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Scenery

Here you will find information about various scenery options for X-Plane.

Overview

X-Plane offers various ways to use realistic scenery and landscapes. This section presents the most important options.

Standard Scenery

X-Plane comes with an extensive collection of standard scenery:

  • Global Scenery: Basic landscape data for the entire world
  • Default Airports: Basic airports with basic buildings and runways (X-Plane Gateway)
  • Autogen: Automatically generated buildings and vegetation
  • Mesh: Basic terrain data

The standard scenery provides a good foundation for the flight simulator, but can be significantly improved with additional scenery.

X-Plane Gateway Server

The X-Plane Gateway Server provides a central platform for community-driven airport scenery development. On this platform, users can create and improve airports, share their work with the community, download airports created by other users, and participate in quality assurance. Airports published on the Gateway undergo review by Laminar Research and are integrated into future X-Plane updates. This system ensures continuous improvement of standard airports, enables a worldwide community of developers, provides quality control through Laminar Research, and guarantees regular airport updates. An overview of all available Gateway airports can be found in the Gateway Scenery Map. It is also noted there from which version the airport is included with X-Plane. Before downloading, one should check whether the airport is not already included in the current X-Plane version.

SimHeaven X-World

SimHeaven X-World represents a free scenery extension that significantly improves X-Plane's standard scenery. The extension provides detailed buildings and cityscapes, realistic vegetation and trees, as well as improved road networks and highways. Particularly noteworthy are the correct building heights and shapes, as well as regional architectural styles that enable an authentic representation of various regions.

The extension covers various regions: X-World Europe offers detailed European cities and landscapes, X-World America encompasses North and South American regions, X-World Asia presents Asian cities and landscapes, X-World Africa shows African regions, and X-World Oceania represents Australia and Oceania.

Installation is done manually in the Custom Scenery directory. The extension is compatible with Ortho4XP and AutoOrtho, optimized for X-Plane 12, and is continuously developed through regular updates and improvements.

Freeware and Shareware

x-plane.org offers an extensive selection of free and affordable scenery. The community provides a variety of airports, including improved versions of standard airports and historical airports. In the area of landscapes, improved terrain data, more detailed vegetation, and special regions are available.

Various tools are available for creating and managing scenery. Ortho4XP enables the creation of custom orthophoto scenery, while AutoOrtho provides automatic orthophoto scenery. XRoad offers improved road networks for a more realistic representation of infrastructure.

Payware Scenery

For the highest quality and detail accuracy, numerous commercial scenery options are available. An almost complete overview can be found linked below.

Resources

For better overview and planning of flight simulation, two self-created WorldMaps are available:

  • WorldMap of Scenery – An interactive map with over 1700 scenery options for X-Plane 12. The map provides detailed information about each airport to facilitate the search for suitable scenery. The search is done via a 4-digit valid ICAO code, which means smaller airfields such as grass strips and helipads are not displayed - this would make the map too confusing in some places already. Direct download links were deliberately omitted because:

    • No purchase recommendations for specific shops should be given
    • Updating numerous links would be very time-consuming
    • The map focuses on X-Plane 12 scenery (XP11 scenery was only included if there are special adaptations that support XP12 scenery features)

    There is a help link in the agenda that explains the popup entries.

  • WorldMap of Ortho Tiles – An overview map of self-created and installed Ortho Tiles. The displayed Orthos were specifically created for addon scenery and provide high-resolution textures, often supplemented with Mesh Patches for additional details such as Runway Slopes. In addition to the self-created Orthos, official Ortho Patches from scenery manufacturers and community-created patches from the X-Plane.org forum are also used.