I'll preface this post by admitting I'm not the sharpest cookie in the shed and know nothing about add-on scenery. I come from an FSX background and was happy to be able to (virtually) fly using 2-D panels, admiring the scenery around me when able.

Now, however, the paradigm has changed.

If I wanted the very best scenery and terrain detail in the upcoming XP12 release, what would that entail, cost-wise and storage-wise? How large are the downloads? When one flies outside of what one has detailed scenery for, what happens? What kind of performance hits are there for different levels of scenery detail?

Again, I'm currently flying another sim but options are a good thing. 😀

You can call me a horse's butt for asking these detailed questions but money is money.

Why don´t you get the free Demo when XP12 comes out - and then look at the default scenery so you can judge performance and the need for scenery upgrades a bit better?

That being said - if looking at scenery is really important for you - go and get MSFS, it will still be the "more realistic" looking option, even after XP12 releases.

I plan on getting the demo, Kapitan, but I was asking, I suppose, how scenery currently works and how it will work in the upcoming release. 😀

Best regards.

If you're asking about Ortho, think Terabytes. I have roughly 3 TB of Ortho, so 3000+ GB. That's most of Europe and maybe 1/3 of the US in a not totally low detail level. This of course needs to be downloaded and stored. When you fly out of the Ortho area, you get standard ground textures (not nice too look at).

5 hours ago, OlliePen said:

If I wanted the very best scenery and terrain detail in the upcoming XP12 release, what would that entail, cost-wise and storage-wise?

XP11 default scenery storage itself is very very efficient, few hundred GB for the entire world (can choose just portions).

Something like orbx payware rachets that up a notch, few hundred GB just for the UK. For a similar increase in quality.

Ortho increases by 4 times the size for twice the quality. I like lvl 16 for a nice balance between size and quality. Some areas are available up to lvl19, but then baked in objects like cars, buildings and trees start to look silly imho.

Absolutely no word on XP12 yet. I expect it has grown somewhat.

Assuming XP12 comes with a regenerated world (elevation, roads, land usage/classification, coast lines, bodies of water, etc.), you won't need anything else to get the most efficient (procedually generated) experience out of the box. Disk space requirement is still unknown, but 250 GB should be well enough (default XP11 is ~62 GB). Global scenery comes free with the base sim.

Simheaven provides free updated road and building placement data plus goodies like VFR landmarks and details for XP11 and will do so for XP12, but this will not affect underlying land usage information (ground texture choice from land classification, elevation and coastlines), which would need to be regenerated by somebody else.

If you want photorealism (minus seasons and night textures) on the ground, tiles can be generated for free from various satellite picture providers like Google Maps, Bing, etc. with OrthoXP. This process takes a lot of time and a 1 x 1° tile at zoom level 16 (best compromise between detail and storage space requirements) will take up 2.5 GB of disk space. Each zoom level increment/decrement increases/decreases disk space requirement by a factor of 4. Going below ZL15 is pointless though as things start to look really awful at VFR altitude. Assuming there are 4800 land tiles to cover globally, a global photoscenery at ZL16 would thus require a 12 TB hard drive, so one may want to think twice before going for photorealism.