Why do I not have any towns or cities in my X-plane installation?

Question

I recently purchased, X-plane, 10 digital download but I have no towns and cities. Please advise. Thank you. Gary Chalmers

Answer 1

Hi Gary,

The first thing to check are if you have scenery installed where you are expecting towns or cities. You can do this by either :

1) Running the installer and picking "Add or remove scenery" and proceeding through the screens until it shows you the map. Colored in tiles have been installed. Then you can add or remove more scenery, or just quit if you don't want to make any changes.

2) More advanced: You can also look in the folders in Global Scenery -> X-Plane 10 global scenery -> Earth nav data. The folders in here are organized by lat/long of the bottom left corner of the scenery tile. For example, the folder -20+130 contains all the scenery tiles for the middle/top of Australia shown on this map.

Another thing to check is your rendering settings. If you have them turned down too low, objects (like buildings) can disappear. Check that the number of objects & airport detail are not at minimum settings (none and low, respectively).

Answer 2

From year's of experience fiddling with X Plane settings may I suggest the following Fly with Lua script which automatically adjusts the 'Level of Detail' thus showing a high level when flying in the countryside then reducing the level when approaching cities.

Download Fly with Lua here 

Download the LOD script here and follow the instructions included

Lastly check out the option to include buildings stored in OSM data - Google X Plane OSM

An example of what is possible - depending on your hardware - shown below

Good luck