Hey World,

Some good news for a simmer. First off, SCS has announced they will be revisiting Germany for the next update. This is great, considering I’ve been using Promods as the vanilla Germany is terrible (basically highways that trails off into enclosed cities…very boring and unrealistic). I’m using Promods to fix this issue, which is a great mod…but I can’t take part in some events. Ideally I want to move away from Promods to take part of many of the events, plus I find SCS’s quality in their newer DLCs better than the modded version

Next, Train Sim World is coming up with the West Summerset Railway addon tomorrow (I’m off that day!). Despite some of the criticism I have of Dovetail Games, I still enjoy driving trains every once in a while and I’m looking forward to trying a new route.

Flew yesterday from Venice to Florence, Italy. It was a one hour journey and there wasn’t much to see. I had a lot of fog and visibility issues which made flying very difficult. I then realized that the real world weather is set to real time, which means it’s early morning in Italy (in real life), so it’s perhaps a morning fog layer. I ended up setting it to historic time and matched my computer time with the weather, that way it matches what it was at 6PM Italy time the previous day (instead of 2AM).

I’m surprised to see that several Florence landmarks were modelled in P3D. It’s something I wouldn’t normally see in X-Plane, where I would just see generic houses and office buildings. I did install a new VFR package for XP11 that adds real world buildings and towers, but unfortunately it changes some of the stuff in the US, so I’ll see unrealistic depictions of Cathedrals in Seattle that stick out like a sore thumb.

On the flip side, I installed some orthos for the Florence and Venice areas in X-Plane, and the scenery looks gorgeous. Given that it’s actual satellite scenery, I’m looking at the real lay of the land. Still, P3D looks equally convincing with the Orbx addons…and it’s often hard to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not. Orbx also takes only a few GB of space, where ortho scenery can take hundreds of GB just for small regions.

I’m currently grabbing more ortho scenery for X-Plane 11 though, but if it comes down to space versus orthos, I’ll have to make the decision to delete either some unfinished games, or delete ortho regions.

Something I have been weighing on is what to do with two sims. I plan on doing some FSEconomy missions this weekend, but often I’ll be presented with multiple choices in aircraft. If I want to fly in a certain part of the world, and the only aircraft available I already own for XP11. What do I do? Purchase another one for P3D? No, that would be stupid. Instead I decided to stick with what is the best for each platform. For example, I have a great Beechcraft F33A with a REP pack for XP11, where the one for P3D sucks. So I can fly that around the area and perform missions. Where on the other hand I have an excellent C182 for P3D, but not for XP11…so I can fly that in P3D.

Problem solved!

I do have a couple of duplicate aircraft, on the other hand. But they are the X-Plane default C172 (with REP) and B737 (with Zibo). The P3D addons are superior models though, so I’m going to stick with them.

That’s about it for now. So the plan for my days off?

• Fly from Florence to Rome
• Take on some FSEconomy missions
• Try the Summerset railway
• Finish some Euro Truck Simulator event deliveries.

After that, no clue. I’m just happy to have three days off. 🙂

Who knows, maybe I’ll do some streaming? Or at the very least maybe I can upload some videos on YouTube.