Flew around Hawaii a bit yesterday. The terrain looks a lot better – the mesh is beautiful – and my add-on airports all seem to work well. Overall, it looks significantly better than before.
I was really disappointed at the lack of photogrammetry on the islands, though. Would have been a better use of resources than hand-crafting a bunch of detailed buildings that stick out in a sea of generic autogen structures. Jorg made the comment about cloud cover causing issues with the update, so hopefully if Bing gets 3D for Hawaiian cities (Google maps has it, but right now Bing only has aerial), they might revisit the update.
Fingers crossed for the photogrammetry introduction, but for me, the biggest impact was the 1m DEM. Taburet’s 10m was a leap above the default, but 1m is really beautiful.
Nice of you to compile and share your list here! Although I don’t presently have any of the add-on airports installed, I do have a few comments based on past experience:
PHKO handcrafted and now included with WU13 is pretty nice freeware.
A typo on Kapalua - should be PHJH
PHLU, Kalaupapa bundled with PHMK by NSS is also very nicely done IMO.
Thanks for flagging those! I updated the original post.
There’s also an excellent freeware PHKO on Flightsim.to, so I wish Asobo had done a different airport that wasn’t covered. I flew them back-to-back and compared them, and they each have advantages. I left Microsoft’s in place, but the freeware one does some aspects better so it’s really a matter of taste. Maybe the freeware author will update theirs as a complement to address the weaker parts of the MS version…
For completeness, I should mention there’s a payware PHTO by Pearl Simulations as well, but the reviews were pretty middling, so I just stuck with the pretty good freeware I linked above.
Also, I initially left them out of my list because they’re mentioned above, but I just added the enhanced airport ground textures too.
The Kahului photogrammetry add-on has some major elevation and coastline problems after SU11. The author’s PC was stolen, so he’s unable to update the package to fix these. Still worth downloading to get the other two Maui areas, though.
The addons are available via the in-game Marketplace and Orbx, with the exception of Vessels: The Channel Islands (Orbx only) and Enhanced AI (PC Only due to Xbox limitations).
Went up Mauna Kea and was blown away by the DEM: The road going up the mountain is carving through the mountain side - I wish all areas were that high-res…!
The Orbx version shouldn’t be unless they messed up an update. Contact them. Only the Market should have them covered. Orbx clearly shows screenshots of the Missouri without the canvas on their website.
