same scene it's the same neighborhood as you can see that intersection is down here you have this commercial building which is a car dealer with a gas station well that is down there um you can clearly see that there's a very large difference in the representation of the houses of course in real life these are all terraced houses that is not displayed correctly in X Europe why is that well every address um is registered in the land registry and basically what x Europe does is it says hey this is an address so there's one house and then it just plots a house there but it cannot see that all the individual houses are basically the same terrorist house building so that's the only thing that you will notice that extra does very very poorly it cannot make a distinction between a single house or a terraced house or a semi-semi semi-detached house but if you look closely at some of the buildings you can see that especially in this part A lot has changed and that's here in the Sim in the um in the default scenery we saw that this was basically just some Woods in none of the buildings or the schools or the shopping center were there with X Europe you can clearly see that this building is in here you can even see that this round bits in here in this building is accurately displayed in the building with X Europe the shape of the buildings is incredibly accurate with X Europe as well as their placement you can also see that there's like this grass playing field here that is now displayed correctly we still have the body of water surrounding it this is water potassium that green stuff that's on on water sometimes that's in here this is just all water and you can clearly see that this plate in here we can also see that at the street that we were looking at just a couple of minutes ago we remember we went from the intersection to the right then to the left right and then we had this dead end Street with the parking lot which is here this row of houses was missing in the default explained scenery with X Europe there is a row of houses where there is supposed to be a row of houses now these houses they look nothing like what it's what it looks like in real life of course and I can demonstrate that because if we go to street view you can clearly see this is just gray bricks terrorist houses and that's nothing like what you're looking at in here however at some level this is accurate because um this row of houses starts at number 89 and it ends on the other end at number 75. and that's eight houses so there's one two three four five six seven Eight houses and if you look in the SIM it is one two three four five six seven eight houses so this is actually highly accurate so the number of houses is correct it's just not the type of building that is there in real life but if you see Eight houses in here you can know for sure that there is Eight houses in there in real life that's how accurate this scenery is which is a massive change of course however what is not changed with X Europe is just the uh the landscape beneath the houses that's still the same let me just get out of the street view back into the overview so for instance if we move back to the uh towards the airport let me just see that's the other way around let's just see if we can find some buildings with specific shapes oh here we have a nice one this is the police station and across the street there is this building with like this characteristic round building so let's just move down there it's in here as you can clearly see the shape of this building matches the shape of the building that is there in real life exactly now this is the police station there's this street running past it the shape is entirely correct you can even see if you look carefully that this goes a little bit out that you can see down there So This is highly accurate that's what x Europe does so it makes the plausible World a little bit more realistic it's still not as real as it is in real life it's not a 3D picture of what's actually there but you get a much better feel for what the area looks like as mentioned before what you don't get is a change in the underlying landscape the terrain where the city is built on so if we go here for the highway entry you can still see that there's a huge difference in the Sim with uh what's that in real life so what I will do next is restart the Sim again and then I've added orthos as well as some additional scenery for Amsterdam airport and then we're going to going to look at what the Sim looks like with X Europe combined with ortho tiles first is the real thing so see you in a bit so now I've Reloaded The Sim with ortho for XP tiles this is a zoom level 17 tile by the way and as you can clearly see now we have a lot more similarity between the terrain below the auto gen which you can clearly see this is the highway entry and exit which is down here you have this green field with this significant stuff down there and you can clearly see that it is located in there as well you see this is exactly the same as that one as well as here you have this distinctive field which runs with this curve that is down there so we can take a closer look take a closer look in the simulator as you can see with ortho 4xp tiles of course the um the area that's below the autogen is just highly highly accurate it is basically the same picture that you're looking at this assume level 17 Google tile and if you fly over the world like this then I think for explain this is the most accurate representation of the real world that you can get in any part of the scenery unless you go for an area where there might be a complete 3D representation of what is there in real life actually but that's not uh very often the case actually so yeah I really like this I think it's really worth um well you can say it's worth the price because both ortho4xp as well as X Europe are completely free you can download uh actual by the way from SIM heaven.com let me just put this on full screen for a minute if you go to Sim fm.com you land on this page and you can see with the newest updated files you can see the top downloads so X World Europe and what is really important you have to download both X World Europe as well as the vegetation library and x-world America is also released now that's new um and in a few days or weeks X Africa and Arctic Antarctica Asia and Australia Oceania will be released as well so again you can download one of these packages always download the vegetation library and after you have downloaded it please read the manual carefully because you have to adjust some things in your scenery packs file I can display that in here let me just go to the Custom Scenery folder and then open scenery packs so if I open this one what is really important is you keep your plugins your airports the landmarks on top of the scenery packs file as well as the global airports below that below the global airports you put the Sim Heaven scenery if you don't do that if you put the X World Loop the X Europe scenery above the global airports then all the airports will also be displayed with the SIM FNX Europe libraries and I just don't think they are the best libraries I think the global airports out of the box are actually really good in X-Plane 12 within the limitations of a standard airport of course but the uh the depiction of the airports is highly accurate with the normal Global airports back if you go below the X Europe senior that's where you should put the libraries and below that I'll put the orthos you can also put the orthos above the libraries that doesn't make too much of a difference but make sure that your ex-europe scenery is in here below landmarks and airports but above libraries in Ortho that's really important so yeah that was what basically what I wanted to show you this is what X-Plane 12 can look like with some freeware add-ons of course it's not all just Hallelujah there is a downside first of all actually will have a frame rate impact that is quite significant and of course that is down to the fact that the simulator has to calculate the exact position of each and every building that you see and not only the position also the overall shape has to be calculated so there's quite a significant frame rate loss let me just see what I get here right now if I put the data output on I get like 28 maybe 30 frames per second on my machine which is actually quite a decent rig I have I9 12900k CPU I have an RTX 3080 TI GPU at 32 gigs of RAM it depends on which direction you are looking by the way as you can see if I move in this direction it's about 30 32 and that has got everything to do with the amount of build up area that is below the Horizon because the Sim has to load in much more as you can see right now I'm turning West so the C is over there and then it goes up to 50 53 frames per second but if I continue turning and I start looking in the direction of Amsterdam that's when it plummets down to 25 26 frames per second so that's just to show you these the impact on performance that this package has now on the other hand if I look at my graphical settings I've got everything maxed out right now I still have to look into that I saw Q8 Pilots has uploaded a video with uh with some display settings I have to look into that and set some adjust some sliders but with Cloud quality Max Shadow Quality quality Max the rendering distance at Max and the world Optics density and vegetation and Max this is what you are looking at at the rig that I just described so there is quite a significant impact in terms of hard disk space required the download for X Europe is I thought it was roughly 9 gigabytes and if you install it it's it takes up about I think it was somewhere between 18 that's 1 8 and 20 Gigabytes of hard disk space so that's quite significant and of course if you go with the ortho tiles be prepared for a zoom level 17 tile that is actually quite large it can take up up to two maybe even more than two gigabytes but it depends on the zoom level that you that you apply so I have lots of Ortho because I just love the Sim with ortho um yeah there are some areas that I fly VFR especially in the Netherlands so I've got those in zoom level 17 most other regions where I usually fly into our zoom level 16 and there are some areas like Southern France that I basically only fly over and Never Land and I've got those regions in zoom level 15 to save significantly on the hard disk space zoom level 15 is sufficient if you use that area just to fly over at Cruise altitude if you start to fly lower zoom level 15 is not too nice zoom level 16 looks a bit better and of course if you're really low zoom level 17 is the zoom level that you are looking for with with ortho um but yeah but that's it and that's basically what I wanted to show you um the only comment that I can make or the suggestion that I would like to make to the developers of either X Europe or laminar I don't know whose autogen buildings these are but I guess they are from SIM effin and it is X Europe I would personally love to see a little bit of physics-based rendering on the buildings now I completely know and understand that that will come at an additional frame rate impact probably but I also think that it will really enhance the look of everything because right now that's the only thing that I don't really like about this is I think it looks a little bit cartoonish in a way and I think adding some PBR on the auto gen might really help to raise the visual appeal of this of this simulator I think Microsoft flight simulator has done an excellent job in that the the auto gen buildings in Microsoft flight simulator are just awesome they they look very realistic if you compare them with with X-Plane so if I could give a suggestion to the developers to further improve either X Europe or X-Plane I think that is something worth looking into because it will certainly make the Sim look much more realistic much better yeah and if they can do that in some way with not too much of an impact that that would be awesome but I guess that's not possible it will always have an impact but uh yeah that's what I would really like to see improved other than that personally I love X-Plane 12 I think laminar did an outstanding job they address certain themes that they want to improve in explain 12 over X-Plane 11. uh those were the wetter system the light in the Sim some additional changes to the flight Dynamics and they delivered on those fields of course many people are now just whining about the uh the scenery not being that great well yeah well that's just X-Plane for now and I think that I and I hope that I showed with this video that there are ways that are completely free of charge of course you can always make a donation and I would highly recommend you to do so because this is hard work for the people who make uh X Europe um but yeah I think uh it's it's awesome what you can accomplish in X-Plane with freeware uh add-ons and of course you have to invest a little bit of time to download it that's just uh basically just once and you have this it it gets updated every now and then there's a certain interfall um yeah but but I think this is just uh especially if you're a VFR pilot I would highly recommend downloading the X Europe or X America files to get a much much better representation of the real world in your simulator it's well worth it especially if you want to you can Orient yourself at some buildings that have made that may have specific dimensions or sizes or shapes those are depicted correctly in the SIM it's just that the facades don't match with the with the real life for instance a very clear example that I can give you by the way is when we go back to that neighborhood that we were looking into right here you have this building in here which is that car dealer stuff and if you look here at the facade you can actually see that it is a car dealer it's that detailed but of course if you look at this building uh in street view it looks different that won't surprise you so it's opal or Foxhole if you're a British well this is what it looks in the Sim so no it's not the building that is there in real life but it is a building with the same shape and the same purpose as it has in real life and I think that in itself is an accomplishment this is of course the Netherlands the Netherlands has very high quality open street map data and that's the Downs another downside of X Europe it's it's success or its impact on the Sim is highly dependent on the quality of the open street map data for the area that you're using it for I know not every country in Europe has the same level of open street map data as the Netherlands has so if you live in a region where there's very poor open street map data quality then you will not have a spectacular effect as you have in the Netherlands but there's only one way to find out that's to download the package install it and start to explore the region where you live and I would highly recommend to first do that with the default scenery then install X Europe and then take a look again make some screenshots in both flights and start to compare those and you will see that there is quite a lot yeah that's that's improved with X Europe so I hope you like this video hope it helped you hope it gave you a little bit of insight and it might have uh convinced you to at least try this see what the impact is on your system um and well all I can say is Happy flying and enjoy this and yeah again this is what X-Plane 12 can look like and I think that's not a bad picture so thank you for watching hope to see you again another day on another video and until that time please stay healthy stay safe and enjoy your flights bye bye

Channel: 0321Sjoerd

Views: 19,780

Keywords: X-plane 12, 12, XP, Xplane, X-Europe, Simheaven, X-world, Europe, world, 0321Sjoerd, Comparison, scenery, default, impact, simulator, flight, laminar, research

Id: roX8hTzoBwM

Length: 30min 25sec (1825 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022