Closing out 2024 I made a lot of enhancements to the ortho around water masks and XP12 turbidity. It still doesn’t feel like a major upgrade though as 99% of the scenery is unchanged from 2017. That means much of the scenery was probably captured 10 years ago on average.

Over the holidays I considered a much more comprehensive upgrade and I think this is the way to go. So I got to work at the end of my holiday break.

All the orthophotography imagery has now been replaced for the whole of New Zealand. This brings higher quality imagery to most places and also updates it to bring in recent developments.

The downside is that all of the custom work that has been done before has regressed. So I’m in the process of re-masking water, and removing clouds from the scenery again. I’ve worked my way through removing the clouds from North to South and am working through the Southern Alps now.

I’ll need to re-mask the major harbours and remove some boats again, but it’s looking much better. I hope to have this completed in February, if not before.

While it’s a pain to have to redo some of this work, half the effort is creating a process to get it done, so it won’t take nearly as much time.

One of the side effects is that built up urban areas has a shift in colour which I may try to make less pronounced with a bit of dithering. You can see it here:

That’s all for now!

Categories: Flight Simulation

Tags: x-plane