Continuing on the X-Plane scenery series here, using some more tools in our never-ending quest to fill disks with X-Plane data:
This time let’s check out some better autogen and object data on top of what we have. In our previous experiments we ended up with Photo scenery plus the recent Open Street Map data from the HDMesh v3 for things like roads. A big city like Vancouver, BC looks like this:
Nice and detailed (my settings are a bit washed out due to VR in FlyInside, so try to ignore the colors) but it could be better. What’s missing is the big tall down-town sky scrapers the YVR homeless know and love. To fix that up we need to use better overlay data. Something called ‘w2xp’ does that from here:
http://simheaven.com/?page_id=3260
For our continued example I’ll download the following from the above link:
- w2xp_America (740 MB, not bad for all of that)
- w2xp_world-models (84 MB, unfortunately just buildings and stuff and not the catwalk type)
We’ll also need some extra bits in the shared open library of X-Plane objects called OpenSceneryX. It has a fancy web installer, you can get that here:
It takes about 890 MB of disk space, but the updater is smart enough to be re-run and just get new things you don’t have. OpenSceneryX contains things often used by X-Plane free scenery designers, so it’s worth getting for that as well, i.e. free airports etc.
Finally, in my area (it is different for Europe etc) you need the R2 library and FF_Library objects as well from here:
http://r2.xpl.cz/ (42 MB)
FFLibrary - Libraries for Scenery - X-Plane.Org Forum (18 MB)
This is all a bit of pain, but it’s not hard to figure out. If X-Plane can’t find something then it adds a warning to it’s install location log.txt and then you use The Google to go get it or search the Master List here. Most things just use these.
In my X-Plane custom scenery folder it now looks like this (you can see I generated some more tiles from the previous example):
If you are using the nice XOrganizer utility instead then it’ll look like this:
Ok, with that we now restart X-Plane and go see if the buildings all look nicer. Cool!
Now we have harbors, lots of North American building types, parks, roads all accurate to current maps.
Pretty good stuff for free. Some more shots:
Rarely dips below 30fps on a 1070, so nice and flyable.
Plus, for reference, Vancouver looks like this in real life (well, if you keep hitting the HDR button on your phone I guess):
