X-Planers feel free to not read, if you are offended by my unfortunate post (yes, I still find my observations troubling and unpleasant, I want to love X-Plane as much as any of you).
After getting back from holidays, I was bitten my the scenery development bug real bad (on top of the fairly large BED BUGS in NYC..), getting desperate to finish off my Mordialloc scenery for FSX (and yes, I’ll see how easy it is to convert to XP). Now that it is pretty much finished, I had some spare time, so managed to construct a pretty major VFR Reporting Point for the Melbourne metro area, namely the Police Academy building that sits at the top of the hill at Mount Waverley. It’s in the bottom-left of the first picture in this post. In placing this building amongst the terrain and autogen of Orbx’s scenery, I was quite chuffed to see how well it blends with the scenery and adds to the local ‘feel’. I’ll be slowly adding a few other major points of interest as time goes by, eg. Doncaster shopping centre. An example of the look is below, with Orbx’s Moorabbin to the right, my Southland building in the foreground and the Academy in the far distance. It all starts to come together so nicely. Most of the work is already done by Orbx though. 
A few of my friends have been reminding me of how they are still in love with Xplane and that the scenery is getting more varied as each month goes by, so I fired up the Xplane 10 icon and updated to the latest 10.21 version. Below are some screenshots that include the same Academy building nestled in amongst the ludicrous medium-rise buildings scattered everywhere. 
So, young readers, there you have it. Scan the images from both sims. Compare the regional feels. Guess why I still don’t fly Xplane that often? Those who live locally in Melbourne should agree that the Xplane version does not resemble Melbourne at all, well pre-Z-apocalypse anyway. Did I mention that my FPS started tanking by the end of the xp flight, down to teens in the Seneca? It did improve intermittently, before producing this: 
Grrrrrr. It would take a company as large and devoted as Orbx to turn Xplane’s wasteland into something I’d be proud to support and use. The sad story is that Orbx will not be developing for XP, and I fear the sim is still so niche that few would be brave enough to undertake the large development exercise involved in replacing all the regional looks to the sim. Hopefully my post pisses off a few Xplane developers and gets them working on such a project. One can dream. Until I see improvements that could take years to happen, I’ll keep enjoying my Prepar3d install and the fantastic sceneries produced by the Orbx team and other talented companies like FSDT and Flightbeam. And who knows what P3V2 will bring us, that’s due sometime this year. As an amateur scenery developer and fan, I just have to celebrate the latest achievement of Russ White of Orbx, whose Elstree, UK scenery is just a tour de force of texture perfection and grubbiness. I don’t care what you think, any sim that has Russ’s work demands attention. Check out his video at the end, it shows the work involved in dirtying up a perfectly good building – great stuff! 
Enough of this back from Holidays rant. I really am a happy camper, just keep your blinkers clear and be aware of what’s out there, and enjoy your sims.
