ORBX never sleeps on the job and you most certainly know that if comes from them, the quality is there. All the scenery produced by them is packed with features and Germany North is definitely not short of goodies. Here's the feature list as per ORBX's website:
- Superb ground textures from local sources
- Hand-placed landclass covers every sq mile
- Custom autogen textures and objects
- FTX Global 3D night lighting effects
- Accurate roads, rivers, lakes, alley trees
- More than 90,000 individually placed and assigned powerline pylons
- 386 airports have been upgraded or added
- Custom models of hundreds of POIs, dams, lighthouses
- Photoreal Cityscape Berlin “lite”
- Photoreal mudflats, Hamburg port, Bremerhaven port, Duisburg Thyssenwerke, open pitmines
- GEN mesh is compiled at 20-m grid spacing
The download is quite large: nearly 15GB as expected from a product that covers about 70,653 square miles (182,991km2). The installation process is quite simple and you only need to follow a small installation wizard. The installer and FTX Central will do the rest.
The scenery
ORBX decided to start covering Germany starting from the North part of the country. You should expect the rest of the country to be covered in the future as well.
Even in FSX -- which is miles behind the P3D rendering -- the scenery looks stunning. And it's causing me a problem: I don't even know where to start. There's just... So. Many. Things!
There are a lot of helicopter-specific locations (airfields/heliports) as well as off-shore locations (such as windmill farms or small islands), making this a very helicopter-friendly scenery and quite suitable for amazing VFR flights.
The amount of things to see is so big that trying to take screenshots of everything would be impossible, as much as I would like to flood you with images. If you're one of those persons that like to explore places, this scenery will keep you busy for hours. The more you fly, the more you'll find.
My main problem was trying to find everything the official site shows as the area covered is extremely huge and the authors added a great amount of custom objects and landmarks to it.
ORBX Germany North is one of the biggest additions to FSX and P3D lately, covering a huge amount of a very interesting country to fly at. This is definitely a must have if you usually fly in the European region.
One final cool detail is also the fact that ORBX included a 9-page list of all the airfields and helipads available with the ICAO, city, type, coordinates, altitude and other relevant data. This makes it pretty easy for people looking for a specific type of field (heliports or helipads, for example) to quickly find them.
Frame rate impact
There's no major frame rate impact, except inside cities like Berlin, where the amount of buildings start to cause a little decrease. It is most noticeable on lower end computers like my laptop but I have talked to someone that tried it on a higher-end rig that indicated me that, although not visibly noticeable, the numbers do sunk a bit (around 5%), which is not too bad.
