If you are very dissatisfied with the wilderness scenery in X-Plane, but don’t want to spend money on expensive, exquisite scenery plugins, then the free scenery from SimHeaven might satisfy you.

simHeaven is based on Open Street Maps, and its scenery files are very small, making it very suitable for users with average hardware configurations. Below are some download links; I highly recommend you give them a try. <a href=http://simheaven.com/?page_id=25&wpfb_list_page=2>OSM country sceneries OSM continent sceneries

I downloaded the Asian scenery from the OSM continent sceneries section above to try it out, specifically “Osm Asia osm+autogen,” and the file was only 96.4 MB, taking just a few dozen seconds to download. After launching X-Plane 10, I selected Beijing Capital International Airport (ZBAA) and flew around the city casually. To my surprise, I found that the previously barren Beijing scenery was suddenly filled with countless skyscrapers, which was truly satisfying.

Additionally, SimHeaven offers exquisite city photo scenery packs, covering Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and more. Here, a single city takes up several GBs, and the sheer size is a bit much for me to handle. For now, I have only downloaded Beijing’s “z+39+116_CHN_Beijing_gc17” to try it out. It seems the content converts Google Earth satellite photos into X-Plane terrain files. Not only are famous attractions like the Summer Palace and the Forbidden City clearly visible, but even ordinary residential buildings can be seen distinctly. If your computer hardware is excellent, you must download and try it.

By the way, SimHeaven scenery requires you to download OpenSceneryX in advance. This was introduced in a previous blog post; if you are not sure about it, you can refer to this article.

Installing SimHeaven is very simple. Just download the compressed file, extract it, and copy the “Osm_Asia_osm+autogen” directory into the “Custom Scenery” folder. Also, don’t forget to edit the “scenery_packs.ini” file. For example, my configuration looks like this: …. …. …. SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Osm_Asia_osm+autogen/ SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Urban_Maxx_Extreme_V2_3D/ SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/OpenSceneryX/

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