A great plane with amazing flight characteristics doesn’t do a flight sim justice, if you don’t have a beautiful scenery to put it in. After all, part of the reason we love to fly, is to look at the incredible scenery.
This is why I decided to review and Buy the ORBX TrueEarth Great Britain South Scenery. The default scenery works fine, but it doesn’t compare to the scenery you get with ORBX.
The scenery covers a huge area of 42,000 square miles or 107,349 square kilometers. That is a massive area. In that area there are hundreds of custom modelled 3D points of Interest. Overall, a well made product.
How does it look?
Well, as you can see from my photos, the scenery is stunning. It really gives you the sense that you are actually flying a real plane in South Britain. The only downside to the visuals, is if you are flying low and landing in a field. When you get below 1000′ you can start to see that it is an image. By this I mean that it becomes slightly pixelated. But not that bad at all. I found that this was not all that noticeable. Around the airport it doesn’t happen. This is due to the lower resolution images used in some areas. If they made everything in extremely dense resolution, the file would be massive.
Autogen Buildings
In order to make the scenery as realistic as possible, the developers have created a new autogen technology specifically for X-Plane 11, which allows them to place realistic United Kingdom style homes in the proper locations. You will also notice that the trees are placed in all the right places and look great.
Aerial Imagery
So, you may wonder, well how did they make this look so realistic. Almost like a photograph.
Well, essentially that is what they used. In order to get the most realistic scenery possible, they have used aerial imagery to create the best look possible. Now, if you were to just slap down some aerial images, it actually wouldn’t look that great. So in order to give it a seamless look they have hand corrected and color matched the images to make it seamless.
Another problem with aerial imagery is that when you get closer to the ground, you will find that you start to feel like you are in an 80’s video game with the jagged edging. I have really noticed this in Aerofly FS 2 when I am away from the airport, however with the ORBX TrueEarth, it really was not that noticeable. I didn’t get that feeling. Maybe it is because they have the higher density image, or because they use some other tricks to make it look good at low altitudes. Either way, I still enjoyed my low altitude flying even more then I did on default scenery.
Coastline
This is also true for the coastline. Coastlines have always been a ugly part of flight sims, as usually they are jagged. And not jagged in a rugged coastline type of way. They are jagged from poorly matched scenery. This is not true in ORBX TrueEarth. They really do a great job at making the scenery flow properly near the water.
VFR Landmarks
So, along with all this beauty comes some function as well. ORBX has spent the time to actually place landmarks accurately in order to assist VFR pilots. If you think about flying in a real plane, you rely on some of the scenery for your VFR flights. If things were all over the place and completely random, it would be hard to navigate properly. This is why sometimes having a quality scenery like this is so nice.
So, how does it compare to X-Plane 11 Default Scenery
Essentially there is no comparison. It is such an improvement, that if you spend any time in this area flying, you need this scenery. I took the above photo while flying close to the boundary of X-Plane default and ORBX scenery.
So, if you look at the above photo you will notice that it is a big difference.
Color
First you will notice that the color on the ORBX side is much more appealing. It is full deep green and really gives you that lifelike feel while the X-Plane 11 default is lacking a bit in the color.
Trees
You will also notice that some of the trees appear less dense and more sporadic in the default while ORBX has them clumped together tightly. The trees look like they were placed in the proper locations, as on the default it feels more like an afterthought.
Size of the File
The scenery is huge, as most of it is aerial imagery. So in order for you to install this, you need to have 127 GB of space! That is a big scenery pack. So, looks like hard drives are going to be selling out in the near future if this is the new size of scenery.
Price
The price of this comes in at a $38.04 USD. So hopefully that is in the budget because it is worth every penny.
The Bad Stuff
Now, I know I haven’t brought up anything bad about the scenery, and it’s true. But this is because there isn’t much wrong with it. There are some small little problems here and there with scenery matching, however overall it is great. The only bad thing I can say, is that it requires a lot of hard drive space and can slow your PC down a bit… but not much. In fact, I run this in VR and have no problems. The last downside I can say is that it really takes a long time to load. There is a lot of scenery to load and I don’t have a solid state hard drive (which allows me to get more space for cheaper). So if you have a solid state drive, you might have a faster experience.
Conclusion
Overall this is pretty incredible scenery. If you have the money, I definitely recommend it. Now, of course it comes with some downsides, such as the very low altitude oversized image, however they seem to do a good job of making this look fairly natural. If you get this scenery, let me know what you think in the description. Have an awesome day and keep flying!
Here is a link to the ORBX TrueEarth Great Britain South Scenery.
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