I don’t know about you but, for me, oil rigs give me an excellent excuse to do some of the riskiest – and fun flights in sims. But there’s also something about oil rigs for me that make me feel edgy yet, it draws me to fly to and from them.
I may be masochist.
X-OilRig’s goal is quite simple: to replace the default oil rigs in X-Plane with some better, high resolution, PBR-textured and with some extra (and very cool) night lighting added.
That’s it. No more, no less, no frills.
Official features list
- High Quality Offshore Oil Rigs 3D Model
- High Quality Offshore Oil Towers 3D Model
- Two Color Liveries for each type of platforms
- Excellent Physical Based Rendering Effect
- Gorgeous Night Lighting
- Highly Optimized 3D Models
Installation
This couldn’t be easier. Just like most of X-Plane addons, it’s all a matter of dragging and dropping some files. In this case, we just need to drop the content of the zip file we are provided into the X-Plane 11\Custom Scenery folder.
The oil rigs
Let’s be honest: there is nothing terribly wrong with X-Plane’s default oil rigs and they’re perfectly usable. But after checking these models out, I just can’t go back to the default ones! These platforms look great, they have pretty much no impact on my framerate and I have to say: the night lighting is really well done, as well as the textures.
You can change the color of the oil rigs (they can be either yellow or red) easily by changing the names of textures provided with the addon, so that adds a bit more of variety if you get tired of the same old colors.
Is there anything else to say? Not really! This is a straightforward addon, easy to install and it does one thing very well.
Should you get this addon?
This is not a complicated addon and it’s not an expensive addon either. To be honest with you, I think it could be priced a bit better (currently $16.90 at the .org store). I think something like $9.99 would be a bit fairer for what it offers.
Yes, the oil rigs are well built but one of them is very simple, really. Skytitude did a good job but I just feel like it could be priced a little better.
To answer the question, though: I think you should get it if, like I mentioned at the beginning of this review, you like to fly to and from offshore locations.
When used in conjunction with WW Oil Rigs – Gulf of Mexico or WW Oil Rigs – Australia, both by our own Bradley Bristow-Stagg, X-OilRigs can be a cheap way of adding up to your offshore experience.
Credits
I'd like to thank our reader, James Canel, for pointing out X-OilRigs.
