Supplement: Scenery Resources

The main resource for users interested in creating scenery for X-Plane is the X-Plane Scenery homepage.

Before doing anything that could affect X-Plane on your system, make sure you take steps to save important models, plug-ins, etc. Work with an X-Plane installation that is easily replaceable should it be corrupted or damaged in any way—to easily do this (assuming there is enough room on the hard drive), simply create a new folder and copy the contents of the X-Plane 9 folder already on the computer to it. This folder could be named “X-Plane Testing” or something similar. This way, if anything goes catastrophically wrong, all it takes to restore it the program to a working state is to delete the contents of the secondary folder and re-copy the simulator.

Downloading Pre-Made Scenery
A number of websites offer free, ready-made scenery for download. Among them are the X-Plane.org Scenery page (a good resource for a wide variety of scenery) and Ted’s X-Plane Scenery page (which has lots of very detailed airports).

Building Custom Airports
For users who just want to make an airport look lived in, the easiest thing to do is to install the OpenSceneryX tool. This is a huge library of buildings, static aircraft, and other objects. One need only drop them in place with Overlay Editor. Membership (free) at X-Plane.org is required to download.

Another great source of static aircraft are the libraries of CSL kits downloadable at X-Plane.org. These are meant for use to display other aircraft when flying online with XSquawkBox, but they're simply aircraft object files. As such, they can be incorporated in scenery.

Please note that, when building scenery like this for personal use, no copyright restrictions apply. However, the CSL kits are copyrighted by their various authors, so one would need their permission before selling scenery using these kits. OpenSceneryX, on the other hand, is free to use in scenery packages. The developer’s one requirement is that users incorporate by reference, meaning that their scenery makes references to the OpenSceneryX objects but does not include copies of them. (Note that anyone who installs a package created this way would have to install OpenSceneryX as well.)

Converting Google Earth Scenery for Use in X-Plane
G2XPL is a (Windows-only) utility that converts Google satellite photos into X-Plane terrain textures. A couple of pretty impressive videos are linked to on the download page showing what the tool is capable of.

Chris Kern has written a tool called Xplage that drives a Google Earth moving map display.

Gmaps for X-Plane is a Mac utility that creates X-Plane scenery from Google Maps images.

Note: Test each of these utilities carefully, as things can change from version to version of X-Plane.