Hello world!
I believe I have my schedule now set for the European tour my mom and I are taking next year.
First we’ll be travelling from Seattle to Amsterdam, we’ll stay in Amsterdam for a day before taking the train to Cologne. Then I’ll travel from Cologne to Frankfurt, Nuremberg, then Munich. Then I’ll go down to Innsbruck, Verona, maybe go east to Venice before heading back down to Florence, Rome, then back up to Milan, Lyon, Paris, Brussels, then back to Amsterdam for the flight back. Visiting each city for a few hours to a whole day depending on our mood.
So basically we’ll be travelling in a giant circle. It’ll be a lot of fun!
In the meantime I’m using my simulator to fly the areas and look at the sites, maybe spot any cool landmarks or buildings from the air that I can visit. One of the advantages of P3D and the Orbx scenery is that it accurately reflects what real world cities look like and I can see accurate landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc, as opposed to the generic autogen buildings that X-Plane renders.
On the flip side, X-Plane with Ortho scenery is as real as it gets. Basically it uses real satellite scenery to render the area, so I’m looking at the ground as it would in real life. It doesn’t replace buildings, obviously, but it makes the world stand out and look alive, especially in mountainous regions. The airports stand out as well, and are not low resolution like P3D’s default airports are.
I’m a sucker for landmarks, so I’m flying P3D right now, I flew from Amsterdam to Rotterdam in a C182, then flew from Rotterdam to Eindhoven. Later I plan from travelling from Eindhoven to Dusseldorf.
Other than that, just transferred a lot of data from my HDD to my SSD for P3D (using symbolic link). Unlike X-Plane, which load times typically are about 5 minutes, P3D can take at least 10-15 minutes to load. That’s insane. I’m hoping the SSD might speed up the process but I doubt it, I might have to remove scenery to make this work.
Also got Envtex and Envshade to enhance the graphics. The differences are subtle but worth it. It makes the world look less grey and dull.
That’s it for now. Have a good day.
Something About Scott 