Here’s an update of the process so far:

Initially, I tried to identify and reproduce what the problem is with the existing Ortho in X-Plane 12. To be honest it isn’t that bad. But I quickly found a couple of glaring issues.

Number 1, which I had already seen but thought might be a XP12 core bug was the shader issue in the water that flickers black triangles. This doesn’t happen with new tiles or the default scenery.

Number 2, is that the old ortho tiles are missing the details of turbidity(waviness) and bathymetry (depth), so you end up with 3D water that doesn’t do the new fancy stuff with rough waves etc.

I moved my seaplane out to the limits of the ortho tiles to identify this:

You can see what the old ortho looks like near land, which for someone that doesn’t care about landing on water if actually pretty fine, but you’re missing some of the new tech.

I then set about to see if I could using Ortho4XP 1.4 (the forked build) and reprocess the tiles with the modern X-Plane scenery to get a mix of the new water tech and the existing ortho. The results were, frustrating:

After a lot of playing around with settings I decided to test out if I was going crazy and build a completely new tile in 1.4 in Australia to see if that worked.

It did:

It’s really weird, but in 1.4 it stubbornly refuses to update old tiles with the new terrain details and use a water mask.

Okay, well with that in mind, I decided to rebuild the NZ tiles from scratch and cobble together the work I’ve done to merge the imagery with the new tiles. I’ve done the first little tile up at Cape Reinga and it appears to be working properly:

Turbidity and water masks hurray!

I’ve got a lot of custom water masks, so I’m hoping that I can retain this.

XP-12 with Orbx Global Forests v2 is looking really good btw:

Categories: Other

Tags: x-plane