Two announcements coming out of Orbx are set to improve the scenery experiences for both X-Plane 11 and Microsoft Flight Simulator. Today we have the formal announcement of Orbx TrueEarth Southern Spain for X-Plane 11 and the new Orbx Himalaya Mesh for MSFS.
Himalaya Mesh
Flight Simulator’s excellent satellite imagery, streamed in high resolution to your PC as needed, is hard to beat but Orbx have found a desire for more detailed height information in their series of Mesh products. Less defined scenery suddenly takes on new detail and the Himalaya region is a great place to employ the technology.
Orbx report they have blended three sources of data together to create 10 meters of resolution and a 20GB download size for the Himalaya region.
Check out more screenshots available from the Orbx forums here. No release date is given but time between Orbx announcements and full release is typically short.
Check out the Announcement of Himalaya Mesh here.
TrueEarth Southern Spain
I’ve been a big fan of the TrueEarth series as it makes adding good quality scenery to X-Plane 11 easy. The only real downside has been the large install sizes but the results, in my experience, have been worth it.
TrueEarth Southern Spain is the next release for the X-Plane 11 series and it comes on the heels of the TrueEarth Balearic Islands and TrueEarth Canary Islands which all seem to be connected with a Spanish theme.
The following features have been listed in Orbx’s formal announcement:
- Huge coverage area spanning from Valencia to the Costa Del Sol.
- Crisp and detailed 1m/px aerial imagery, hand-edited textures with colour corrections
- Over 200 POIs covering major cities, castles, churches and key landmarks
- Hand-placed ports/boats and other coastal features
- Accurate Spanish themed autogen grouped and heightened based on detailed LiDAR data
- Highly detailed and optimised 10m mesh to bring out stunning detail in mountains and the coastline
- Accurate vegetation, matching colour, type and height and optimised for performance
Although Valencia to the Costa Del Sol is given as the range of the product, community members have noted that one of the screenshots includes Alamillo’s Bridge in Seville, Spain which is further west than the range given.
As a rough guesstimate, this appears to be what Orbx will be giving us. Although Gibraltar is part of the scenery, a special POI for the landmark is apparently not in the cards for this scenery pack.
This product should dovetail nicely with the Balearic Islands release with all sorts of short and medium haul flights across southern Spain and into the Islands coming up as possibilities.
As with the Himalaya Mesh announcement, Orbx rarely delays for very long once these announcements go out. Pricing will also likely be in line with other large region releases. More details to come.
Check out the announcement of TrueEarth Southern Spain here.
Stormbirds 
I’m genuinely surprised they haven’t included Portugal.
Granted, this thing is named TE Southern *Spain*, but the lower half of Portugal is just about four extra ortho tiles. And now, instead of having the whole Iberia nicely covered (once they release the inevitable TE Northern Spain), we’ll be seeing this ugly patch on most flights from anywhere in Europe to Tenerife, Funchal etc.
And before someone says: “But you can make your own ortho for Portugal” – TE regions are so heavily colour-corrected, that they never really match with anything generated by ortho4xp.
My another worry is that this thing will break a lot of airports created for the wonderful SpainUHD project.
Controversial product, IMO.
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I don’t know much about SpainUHD. I’ll have to look at up.
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It was very interesting to see a lot of simmers collectively say, “Meh” at this announcement – due entirely to the existence of SUHD. Must be an impressive bit of work!
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The Himalaya mesh makes an impressive difference. Far more so than I was able to notice with their other mesh products. And if you look at the forum post, the area covered by this product is HUGE – Afghanistan, Pakistan, most of China/Mongolia, half of India and even bits of Laos & Vietnam!
I think this one is a Must Buy for me 🙂
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